There is no good evidence that China has reduced its exposure to the dollar. In fact, if you account for the higher dollar share of China's hidden reserves, its USD likely has increased since 2014. I am pretty sure that over the last year China hasn't shifted its reserves out of the dollar. It has shifted from US custodied Treasuries to offshore custodians and risk assets (Agencies, equities).  When China stops targeting 60% for the dollar share of its formal reserves, we will know.  The interesting question is what is the dollar share of China's shadow reserves -- and I think the answer is that it is a lot higher than the dollar share of China's formal reserves.

Related: Shadow Reserves — How China Hides Trillions of Dollars of Hard Currency and Great Power Conflict Puts the Dollar’s Exorbitant Privilege Under Threat and Pettis On Pozsar

Almost 90% of surveyed Americans say people shouldn’t be judged for moving back home, according to Harris Poll in an exclusive survey for Bloomberg News. It’s seen as a pragmatic way to get ahead, the survey of 4,106 adults in August showed. Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 drove the share of young adults living with parents or grandparents to nearly 50%, a record high. These days, about 23 million, or 45%, of all Americans ages 18 to 29 are living with family, roughly the same level as the 1940s, a time when women were more likely to remain at home until marriage and men too were lingering on family farms in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Related: Millions of US Millennials Moved in With Their Parents This Year and Young Adults in the U.S. Are Reaching Key Life Milestones Later Than in the Past and Americans’ Ideal Family Size Is Larger Than the Birthrate Suggests

Democrats have been posting special-election overperformances of that magnitude all year long, in all kinds of districts. And on average, they have won by margins 11 points higher than the weighted relative partisanship of their districts. The types of people who vote in low-turnout special elections tend to be different from the types of people who vote in regularly scheduled elections: Lower turnout generally means a more college-educated electorate, and college graduates have gotten more Democratic in recent years. That could be why special-election overperformance has consistently been a couple of points more Democratic than the House popular vote over the past three cycles. However, college graduates were disproportionately Democratic in 2020 and 2022 too, and Democrats didn’t consistently do this well in special elections in those cycles. So something seems to be different this time that the education realignment doesn’t fully explain.

Related: Is a Trump-Biden Rematch Inevitable? and Trump’s Electoral College Edge Seems to Be Fading and How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support

Patent concentration, which can affect diffusion, has risen over the past several decades with a concurrent surge in patent litigation cases. In the post-1980 period, a parallel trend concerning patents in the U.S. has been the dramatic increase in the number of patent cases filed, which some authors have dubbed the “patent litigation explosion.” The annual number of litigation cases filed per 100 granted patents rises from about 1.2 in the early 1990s to an average of about 1.5 between 1995 and 2010, before rising again to more than 1.8 between 2010 and 2015 and only receding marginally since then.

Related: Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone? Employment Dynamics of US Inventors and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

Since 2009, manufacturing output per hour in the U.S. has grown just 0.2% a year, well below the economy as a whole and peer economies in Europe and Asia, except Japan. In motor vehicle manufacturing, the picture is especially bad: From 2012 through last year, productivity plummeted 32%, though some of this was no doubt due to pandemic disruptions.  Warehouses and hospitals can pass the cost of higher wages and reduced hours to customers without being undercut by foreign competitors. Manufacturers don’t have that luxury. That’s why Detroit is recoiling at the UAW’s demands. While their output per employee is among the highest of 11 global manufacturers ranked by consultants AlixPartners, so are their costs per vehicle. The lowest cost: China’s.

Related: Autoworkers Have Good Reason to Demand a Big Raise and Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers and EV Boom Remakes Rural Towns in the American South

We discuss how Large Language Models (LLM) can improve experimental design, including improving the elicitation wording, coding experiments, and producing documentation. Second, we discuss the implementation of experiments using LLM, focusing on enhancing causal inference by creating consistent experiences, improving comprehension of instructions, and monitoring participant engagement in real time. Third, we highlight how LLMs can help analyze experimental data, including pre-processing, data cleaning, and other analytical tasks while helping reviewers and replicators investigate studies. Each of these tasks improves the probability of reporting accurate findings

Related: Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier and Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment and Generative AI at Work

Joe Biden is likely to be the Democratic nominee. I would put his chances in the range of 80 to 85%. Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee. I would put his chances in the range of 75%. The chance of an average non-Hispanic white man of Biden’s age (80) dying in the next year is about 5%. Biden’s odds are presumably lower than this, however. Even if he’s lost a step or two, I feel comfortable asserting that his physical and mental health are better than that of the typical 80-year-old. However, there are a lot of medical events other than Biden literally passing away that might end his bid for a second term. Overall, I figure there’s a 10% chance that Trump loses the nomination in “typical” fashion, such as being caught from behind in Iowa, a 5% chance that a health-related issue ends his campaign, and a 10% chance that legal jeopardy forces Trump to reconsider or compels Republicans to turn on him, even though they haven’t so far.

Related: Five Reasons Why Biden Might Lose in 2024 and For Some Key Voters, Trump Has Become Toxic and How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support

Since the 1970s, trust in government has been consistently higher among members of the party that controls the White House than among the opposition party. Republicans have often been more reactive than Democrats to changes in political leadership, with Republicans expressing much lower levels of trust during Democratic presidencies; Democrats’ attitudes have tended to be somewhat more consistent, regardless of which party controls the White House. However, the GOP and Democratic shifts in attitudes from the end of Donald Trump’s presidency to the start of Joe Biden’s were roughly the same magnitude.

Related: Collapsing Social Trust is Driving American Gun Violence

The pandemic led to a surge in new business formations. What is striking to us is that this elevated level has continued post-Covid. According to data from the Census Bureau, in July, high-propensity business applications, which include all those that are more likely to become businesses with a payroll, were 40% higher than the average level in 2019.  While not all of these businesses survive (the number of business deaths also rose in 2022 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), the net impact still points to strong growth in business formation. Business applications each year seem to be driven by a different sector. At the start of the pandemic, retail trade saw the biggest surge, driven largely by the growing demand for e-commerce, according to commentaries from the Census Bureau.

Related: Surging Business Formation in the Pandemic: Causes and Consequences and The Startup Surge Continues: Business Applications on Track for Second-Largest Annual Total on Record and Creative Destruction After the Pandemic

To get rates back up to the 12% pre-pandemic level would require adding 2.7 million new housing units—more than the entire housing stock of the state of Maryland or more than 1.5 years of construction at 2022 rates—and leaving them all empty. Assume half occupancy and America needs 6.2 million new units—more than currently exist in Pennsylvania. If you assume that 75% of units will get filled on net then America needs more than 18 million additional housing units—roughly as many as exist in California and Washington state combined. Actual construction stood at only 1.4 million in the first half of 2023, failing to keep up with demand and leading to further declines in unoccupied housing rates—in other words, the structural shortage of housing is keeping prices high and vacancies down.

Related: Repeat After Me: Building Any New Homes Reduces Housing Costs For All and On the Move: Which Cities Have The Biggest Housing Shortage? and Have Rising Mortgage Rates Frozen the Housing Market?

All these areas clearly do have much higher WFH shares than the nation as a whole. What else do they have in common? One striking characteristic, which I highlighted in the top-50 table, is that most are located in central cities of metropolitan areas, which are designated as such based on population and how many people commute to jobs there. What’s more, two non-central cities on the list — Cupertino, California, and Redmond, Washington — happen to be home to the headquarters of the two most valuable companies in the world, Apple and Microsoft, and several others are also home to large corporate headquarters. Working at home seems to be most popular in places close to lots of offices and other places of employment.

'Related: Remote Work, Three Years Later and Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse and Real-Estate Doom Loop Threatens America’s Banks

Using UN votes to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a filter, Bloomberg Economics found that the global share of greenfield foreign direct investment going to countries that didn't condemn the invasion averaged only 15% in the last two years, down from 30% in the decade to 2019. China's share, including Hong Kong, fell to less than 2% in 2022 from nearly 11% on average over 2010-19. The data point to US and other Western companies investing more in like-minded countries. Between the second quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of this year, US companies’ greenfield investments in China plunged 57.9% and those by European firms dropped 36.7% versus the five years leading up to the pandemic, an updated IMF analysis shared with Bloomberg found. Investments from the rest of Asia into China were down by more than two-thirds.

Related: Setser On Rumors Of Decoupling and How America Is Failing To Break Up With China and Global Firms Are Eyeing Asian Alternatives to Chinese Manufacturing

Xin Meng of the Australian National University appears to refute the “demographic dividend” as an explanation for China’s economic success.  Her analysis showed that between 1982 and 2015 China’s working-age population, defined as those aged between 16 and 65, grew from 600m to 1bn. During this same period, however, labour-force participation dropped from 85% to just over 70%. Much of the decline came from those with an urban hukou. Unlike holders of rural hukou, urbanites were subjected to mandatory retirement at the age of 55 for women and 65 for men. Compulsory education and greater university enrolment kept under-25s out of the workforce.

Related: Population Aging and Economic Growth: From Demographic Dividend to Demographic Drag? and The Chinese Century Is Already Over and The Neoclassical Growth of China

For decades now, the Chinese government has encouraged university enrollment, pushing the number of students in higher education from 22 million in 1990 to 383 million in 2021.  During the pandemic, it pressed even harder, expanding graduate-school capacity.  Master’s-degree candidates rose by 25 percent in 2021.  China’s Ministry of Education estimated that 10.76 million college students would graduate in 2022, 1.67 million more than in 2021—and it expects a further large rise in 2023. The message for China’s policymakers is clear: boosting graduate numbers while throttling services and subsidizing buildings is bad economics and worse social policy. 

Related: Why Has Youth Unemployment Risen So Much in China? and China Cannot Allow Jobless Young To ‘Lie Flat’ and China’s Defeated Youth

The path of policy rates priced into futures markets in major Advanced Economies became more in line with the cautious tone of central banks. The Federal Reserve and the ECB raised policy rates further in July, and emphasized in their communications that future decisions would be data-dependent. Officials also indicated that, while rates might not rise much more, they could stay at their current levels for a prolonged period if inflation remained above target. In accordance with these messages, futures markets in both in the US and the euro area priced in higher rates for 2024 than they had just a few months before. And the expected peak in policy rates was pushed higher and later. That said, investors still seemed to anticipate rate cuts as early as the second quarter of 2024, and much deeper in the US than the euro area.

Related: Adrift at Sea and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest After COVID-19

While Treasuries remain the most liquid security in the world, they are structurally becoming less liquid. The average daily cash transactions in Treasuries has not come close to scaling with the overall growth in issuance. Although average daily cash volumes have increased slightly in recent years to $700b, that increase is in part due to the activity of principal trading firms whose strategy is to profit from small intraday fluctuations in price. These firms account for 20% of cash market volumes, but they disappear when volatility picks up so their provision of liquidity is illusory. Excluding their participation, cash market activity would be progressively thinning relative to the steady growth in issuance.

Related: Living with High Public Debt and Raising Anchor and Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market

The hand-wringing about the Great Maturity Wall appears to have been wildly overdone. A year ago, the bear case held that interest rates were rising and the economy was deteriorating at the same time that a surfeit of high-yield debt was coming due. But ever since that point, companies have been quietly extending their debt calendars. At the start of 2023, high-yield issuers had about $878.4 billion in significant dollar-denominated bond and loan issues coming due through 2025. And since then, issuers have whittled the number down by about 38% to $542.3 billion. Most signs suggest they will continue to make plodding progress.

Related: Rates Are Up. We’re Just Starting to Feel the Heat and A Default Cycle Has Started and Credit Normalization

For the last several months, I have been part of a team of social scientists working with Boston Consulting Group, turning their offices into the largest pre-registered experiment on the future of professional work in our AI-haunted age. For 18 different tasks selected to be realistic samples of the kinds of work done at an elite consulting company, consultants using ChatGPT-4 outperformed those who did not, by a lot. On every dimension. Every way we measured performance. Consultants using AI finished 12.2% more tasks on average, completed tasks 25.1% more quickly, and produced 40% higher quality results than those without. [AI] works as a skill leveler. The consultants who scored the worst when we assessed them at the start of the experiment had the biggest jump in their performance, 43% when they got to use AI. The top consultants still got a boost, but less of one.

Related: Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment and Generative AI at Work and AI, Mass Evolution, and Weickian Loops

The increase in disability reporting has been especially pronounced among people aged 25-54 (the so-called prime-age population). This group has also seen its disability rate rise by about 0.9pp but from a lower base. This increase brings the prime-age disability rate to 6.9% over the last three months, corresponds to nearly 1.3mm additional prime-age people with disabilities, and represents a 16% increase in that population. Even though cognitive difficulties are more common among older people, the increases in cognitive difficulties seen since the onset of the pandemic have been driven by younger people. Since February 2020, rates of cognitive difficulties have increased by about 1.1 percentage points among people 16-24 and 25-34 and by 0.7 percentage points among people 35-44, in each case representing at least a 25 percent increase in prevalence.

Related: The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere and Youth Risk Behavior Survey

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has appealed for greater European support as her country confronts a surge of people fleeing north Africa, amid growing tensions between Rome and other EU capitals over migration policy. More than 12,000 people have reached Italy in the past week, mostly to the island of Lampedusa, authorities said, with thousands more awaiting to make the relatively short journey from Tunisia’s port city of Sfax to the Italian island. The increased influx is a political headache for Meloni, who was elected on a promise to stop the flow of illegal migration to Italy. Instead, the number of those arriving on Italian shores has surged to more than 128,600 so far this year, up from around 66,200 at the same time last year.

Related: Saudi Forces Accused of Killing Hundreds of Ethiopian Migrants and How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World and Demography Is Destiny in Africa

The over-80s for the first time accounted for more than 10% of Japan’s population, according to a government report.  Japan’s persistently low birthrate and long lifespans have made it the oldest country in the world in terms of the proportion of people aged over 65, which this year hit a record of 29.1%. Japan’s overall population fell by about half a million to 124.4 million, according to the report. It’s expected to tumble to less than 109 million by 2045.

Related: Inflation in The *Very* Long Run and Japan Demographic Woes Deepen as Birthrate Hits Record Low and More Than 40% of Japanese Women May Never Have Children

Meanwhile, spending at stores, restaurants, and online excluding grocery stores and gas stations has been rising at a yearly rate of 7% each month on average since the spring, compared to 4% a year in 2017-2019. That is consistent with underlying wage growth, which is still rising about 2 percentage points faster than before the pandemic, despite the normalization in job market churn, the declining wage bump for people switching jobs, and the slowdown in the growth of posted wages on job boards.

Related: Breaking Down the Sources of US Economic Resilience and Soft Landing Summer and The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes

The United Auto Workers union for the first time ever went on strike at all three Detroit car companies, with about 12,700 workers hitting the picket lines shortly after midnight Friday in targeted work stoppages at plants in Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri. The UAW’s plans for targeted work stoppages would bring only a fraction of the overall workforce off assembly lines. That strategy would help preserve the union’s $825 million fund more than a full strike of all 146,000 workers, but stymie output and disrupt automakers’ production planning. It also could prove risky, because employees who remain on the job likely would be working without a contract, a prospect that has sparked concern among some members.

Related: Autoworkers Have Good Reason to Demand a Big Raise and The Q4 Pothole: Student Loans, Shutdown, and Strikes and EV Boom Remakes Rural Towns in the American South

Unions’ declining vote share combined with less dominant Democratic performances with union household voters have made all three Blue Wall states more competitive: after voting reliably Democratic from 1992 to 2012, each narrowly broke for Trump in 2016. Although Biden won all of them back in 2020, he did so by far smaller margins than Obama earned in 2012. In 2020, white, non-college voters constituted a majority of the electorate in Michigan (54%), Pennsylvania (53%), and Wisconsin (58%). While this demographic is still likelier than not to vote Republican, non-college white voters who are unionized were less likely to back Trump in 2020 compared to those who were not. And while these voters are often more culturally moderate or even conservative, many embrace economic populism and highly approve of unions, giving Biden and Democrats an opportunity to make greater inroads.

Related: Flanked by Union Allies, Biden Touts $36 Billion Pension Bailout and The ‘Summer of Strikes’ Isn’t Living Up to the Hype

By 2030 copper and nickel demand could rise by 50-70%, cobalt and neodymium by 150%, and graphite and lithium six- to seven-fold. All told, a carbon-neutral world in 2050 will need 35m tonnes of green metals a year, predicts the International Energy Agency. Industry oracles asked by The Economist predict copper-supply gaps of 2m-4m tonnes, or 6-12% of potential demand, by 2030. They also foresee a shortfall of lithium of 50,000-100,000 tonnes, a 2-4% deficit. Nickel and graphite—plentiful in theory—could cause problems because batteries require pure material. There are too few smelters to refine bauxite into aluminum. Outside China, next to no one produces neodymium.

Related: Glencore Says This Time Is Different for Coming Copper Shortage and Lithium Discovery in US Volcano Could be Biggest Deposit Ever Found and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate?

Recent studies from the US, Sweden, and Finland all demonstrate that although most people who move directly into new unsubsidised housing may come from the top half of earners, the chain of moves triggered by their purchase frees up housing in the same cities for people on lower incomes.  The US study found that building 100 new market-rate dwellings ultimately leads to up to 70 people moving out of below-median income neighbourhoods, and up to 40 moving out of the poorest fifth. Those numbers don’t budge even if the new housing is priced towards the top end of the market.  It’s a similar story in the American Midwest, where Minneapolis has been building more housing than any other large city in the region for years, and has abolished zones that limited construction to single-family housing. Adjusted for local earnings, average rents in the city are down more than 20% since 2017, while rising in the five other similarly large and growing cities.

Related: On the Move: Which Cities Have The Biggest Housing Shortage? and A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South and Young Families Have Not Returned to Large Cities Post-Pandemic

First, we expect the resumption of student loan payments to subtract 0.5pp from quarterly annualized GDP growth. Second, the federal government looks more likely than not to temporarily shut down. A government-wide shutdown would reduce quarterly annualized growth by around 0.2pp for each week it lasted. Third, we estimate that reduced auto production from a potential UAW strike would reduce quarterly annualized growth by 0.05-0.10pp for each week it lasted, if all three companies currently undergoing contract negotiations are impacted. We expect quarterly annualized GDP growth to slow from +3.1% in Q3 to +1.3% in Q4 (vs. consensus of +2.9% and +0.6%). We expect the slowdown to be shallow and short-lived, with GDP growth rebounding to +1.9% in Q1 (vs. consensus of +0.1%) as these temporary drags abate and income growth reaccelerates on the back of continued solid job growth and rising real wages.

Related: Soft Landing Summer and Autoworkers Have Good Reason to Demand a Big Raise and The Economic Impact of the Student Loan Restart

The impact on markets of the government’s expanded financing need is largely still ahead of us. Over the past year, the government has funded essentially all of the increase in its deficit by issuing T-bills and spending down its cash reserves rather than significantly ramping up the issuance of duration to the market. As a result, Treasury issuance hasn’t needed to entice money out of other cash and asset markets, and thus the impact of the expanded deficit on liquidity has been minimal thus far. We think this pressure is delayed rather than eliminated: looking forward, we expect that the Treasury will shift its mix of issuance toward more duration, as the budget deficit remains elevated and the share of bills outstanding rises through the range that the Treasury generally prefers to target (though there is plenty of flexibility around the precise proportion).

Related: Soft Landing Summer and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider and DM Debt - How to Move Mountains

The chart shows the % of Black families that are in three income groups, using total money income data. The data is adjusted for inflation. The progress is dramatic. In 1967, the first year available, half of Black families had incomes under $35,000. By 2022 that number had been cut in half to just one quarter of families (the 2022 number is the lowest on record, even beating 2019). Twenty-five percent is still very high, especially when compared to White, Non-Hispanics (it’s about 12 percent), but it’s still massive progress. It’s even a 10-percentage point drop from just 10 years ago. And Black families haven’t just moved up a little bit: the “middle class” group (between $35,000 and $100,000) has been pretty stable in the mid-40 percentages, while the number of rich (over $100,000) Black families has grown dramatically, from just 5% to over 30%.

Related: U.S. Incomes Fall for Third Straight Year and Who Won the Cold War? Part I

Last week Huawei quietly unveiled the Mate 60 Pro—its new smartphone that apparently comes with 5G capabilities. According to a teardown by industry research firm TechInsights, the main chip inside this new phone is made using technology comparable to the so-called 7nm process. It is possibly made by China’s leading chip foundry  Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC).  That is still generations behind the market leaders. For example, TSMC has already been mass-producing more advanced 3nm chips. But that nonetheless is still a big step forward, especially given the limitations China’s chip makers are facing. While SMIC has no access to the most cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, it could use some older equipment to make advanced chips, likely using a process called multipatterning.

Related: China Imports Record Amount of Chipmaking Equipment and Japan to Join US Effort to Tighten Chip Exports to China

Put simply, Kirin 9000S is a better-designed chip than the West realizes. It has solid power and performance. Even with the lackluster export controls, this is a leading-edge chip that would be near the front of the pack in 2021, yet was done with no access to EUV, no access to cutting-edge US IP, and intentionally hampered. We cannot overstate how scary this is. There are steps that could be taken to ensure that China does not develop the ability to mass-manufacture the sorts of chips needed for high-end military applications in the coming year. Half measures will not work, but a full-scale assault will make it so the cost of replicating the semiconductor supply chain domestically is neigh on impossible. While we aren’t advocating for any of these specifically, it is clear the West can still stop China’s rise if decisive action is taken.

Related: Huawei Building Secret Network for Chips, Trade Group Warns and China Imports Record Amount of Chipmaking Equipment and Japan to Join US Effort to Tighten Chip Exports to China

We had 2 consecutive unqualifiedly good CPI reports. I was hoping for a 3rd but this one is only qualifiedly good. Not a huge concern but some. I'm focused on core CPI which grew at a 3.4% annual rate after 2 months <2%. Here is swapping new rents instead of all rents for core. The most reassuring of the bunch because new rents are actually falling. Is a useful gut check but I would not actually assume that we're going to see substantial falls in all rents anytime soon. Overall I still feel better than I did a few months ago about the possibility of a soft landing. But I feel a bit worse than I did yesterday. And if you over-updated based on the noisy June and July data you should probably be over-updating back again based on the August data. One month of data will not and should not change what the Fed does next week. But if we get two more months like this then I would hope they hike again at the December meeting.

Related: The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider

Using a debt accounting exercise, we show that periods of sustained debt reduction are typically driven by strong primary balances and above-average growth. Following 1980, inflation has played little role in debt reductions. Current fiscal projections and current market interest rates on average do not point to declines in debt-to-GDP ratios across developed markets. We estimate that market implied r - g, the difference between real interest rates and growth rates, is now positive for many countries. Japan provides an example of high debt peaceably coexisting with low interest rates. However, given current high inflation, wider deficits, and rising interest costs, we think it unlikely that we return to the era of structurally low interest rates in the US, UK, or Europe. As a result, we see the risks to term premia skewed higher as fiscal risks simmer.

Related: Living with High Public Debt and American Gothic and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible?

The decline in marriage and the rise in the share of children being raised in a one-parent home has happened predominantly outside the college-educated class. Over the past 40 years, while college-educated men and women have experienced rising earnings, they continue to get married, often to one another, and to raise their children in a home with married parents. Meanwhile at the same time, the earnings among adults without a college degree have stagnated or risen only a bit. And these groups have become much less likely to marry and more likely to set up households by themselves.So just mechanically, these divergent trends in marriage and family structure mean that household inequality has widened by more than it would have just from the rise in earnings inequality.

Related: US Births Are Down Again, After the COVID Baby Bust and Rebound and Wage Inequality and the Rise in Labor Force Exit: The Case of US Prime-Age Men and Bringing Home the Bacon: Have Trends in Men’s Pay Weakened the Traditional Family?

Americans’ inflation-adjusted median household income fell to $74,580 in 2022, declining 2.3% from the 2021 estimate of $76,330, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. The amount has dropped 4.7% since its peak in 2019. Wage growth for the typical worker outstripped inflation starting in December 2022, with inflation-adjusted wages rising about 3% in July, according to data from the Atlanta Fed Wage Tracker and the Labor Department.

Related: Jason Furman On Employment Cost Index and Real Wage Growth at the Individual Level in 2022 and The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Economy

Brussels will launch an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese electric vehicles that are “distorting” the EU market. The probe could constitute one of the largest trade cases launched as the EU tries to prevent a replay of what happened to its solar industry in the early 2010s when photovoltaic manufacturers undercut by cheap Chinese imports went into insolvency. If found to be in breach of trade rules, manufacturers could be hit with punitive tariffs.

Related: China Set to Overtake Japan as World’s Biggest Car Exporter and China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s

The positive-sum vision of global economic integration is that rising production in one place does not need to displace existing production elsewhere because demand and living standards will rise commensurately. Novo Nordisk’s scientists invented something new and valuable, simultaneously creating both supply and demand. They did not pivot from selling to Danes to selling to Americans. The negative-sum vision is the one of businesses burdened by persistent “overcapacity” (really, underconsumption) are forced to fight for market share in a world without growth. The U.S. effectively preempted the influx of Chinese-made electric vehicles with the Inflation Reduction Act, which boosts total demand while reserving a share for local producers. Europe is far more exposed and has yet to formulate a response. The common belief in certain circles that Europeans are more “open to trade” than Americans may not survive this experience.

Related: How Weight Loss Drugs Stopped a Danish Recession and China Set to Overtake Japan as World’s Biggest Car Exporter

By my calculations, if the government could directly or indirectly transfer roughly 1.5% of GDP every year to households, it could drive growth in household income – and with it, household consumption – to around 7% annually. This, in turn, could generate GDP growth of 4-5% even as investment growth dropped sharply. The arithmetic of rebalancing is unassailable. Given its status as the world’s second-largest economy, and by far the world’s largest investor, China simply cannot maintain its current investment share of GDP while continuing to grow relative to the rest of the world.

Related: Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent? and Chinese Professor Says Youth Jobless Rate Might Have Hit 46.5% and China Cannot Allow Jobless Young To ‘Lie Flat’

For the first time, the new iPhone model you buy on the launch day could be made in India. Apple plans to make the India-built iPhone 15 available in the South Asian country and some other regions on the global sales debut day, people familiar with the matter said. While the vast majority of iPhone 15s will come from China, that would be the first time the latest generation, India-assembled device is available on the first day of sale, they said, asking not to be identified as the matter is private.

Related: Apple India iPhone Output Soars to $7 Billion in China Shift and Top Apple Supplier Foxconn Plans Major India Expansion and Apple’s Complex, Secretive Gamble to Move Beyond China

The federal budget deficit was $1.5 trillion in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2023, the Congressional Budget Office estimates—$0.6 trillion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year. Revenues were 10% lower and outlays were 3% higher from October through August than they were during the same period in fiscal year 2022. Receipts collected through August 2023, net of refunds, were about $350 billion less than CBO projected, mainly because of smaller-than-anticipated collections of individual and corporate income taxes.  Net outlays for interest on the public debt rose by $149 billion (or 30 percent), mainly because interest rates are significantly higher than they were in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2022.

Related: The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

While the vast majority of U.S. mortgages are 30 year fixed rate, many other countries rely on either variable rate or short dated fixed rate mortgages. U.S. mortgage debt servicing ratios have thus remained around historical lows due to robust wage growth and a large existing stock of mortgages taken out at low rates. In contrast, households in many other countries are beginning to see their disposable income disappear. The dollar strengthened significantly in 2022 as the Fed moved more aggressively than other major central banks, but sold off when other countries caught up. The scenario may replay in a slightly different way as interest rate differentials widen because other central banks retreat first.

Related: Soft Landing Summer and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider and  The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet)

Using a measure of nonfinancial corporate profits from the national income accounts [before tax profits with capital consumption adjustment] we find that nonfinancial corporate profit margins, or profits over gross value added, increased sharply to about 19% in 2021 Q2 and slipped back to 15% in 2022 Q4, compared to about 13% in 2019 Q4. Our analysis shows that much of the increase in aggregate profit margins following the COVID-19 pandemic can be attributed to (i) the unprecedented large and direct government intervention to support U.S. small and medium-sized businesses and (ii) a large reduction in net interest expenses due to accommodative monetary policy.  Without the historically outsized government fiscal intervention and accommodative monetary policy, non-financial profit margins during 2020-2021 would have been more in line with past episodes of large economic downturns.

Related: The Curious Incident of the Elevated Profit Margins and "Greedflation" and the Profits Equation

China is set to become the world’s biggest car exporter this year, overtaking Japan. Driving China’s global ascendancy are deep structural problems in the domestic auto industry, which threaten to upend car markets across the world. A stark mismatch between production at Chinese factories and local demand has been caused, in part, by industry executives mis-forecasting three key trends: the rapid decline of internal combustion engine car sales, the explosion in popularity of electric vehicles and the declining need for privately owned vehicles as shared mobility booms among an increasingly urbanised Chinese population. The result has been “massive overcapacity” in the number of vehicles produced in factories across the country, said Bill Russo, former head of Chrysler in China and founder of advisory firm Automobility. “We have an overhang of 25mn units not being used.”

Related: China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s and Can Volkswagen Win Back China? and How China Became A Car-Exporting Juggernaut

When the core inflation rate averages above 4%, the stock-bond correlation has been positive with few exceptions. Core inflation has averaged 4.5% for the past three years and is currently 4.7%.  Even in periods of high stock-bond correlations, stocks, and bonds can be negatively correlated over shorter periods. In fact, over the first eight months of this year, stocks and bonds moved opposite one another in May, June, and July. This also helps explain how in the 1970s during a period of sustained positive stock-bond correlations, Treasurys still had positive returns in recessions.  The stock-bond correlation can be seen as an indicator of what is the dominant risk—inflation or growth—and how it is changing.

Related: Stock-Bond Correlations and Do Stocks Always Outperform Bonds?

Mr. Trump’s made huge gains among white voters without a college degree in 2016, a group that was overrepresented in the key Northern battleground states. The polls so far this cycle suggest that the demographic foundations of Mr. Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College might be eroding. Mr. Biden is relatively resilient among white voters, who are generally overrepresented in the battleground states. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, shows surprising strength among nonwhite voters, who are generally underrepresented in the most critical battleground states. As a consequence, Mr. Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters nationwide would tend to do more to improve his standing in the national vote than in the battleground states. Overall, 83% of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were white in the 2020 election compared with 69% of voters elsewhere in the nation.

Related: Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden and How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support and Can Democrats Survive the Looming Crisis in New York City’s Outer Boroughs?

Twelve insurers that write homeowners coverage in Louisiana were declared insolvent between July 2021 and February 2022, according to the Insurance Information Institute. Those closures sent insurance prices spiraling out of control, in both absolute terms and also in prices relative to local median incomes that are among the lowest in the nation. The average premium rose 6.7% in 2021 and then 18.5% in 2022, according to the Louisiana Department of Insurance. Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer of last resort, went from 45,000 policies in 2020 to 130,000 currently. That’s despite the fact that, by law, it charges 10% above market rate and raised rates 65% at the beginning of this year.

Related: Analyzing State Resilience to Weather and Climate Disasters and How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters and Home Insurers Are Charging More and Insuring Less

The latest government data released just last month points to a second year of increases in 2022 after years of declines. The trend is sparking resentment as house prices in the top 10 rural counties that have seen the biggest population increases surged more than 40% over the past three years. The number of people living in non-metro areas outgrew the urban population for the first time in three decades in 2021, and the rural population expanded again last year. But growth wasn’t evenly distributed, with the top 10 counties with the largest population gains growing by an average 5%, according to Census data. That’s more than the national average of 0.4%.

Related: Young Families Have Not Returned to Large Cities Post-Pandemic and Tax Data Reveals Large Flight of High Earners from Major Cities During the Pandemic

Sweden, which has applied for Nato membership, announced on Monday that it planned to raise defense spending by more than  25%  to meet the military alliance’s target of 2% of GDP.  Currently, only 11 of 31 members do.  Persuading voters of the sacrifices required to make such commitments a reality represents a seismic reordering of the budget and electoral priorities. In Denmark, the government opted to fund its increase in public spending by cancelling a public holiday — to much chagrin from voters. "Leaders have signed up to a generational shift in defence policy. But I do wonder if they fully understand, or have told their finance ministers,” a senior Nato official said.

Related: The Age-Old Question: How Do Governments Pay For Wars? and The Cost of the Global Arms Race and Military Briefing: Ukraine War Exposes ‘Hard Reality’ of West’s Weapons Capacity

The federal deficit for the first 3/4 of the fiscal year 2023 was almost 3x as high as a year before. Very little of it was the result of new spending programs (although money is starting to flow out the door under the Biden administration’s industrial policies).  It was mainly about two things: a sharp fall in tax receipts and rising interest payments. What’s happening on taxes is that the federal government in effect got a windfall from stock prices and inflation, which is now going away. We’re not looking at any fundamental deterioration. The U.S. government really shouldn’t be running budget deficits this big at full employment. Yet we don’t want to reduce deficits by cutting essential spending. America collects a lower share of its income in taxes than other major economies, so more revenue — partly from the rich, but also from the middle class — would be a reasonable policy.

Related: Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and American Gothic and Living with High Public Debt

The hype around the “Magnificent 7” stocks [Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla] that have driven the stock market this year is reminiscent of the dot.com era, which ended with a spectacular crash. However, there are two reasons why today’s developments seem less worrying: The rise of hyped stocks was more extreme in the Dot.com era, as was the rise of the rest of the market. While today’s situation is exceptional, with seven stocks accounting for nearly 30% of the total value of the S&P 500, the rule in the past has been that only a few stocks generated most of the value creation of the stock market in the US and internationally.

Related: 7 or 493 Stocks: What Matters for the S&P 500? and Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs

We calculate net global stock market wealth creation of $US 75.7 trillion btw 1990 and 2020.  Wealth creation is highly concentrated. Five firms (0.008% of the total) with the largest wealth creation during the January 1990 to December 2020 period (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Tencent) accounted for 10.3% of global net wealth creation. The best-performing 159 firms (0.25% of total) accounted for half of global net wealth creation. The best-performing 1,526 firms (2.39% of the total) can account for all net global wealth creation. Skewness in compound returns is even stronger outside the U.S. The present sample includes 46,723 non-U.S. stocks. Of these, 42.6% generated buy-and-hold returns measured in U.S. dollars that exceed one-month U.S. Treasury bill returns over matched horizons. By comparison, 44.8% of the 17,776 U.S. stocks in the present sample outperformed Treasury bills.

Related: Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and More Bang for Your Buck and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

Demand for Ozempic (a diabetes drug often sought for weight loss—though not FDA-approved for that purpose) and Wegovy (the new drug explicitly approved for treating obesity), is so strong that it functionally prevented a recession in Denmark—headline GDP is up roughly 1.1% over the last year, but excluding the pharmaceutical industry it’s down -0.9%, meaning drugmakers alone have added roughly 2% to Danish economic growth. Booming exports and high dollar earnings are allowing Danmarks Nationalbank—the Danish Central Bank—to keep rates lower than they otherwise would in order to maintain their currency peg to the Euro. Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical giant has rapidly become the most valuable publicly traded company in Europe. Sales have risen 30% in the first half of this year, profits are up 40%, and the company is having to ration supply as production struggles to keep up with growth in orders.

Related: More Bang for Your Buck

We built a statistical model to predict the monthly consumer-sentiment index between 1980 and 2016 using a broad battery of economic data. A combination of 13 variables, including inflation, unemployment and petrol prices explained 86% of the variation in the index in this period, a very good fit. Before the pandemic, the relationships between these indicators and consumer sentiment were relatively stable. Although Americans report being worried about their finances, they are behaving as flush as ever—and in economic forecasting, actions speak louder than words. When used to project future spending rather than consumer sentiment, the same battery of economic variables has fully maintained its forecasting power since 2020. In contrast, since covid began, the correlation between sentiment and both current and future spending has vanished.

Note that this is a deceleration of the rate of increase. So if an item had 5% price growth and 1% quantity growth at the end of 2022, and then it had a 3% price growth and 2% quantity growth ending July 2023, it would show up as (-2,+1), or on the bottom right quadrant. It would be categorized as supply-increasing in this exercise, as the rate of price increases fell while the rate of quantity increases picked up. At the moment, the inflation story is exactly what a “soft landing” would have predicted. A combination of resolving supply shocks and a subtle decrease in demand has driven inflation down dramatically, with no cost to the level of employment.

Related: The Relationship between Consumption Growth and Inflation and What We’ve Learned About Inflation and The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes

An estimated 20 to 40 million tonnes of lithium metal lie within a volcanic crater formed around 16 million years ago. This is notably larger than the lithium deposits found beneath a Bolivian salt flat, previously considered the largest deposit in the world.  Thomas Benson, a geologist at Lithium Americas Corporation expects to begin mining in 2026. It will remove clay with water and then separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.

Related: Tesla’s Lithium Lead at Risk as Rivals Make Supply Deals and Chile’s Move to Control Lithium Alarms Industry and China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s

Vietnam has upgraded its relationship with the US to the highest level.  The US signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with the south-east Asian country on Sunday after President Joe Biden arrived in Hanoi from New Delhi, where he had attended the G20 summit. The symbolic but significant change, which follows years of lobbying by Washington, raises the US by two levels to the top status in Vietnam’s bilateral ties hierarchy. The status is one previously reserved only for China, Russia, India and, as of last year, South Korea. Vietnam had long avoided the move for fear of upsetting Beijing. As well as having security implications, such as potential defence co-operation, the new US status also carries economic importance, especially in crucial industries such as semiconductors.

Related: Vietnam Boots UK Out of Top Seven US Trading Partners and War, AI and Climate Change Shake Up $32 Trillion in Global Trade and Globalization Isn’t Dead. But It’s Changing

During a meeting on Saturday on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in India, Giorgia Meloni told Chinese Premier Li Qiang that Italy plans to withdraw from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative while still looking to maintain friendly relations with Beijing, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named. Italy officially signed up for the pact in 2019.

Related: Italy Intends to Exit China Belt and Road Pact as Relations Sour and China As an International Lender of Last Resort

Nationally, the real cost of [weather and climate]  disasters has risen from $20B per year in the 1980s to nearly $95B per year during the period 2010–19. In 2021, damages increased to about $153B. Costs were absorbed by four entities: property insurers (48%), uninsured or underinsured homeowners, businesses, and agricultural entities (37%), the federal government (11%), and state and local governments (4%). If property insurers were to exit certain markets or decrease coverage in states with greater exposure to physical risks due to decreased profitability, a larger share of damages would not be fully insured. Two major insurers recently announced that they will no longer accept new applications for business and personal property insurance coverage in California, citing increasing wildfire risk as a key factor in that decision. In addition, several major hurricanes during 2020-22 forced numerous insurance companies into bankruptcy in Louisiana and Florida.

Related: Home Insurers Are Charging More and Insuring Less and Why California and Florida Have Become Almost Uninsurable and How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters

While the global economy keeps growing over time, the NZE Ambition [net zero emissions] scenario results in a slowdown of GDP growth, both between 2019 and 2030 and between 2030 and 2050. The average global GDP growth rate goes from 2.3% per annum in the Baseline between 2019 and 2030 to 2.0% and decreases from 2.1% between 2030 and 2050 in the Baseline scenario to 1.9% in the NZE Ambition scenario. This leads to a reduction of global GDP compared to Baseline by 2.6% in 2030 and 5.6% in 2050.

Related: Growing Pains: The Renewable Transition in Adolescence and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate?

High interest rates have prompted homeowners to stay put rather than buy new homes and take on more expensive mortgages, resulting in an unusually low inventory of homes for sale. Sales of previously owned homes are now down about 36% from January 2022. But prices are generally holding firm outside of a few trouble spots.

Related: The "New Normal" Mortgage Rate Range and The Great Pandemic Mortgage Refinance Boom and Have Rising Mortgage Rates Frozen the Housing Market?

Looking back over the last few decades, there’s a clear relationship between the racial turnout gap — the difference between white and Black turnout — and the proportion of Black registered voters who back Democrats in pre-election polls since 1980. Or put differently: When Black voters don’t support Democrats, they tend not to vote. It’s possible that the Black voters who back Mr. Trump in the polls today will ultimately show up for him next November. But for now, when I see Mr. Biden’s share among Black voters slip into the 60s and 70s in the polls, I mostly see yet another decline in the Black share of the electorate, at least “if the election were held today.” If there’s any good news for Mr. Biden here, it’s that the election is still 14 months away.

Related: Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden

Defense Chief General Anil Chauhan — India’s top military commander — commissioned a study to examine the wider impact of any war over the island that also involves the US and its allies, and what action India could take in response.  One option the Indian military will study involves serving as a logistics hub to provide repair and maintenance facilities for allied warships and aircraft, as well as food, fuel and medical equipment for armies resisting China.  A more extreme scenario would assess the potential for India to get directly involved along their northern border, opening a new theater of war for China. While no deadline has been set to complete the study, the Indian military is under orders to finish it as soon as possible, one of the officials said.

Related: US and India Announce Defence and Technology Deals During Visit By Narendra Modi and Indian Stock Market Surges as Foreign Funds Buy Into National Growth Story and India Equity: An Unsung Long-Term Performance Story

It is unclear whether the normalization of churn that has already occurred will be sufficient to bring wage growth—and therefore consumer spending power—back in line with what would be consistent with the Fed’s inflation target. My preferred high-frequency measure of underlying wage growth has been the three-month average of the monthly change in average hourly pay for nonsupervisory workers outside of the retail, leisure, and hospitality industries. After hovering around 5% since last summer, it has come down sharply in the past three months to just 4% in June-August. That is encouraging news and seems to fit with the recent moves in the quit rate and the job openings rate.

Related: The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes and Rate Cuts and The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Labor Market

During the past 20 years, the inflation-adjusted average hourly wage of non-management US workers, also known as production and nonsupervisory employees, has risen 13%. That’s not exactly a rip-roaring pace — 0.6% a year. Then again, real hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory employees fell in the 1970s and 1980s and rose at only a 0.3% annual pace in the 1990s. The average hourly wage for autoworkers on the production line has dropped 30% since 2003. GM, Ford and Stellantis are all profitable, with a combined net income of $42B for the 12 months ended in June and the amount coming from their US operations probably adding up to somewhat less than $30B. Bloomberg reported last month that Ford and GM’s internal estimates of the costs of the UAW’s demands peg them at $80B per company over the next four years, which would wipe out all those profits and then some.

Related: EV Boom Remakes Rural Towns in the American South and Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers

The nominal yield spread is currently negative—quite low by historical standards—and predicts a 65% probability of recession in 12 months. This recession probability would be unprecedentedly high for a false positive. The “real” interest rate spread implies a still elevated, but lower probability of recession in 12 months, of about 40%. This 40% probability is the highest in the history of the series, exceeding that even in any actual recession. Even if a model were literally correct instead of an approximation, these models predict 40%, 50%, and 60% probabilities of recessions, which means there is a fair likelihood of a soft landing.

Related: Soft Landing Summer and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider

Mr. Biden’s weakness among nonwhite voters is broad, spanning virtually every demographic category and racial group, including a 72-11 lead among Black voters and a 47-35 lead among Hispanic registrants. The sample of Asian voters is not large enough to report, though nonwhite voters who aren’t Black or Hispanic — whether Asian, Native American, multiracial or something else — back Mr. Biden by just 40-39. In all three cases, Mr. Biden’s tallies are well beneath his standing in the last election. The survey finds evidence that a modest but important 5% of nonwhite Biden voters now support Mr. Trump, including 8% of Hispanic voters who say they backed Mr. Biden in 2020.

Related: Can Democrats Survive the Looming Crisis in New York City’s Outer Boroughs? and The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory and Five Reasons Why Biden Might Lose in 2024

The Pentagon intends to field a vast network of AI-powered technology, drones and autonomous systems within the next two years to counter threats from China and other adversaries. Kathleen Hicks, the deputy secretary of defense, provided new details in a speech Wednesday about the department’s plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to produce an array of thousands of air-, land- and sea-based artificial-intelligence systems that are intended to be “small, smart, cheap.”

Related: U.S. Weapons Industry Unprepared for a China Conflict, Report Says and Military Briefing: Ukraine War Exposes ‘Hard Reality’ of West’s Weapons Capacity and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years

Unexpected changes in monetary policy can slow the pace of economic activity much more persistently than is commonly believed.  In response to a 1% increase in interest rates, output would be about 5% lower after 12 years than it would otherwise be. To provide some context for these numbers, consider some data for the United States. In response to a similar 1% increase in interest rates, after 12 years TFP would be about 3% lower and capital would be about 4% lower. When we separate our interest rate experiments into those that resulted in rate hikes versus those that resulted in lower interest rates, we see that there is no free lunch. The blue line shows that lower interest rates have mostly temporary effects that vanish after a few years, as traditional theories predict.

Related: Loose Monetary Policy and Financial Instability and Monetary Policy and Innovation

Spending per Medicare beneficiary has nearly leveled off over more than a decade. The trend can be a little hard to see because, as baby boomers have aged, the number of people using Medicare has grown. The reason for the per-person slowdown is a bit of a mystery. Some of the reductions are easy to explain. The Affordable Care Act in 2010 reduced Medicare’s payments to hospitals and to health insurers that offered private Medicare Advantage plans. Congress also cut Medicare payments as part of a budget deal in 2011. But most of the savings can’t be attributed to any obvious policy shift. Economists at the Congressional Budget Office described the huge reductions in its Medicare forecasts between 2010 and 2020. Most of those reductions came from a category the budget office calls “technical adjustments,” which it uses to describe changes to public health and the practice of medicine itself.

Related: America’s Entitlement Programmes Are Rapidly Approaching Insolvency and Why Medicare and Social Security Are Sustainable and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years

The continued positive inflation and labor market news has led us to cut our estimated 12-month US recession probability further to 15%, down 5pp from our prior estimate and equal to the unconditional average recession probability of 15% calculated from the fact that a recession has occurred roughly once every seven years since WW2. Our estimate is far below the Bloomberg consensus, which remains stuck at 60%. Our expectation is that the 1991-2007 period, when the nominal funds rate fluctuated between 1% and 6½%, will prove to be a better template than the post-2008 period when the Fed found it difficult to get much above 2%.

Related: What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider

One source of upward pressure on US rates is the $7.6 trillion in US government bonds that will mature over the coming 12 months.

Related: Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and Rising Rates Slowing Growth Through Higher Debt Servicing Costs and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

Indirect lending—along with foreclosed properties, trading portfolios and other assets linked to commercial properties—brings banks’ total exposure to commercial real estate to $3.6 trillion, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. That’s equivalent to about 20% of their deposits. Holdings of CMBS and loans to mortgage REITs and other nonbank lenders accounted for about 18% of the nearly $3.6 trillion in commercial real-estate exposure in 2022, or nearly $623 billion. The first quarter of 2023 marked the first decline in banks’ commercial real-estate holdings since 2013. At that point, banks’ overall securities holdings had lost nearly $400 billion in value, largely due to higher interest rates. Banks don’t have to mark down the value of loans in most cases, so the real losses are likely greater. The banks are in danger of setting off a doom-loop scenario where losses on the loans trigger banks to cut lending, which leads to further drops in property prices and yet more losses.

Related: Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse and Who’s Afraid of Commercial Real Estate? and Rates Are Up. We’re Just Starting to Feel the Heat

Central business districts (CBDs) in the northern and western US continue to see consumer spending below pre-pandemic levels. However, there is a glimmer in New York City and Seattle that the situation is not continuing to deteriorate. Cities in the south are seeing strong growth in their city centers.  The difference in performance is largely driven by migration patterns as working from home doesn't necessarily vary across cities. For example, southern cities with increased population growth also seem to be capturing more of the increasing spend in their city centers.  Cities with population gains %YoY as of 2Q 2023 (Tampa, Phoenix, Orlando, Nashville, Jacksonville, Columbus, Charlotte and Austin) are seeing spending relative to pre-pandemic up around 20%. On the other hand, cities with net population losses over this period (New York, Boston, San Francisco and Atlanta) have spending down around 20%.

Related: On the Move: Which Cities Have The Biggest Housing Shortage? and Remote Work, Three Years Later and A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget the federal deficit is projected to roughly double this year, as bigger interest payments and lower tax receipts widen the nation’s spending imbalance despite robust overall economic growth. After the government’s record spending in 2020 and 2021 to combat the impact of covid-19, the deficit dropped by the greatest amount ever in 2022, falling from close to $3 trillion to roughly $1 trillion. But rather than continue to fall to its pre-pandemic levels, the deficit then shot upward. Budget experts now project that it will probably rise to about $2 trillion for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. Jason Furman said the current jump in the deficit is only surpassed by “major crises,” such as World War II, the 2008 financial meltdown or the coronavirus pandemic.

Related: Living with High Public Debt and There Is No "Stealth Fiscal Stimulus" and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

Growth theory reveals that in the long run, growth in living standards is determined by growth in the worldwide number of people searching for ideas. A growth accounting exercise for the US since the 1950s suggests that many other factors have temporarily contributed to growth, including rising educational attainment and a rising investment rate in ideas. But these forces are inherently temporary, implying that growth rates could slow in the future. In contrast, other forces could potentially sustain or even increase growth rates. The emergence of countries such as China and India provides large numbers of people who could search for ideas. Improvements in the allocation of talent — for example, the rise of women inventors — and increased automation through artificial intelligence are other potential tailwinds.

Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and From Strength To Strength and Fully Grown - European Vacation!

Bloomberg Economics now sees growth in China’s economy — the world’s second largest — slowing to 3.5% in 2030 and to near 1% by 2050. That’s lower than prior projections of 4.3% and 1.6%, respectively. It will take until the mid-2040s for China’s GDP to exceed that of the US — and even then, it will happen by “only a small margin” before “falling back behind.” Before the pandemic, Bloomberg expected China to take and hold pole position as early as the start of next decade. Bloomberg estimates potential US growth at 1.7% in 2022-2023, with long-term forecasts showing a gradual drifting down to 1.5% by 2050.

Related: When Will China’s GDP Overtake America’s? and How Soon and At What Height Will China’s Economy Peak? and The Neoclassical Growth of China

We expect real income will grow by 3% in 2024 on a Q4/Q4 basis. In terms of components, expected labor income gains account for over half this increase, we expect interest income increases will raise real income growth by over 1pp, and the pullback in Medicaid coverage [Sunset of pandemic era continuous enrollment provision] is set to subtract almost ½pp. This pace of real income growth is below the 4% pace in 2023, but comfortably above the roughly 2½% real growth pace observed in the 20 years prior to the pandemic. In terms of the timing of these real income gains, we forecast a flatter profile than in 2023, as start-of-year adjustments from COLAs and changes in the effective tax rate will likely be less of a driver of income growth in 2024.

Related: Soft Landing Optimism Is Everywhere. That’s Happened Before and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider and The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes

We’ve found reasons to think more highly of Europe and Japan. Notably, we find that value stocks in Europe and Japan are more profitable, with Europe being particularly impressive. Among firms that trade at a discount to book value, Europe has a Gross Profit/Assets ratio of 18.5%, which is 1.5x the profitability of North American value firms. The differences are even more stark in terms of EBITDA/Assets, with Europe’s value firms delivering a 6.4% return on assets, almost 3x higher than North America’s profitability among value firms. We believe that the combination of historically wide valuation spreads in Europe and higher levels of profitability among Europe’s value stocks bolster the case for upward mean reversion going forward. Historically, mean reversion in multiples has supported significant outperformance of value relative to growth.

Related: Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off.’ and From Strength To Strength and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

While bank lending plateaued in the U.S., off-shore dollar bank lending has actually contracted outright at a rate not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. Data as of 2023Q1 indicates a year over year decline of $325b in loans with the bulk of the decline concentrated in lending to emerging markets. This is likely due to both supply and demand factors, where borrowers pull back due to higher rates and banks reduce lending due to lower profitability. A similar trend is observed on-shore, where bank lending has been growing at a very sluggish rate. Note that foreign banks may not have access to dollar liquidity backstops like FHLB lending and the discount window, so they may be more cautious than U.S. banks. The reduction in dollar credit is likely contributing to the global manufacturing slump and will remain a significant headwind to global growth.

Related: BIS International Banking Statistics and Global Liquidity Indicators at End December 2022

The big way I think China could negatively impact the U.S. economy is that if China decides to export its way out, the U.S. is still the biggest market for consumer goods and the biggest market for imported goods globally. If China really wanted to export its way out, let its currency go, there would be a big further depreciation in the Yuan. And the Yuan’s already a 15-year low, more or less. If the Yuan goes back to the levels where it was when China joined the WTO, without an enormous ratcheting up of trade restrictions, there would be pressure on certain parts of the U.S. economy that I think would be meaningful. There’s no doubt that China has the biggest manufacturing base in the world. And those parts of the U.S. economy that compete with it may face difficulty if China can’t find a way to recover other than exports.

Related: Setser On China's Trade Surplus and Brad Setser On Deglobalization and Is the Chinese Government Pushing Down the Yuan?

Even after a planned rise in October, the minimum wage in Tokyo will be the equivalent of just $7.65, compared with $15 in New York City. Median household income in Japan in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available, was equivalent to about $29,000 at the current exchange rate, compared with $70,784 in the U.S. that year, according to government statistics in the two countries. The typical Asian-American household brought in just over $100,000—more than triple what the typical Japanese family made.

Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and Japan Demographic Woes Deepen as Birthrate Hits Record Low and From Strength To Strength

The 2024-25 budget represents a 13% rise compared with this fiscal year’s intended spending. It is part of a five-year, ¥43tn plan by Tokyo to strengthen its defence capabilities and bring military spending to roughly 2% of current gross domestic product, compared with the self-imposed cap of about 1% of GDP that Japan has maintained since the 1960s. Japan intends to build destroyers equipped with a US-built Aegis missile defence. The planned shopping list also includes the acquisition of counterstrike weapons, including Tomahawk cruise missiles. The largest portion of the requested spending will be designated to strengthening the “sustainability and resilience” of the Self-Defense Forces. The aim is to address shortages of basic items that officials fear will hamper the SDF’s ability to cope with a prolonged conflict.

Related: The Age-Old Question: How Do Governments Pay For Wars? and The Cost of the Global Arms Race and US To Link Up With Taiwan and Japan Drone Fleets To Share Real-Time Data

Overall both household and payroll employment are 1.5mm higher than CBO's pre-pandemic projections. It doesn't feel that long ago that people were talking about missing workers (talking about it for longer than was justified by the data I might add). Pretty much the only thing that went in the direction of tighter was average weekly hours ticked up but this series is noisy because of rounding and measurement issues. As a result, aggregate hours grew strongly as well. Average hourly earnings growth was the slowest in over a year and a half. This is noisy, subject to revision, but even adjusting for that perhaps the biggest sign of cooling in this report.

Related: Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider and  Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers and Unions’ Inflation Warning?

[Short-term interest rates] are not “market-determined” in any normal sense, but chosen at the discretion of the ~18 members of the FOMC. Longer-term interest rates are not explicitly set by the Fed, but Fed officials try to make those rates go up or down when they think it is necessary to achieve their policy objectives, sometimes by buying or selling bonds outright. If the point of maintaining “market functioning” is to prevent spikes in yields that could hurt borrowers in the real economy while facilitating transactions of bonds for cash, central banks are already better-positioned to do those trades directly than anyone else. What would be the point of involving intermediaries, except to pay them for a service that could be provided in-house? This is effectively what the BOJ has been doing for years, laying out target ranges for yields at points on the curve, adjusting those ranges as needed, sometimes buying oodles of Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs), and often doing nothing.

Related: Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market and Living with High Public Debt and The Fed and the Secular Decline in Interest Rates

Hedge fund short futures positions in the 2-year, 5-year, and 10-year contracts rose by $411 billion between October 4th, 2022 and May 9th, 2023. Consistent with these empirical trends, spreads on the trade suggest it has been profitable at several points in recent months, without considering the value of options embedded in the trade (and whose value has likely increased as measures of Treasury market uncertainty have risen). The cash-futures basis trade is an arbitrage trade that involves a short Treasury futures position, a long Treasury cash position, and borrowing in the repo market to finance the trade and provide leverage. This trade presents a financial stability vulnerability because the trade is generally highly leveraged and is exposed to both changes in futures margins and changes in repo spreads. Hedge funds unwinding the cash-futures basis trade likely contributed to the March 2020 Treasury market instability.

Related: Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market and Who Has Been Buying U.S. Treasury Debt? and A Beautiful Replenishment

Most Americans still overwhelmingly stick to an ideal of two to three children. In fact, the share of people saying they want three or more children has risen as the actual number of children being born has dropped. By the mid-1990s, about one-third of Americans said the ideal family had three or more children. But since then, the share of respondents citing an ideal of three or more children has gradually climbed. Despite dipping briefly after the pandemic, that group rebounded again in 2022 to 44%, according to the General Social Survey, the more than 50-year-old survey of Americans’ social views conducted by the University of Chicago. Meanwhile, the share of people who say the ideal family consists of two children slipped to 51.7% in 2022 from 62% in 1998. On average, the ideal family is 2.5 children, which is up slightly from the 1990s but relatively little changed over the course of 50 years.

Related: Young Adults in the U.S. Are Reaching Key Life Milestones Later Than in the Past and Immigrants & Their Kids Were 70% of U.S. Labor Force Growth Since 1995

U.S. companies have $600 billion in corporate debt set to mature this year, a total that will grow to more than $1 trillion a year from 2025 until 2028. That stark data from Goldman Sachs points to a financial cliff that is coming for American corporations, which executives are trying to navigate by extending the dates their debts come due, refinancing borrowings or managing cash reserves. What’s at stake? The debt loads, coupled with the rising costs of new financing for companies, may cut into corporate profits, investor returns, spending on new ideas, hiring—and could lead to less-healthy balance sheets. Some analysts say there could be a swath of corporate credit-rating downgrades ahead.

Related: How Is the Corporate Bond Market Functioning as Interest Rates Increase? and Credit Normalization and A Default Cycle Has Started

There has been no major increase in the US capital-output ratio, nor has there been a major decline in the US marginal product of capital – the economy’s real return to capital. The US capital-output ratio remains close to its postwar average and capital’s real return has remained roughly constant -- around 6%.  During the 2000s the marginal product of U.S. capital (MPK) was a healthy 5.84%.  In the 2010s it was even higher at 6.42%.  The market return to capital would show a decline if there were a capital glut and investors expected lower rates of return, It shows no such decline. The market return to capital’s real return averaged 5.52% between 1950 and 1989. Btw 1990 and 2019 it averaged 6.95. Hence, the broadest market-based real return data shows a rise, not a fall in returns in the recent decades during which capital has allegedly been in vast oversupply. The real return to US wealth between 2010 and 2019 averaged 8.25% – the highest average return of any postwar decade.

Related: In Search of Safe Havens: The Trust Deficit and Risk-free Investments! and Summers and Blanchard Debate the Future of Interest Rates

Since February 2023, the labor force participation rate for prime-age women––those between the ages of 25 and 54––has exceeded its all-time high. As of the most recent jobs report, prime-age women had a labor force participation rate of 77.8%. We find that those who have contributed most to the rebound in overall labor force participation in April and May of 2023, three years after the nadir of pandemic-era participation, are in fact prime-age women. Moreover, among prime-age women and indeed among all groups, women whose youngest child is under the age of five are powering the pack’s upward trajectory.

Related: “The Great Retirement Boom”: The Pandemic-Era Surge in Retirements and Implications for Future Labor Force Participation and The Labor Supply Rebound from the Pandemic and Retirements, Net Worth, and the Fall and Rise of Labor Force Participation

Auto companies have announced more than $110 billion in EV-related investments in the U.S. since 2018, with about half that sum destined for Southern states, according to the Center for Automotive Research. The rest is mostly planned for states in the Great Lakes region, including Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. Auto employment in the Great Lakes region, while still nearly double that of southern states, has slid 34% in the last two decades to 382,000 workers as of 2021, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Full-time unionized jobs in the industry currently range between $18 to $32 an hour. There is no guarantee the [southern] Ford plants will be unionized, and the company has said this decision is up to its workers. The United Auto Workers union is currently in talks with the Detroit automakers and is prioritizing organizing these joint-venture battery plants.

Related: Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers and Republican Districts Dominate US Clean Technology Investment Boom and Small Towns Chase America’s $3 Trillion Climate Gold Rush

South Korea’s fertility rate slumped to 0.78 last year, from 0.81 in 2021. The slide has worsened in recent months, falling to 0.70 in the April-to-June quarter. Since 2013, the country of 52 million has reported the lowest fertility rate among wealthy members of the OECD—where the average fertility rate stands at 1.58. No other OECD member has a fertility rate below 1. South Korea’s population began declining in 2020, with the number of deaths overtaking total births. Its military conscripts are expected to shrink by nearly half over the next two decades. The military has started to deploy more unmanned combat aircraft and increase the number of women serving. The country’s total student enrollment has shrunk for 18 years straight.

Related: South Korea Again Smashes Own Record for World’s Lowest Fertility Rate in 2022 and The Great Global Baby Bust is Under Way and How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World

A 2022 paper, “Small Campaign Donors,” documents the striking increase in low-dollar ($200 or less) campaign contributions in recent years.  The total number of individual donors grew from 5.2mm in 2006 to 195mm in 2020.  The appeal of extreme candidates can be seen in the OpenSecrets listing of the top members of the House and Senate ranked by the percentage of contributions they have received from small donors in the 2021-22 election cycle: Bernie Sanders raised $38.3mm, of which 70%, came from small donors; Marjorie Taylor Greene raised $12.5mm, of which 68% came from small donors; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised $12.3mm, of which 68%, came from small donors. House Republicans who backed Trump and voted to reject the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 received an average of $140,000 in small contributions, while House Republicans who opposed Trump and voted to accept Biden’s victory received far less in small donations, an average of $40,000.

Related: Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal? and What Happened In 2022 and Republican Gains in 2022 Midterms Driven Mostly by Turnout Advantage

Rather than signaling a trend towards deglobalization, the available data hints at a looming “great reallocation” of US supply chain activity. This shift is marked by a decline in direct US sourcing from China, with a corresponding rise in import share from low-wage locations, chiefly Vietnam, and regional trade areas, particularly Mexico.  Recent policy efforts may ultimately not succeed in their objective to reduce US dependence on supply chains tied to China. Despite a decrease in US direct reliance on China, there has been an increase in China’s import share in “friendly” nations, including the EU, Mexico, and Vietnam. Chinese firms are stepping up FDI and production facilities in Vietnam and Mexico in critical sectors, albeit from a low base. This suggests that plants in which China is the ultimate owner may continue to play a significant role in US value chains.

Related: How America Is Failing To Break Up With China and Setser On Rumors Of Decoupling and Global Firms Are Eyeing Asian Alternatives to Chinese Manufacturing

Germany will be the world’s only major economy to contract in 2023, with even sanctioned Russia experiencing growth, according to the International Monetary Fund. China was for years a major driver of Germany’s export boom. A rapidly industrializing China bought up all the capital goods that Germany could make. But China’s investment-heavy growth model has been approaching its limits for years. Growth and demand for imports have faltered. Energy prices in Europe have declined from last year’s peak as EU countries scrambled to replace Russian gas, but German industry still faces higher costs than competitors in the U.S. and Asia.

Related: Germany's Industrial Slowdown and Europe's Imbalances in Pandemic and War and Can Volkswagen Win Back China?

In this analysis, I look at the performance of stocks referred to by some as the “Magnificent Seven” (Mag7). These are: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla.   The combined market value of all 500 stocks in the S&P 500 has increased by $5 trillion or 15.3% in 2023, as mentioned. Leaving Mag7 out of the equation, the value of the remaining 493 shares has risen from $26 trillion to $27 trillion today, a return of only 4.5%. Consequently, Mag7 stocks have provided a 10.8% increase in the S&P 500. This means that only 7 out of 500 stocks generated 10.8%/15.3% = 71% of the return of the S&P 500 in 2023. The remaining 493 stocks delivered the remaining 29%. One can only speculate whether these shares are bubbles. The spectacular performance of Nvidia, for example, is reminiscent of the performance of hyped stocks during the dot.com bubble at the turn of the millennium.

Related: Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs and Long Term Expectations and Aggregate Fluctuations

Work from home has reduced office utilization rates but has not yet led to substantial declines in office occupancy rates because most firms are locked in long-duration leases. Going forward, 17% of all office leases are scheduled to expire by the end of 2024, 47% between 2024-2029, and the rest after 2030. Our baseline estimates suggest that remote work will likely exert 0.8pp of upward pressure on the office vacancy rate by 2024, an additional 2.3pp over 2025-2029, and another 1.8pp in 2030 and beyond, though this is likely to be partially offset by a decline in new construction. The share of employees working remotely remains remarkably elevated in industries like information that require less face-to-face interaction, while it is much lower in contact-heavy sectors like retail and hospitality.

Related: Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse

A wealth of underground water helped create America, its vast cities and bountiful farmland. Now, Americans are squandering that inheritance. The Times analyzed water levels reported at tens of thousands of sites, revealing a crisis that threatens American prosperity - 84,544 monitoring wells examined for trends since 1920. Nearly half the sites have declined significantly over the past 40 years as more water has been pumped out than nature can replenish. In the past decade, four of every 10 sites hit all-time lows. And last year was the worst yet.

Related: Arizona Is Running Out of Cheap Water. Investors Saw It Coming and A Breakthrough Deal to Keep the Colorado River from Going Dry, for Now and Texas Farmers Are Worried One of the State’s Most Precious Water Resources is Running Dry. You Should Be Too

The sea surface temperatures of the gulf have cooked, warming more than 3 degrees above the norm for the date. The water has also heated up far beneath the surface. In fact, temperatures of nearly 88° are common to depths of 165 feet below the surface, according to data from Kim Wood, a professor of meteorology at Mississippi State University. University of Miami hurricane scientist Andy Hazelton called the ocean heat “other-worldly.” While the Gulf of Mexico as a whole has cooled slightly compared with earlier this month, when it shattered records, it remains near all-time highs.

Related: Heating Waters Force Change in Industries That Depend on the Ocean and What This Year’s ‘Astonishing’ Ocean Heat Means for the Planet and The Rapid Loss Of Antarctic Sea Ice Brings Grim Scenarios Into View

Models of artificial intelligence (AI) that have billions of parameters can achieve high accuracy across a range of tasks but they exacerbate the poor energy efficiency of conventional general-purpose processors, such as graphics processing units or central processing units. Analog in-memory computing (analog-AI) can provide better energy efficiency by performing matrix–vector multiplications in parallel on ‘memory tiles’. However, analog-AI has yet to demonstrate software-equivalent (SWeq) accuracy on models that require many such tiles and efficient communication of neural-network activations between the tiles. We demonstrate fully end-to-end SWeq accuracy for a small keyword-spotting network and near-SWeq accuracy on the much larger MLPerf8 recurrent neural-network transducer (RNNT.)

Related: Mega Firms and Recent Trends in the U.S. Innovation: Empirical Evidence from the U.S. Patent Data and The Race of the AI Labs Heats Up and The Dream of Bringing Back Bell Labs

The total amount of Treasuries outstanding will continue to grow rapidly relative to the intermediation capacity of the market because of large and persistent US fiscal deficits and the limited flexibility of dealer balance sheets, unless there are significant improvements in market structure. Broad central clearing and all-to-all trade have the potential to add importantly to market capacity and resilience. Additional improvements in intermediation capacity can likely be achieved with real-time post-trade transaction reporting and improvements in the form of capital regulation, especially the Supplementary Leverage Ratio. Backstopping the liquidity of this market with transparent official-sector purchase programs will further buttress market resilience.

Related: JPMorgan Says Treasuries Coping Amid Worst Liquidity Since 2020 and Raising Anchor

Today, about 2.5% wage growth would be consistent with 2% inflation, as recent-trend productivity growth has been low and other sources of income (from assets and government-deficit-financed transfers) are more neutral. With wage growth currently running at around 4.5%, we’re far away from this level. We’re more likely to see inflation level out at its current rate rather than continue to decline like it has over the past year. This would push the Fed to continue tightening and, with a short pause and return toward easing being priced in, could come through the form of either rate rises or holding rates at high levels. This makes assets especially vulnerable to another round of tighter policy.

Related: The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes and The Tightening Cycle Is Approaching Stage 3: Guideposts We’re Watching and Rate Cuts

One market based measure of longer dated real yields has steadily risen and appears to indicate such a possibility. Market pricing indicates that some investors have a clearer vision of the future. Market pricing of future inflation expectations and longer dated real rates have been creeping up, potentially pricing in some probability of both a higher inflation target and a higher r*. Together this implies that the higher nominal rates we see today are here to stay and may even trend higher as the future unfolds. The Fed is a conservative institution and would be hesitant to make any big changes to its approach to policy. If the future looks different from the past, the Fed will be among the last to know.

Related: Hitch Your Wagon to R-Star and Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest After COVID-19 and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate?

One way to better understand the impact of BoJ YCC exit on Japanese demand for US Treasuries is to look at how much of the recent increase in US long-term interest rates has happened during Tokyo trading hours. Since the BoJ YCC exit surprise in late July, the move higher in 10s has occurred almost entirely during New York trading hours. This suggests that US rates are not driven higher by Japanese investors during Tokyo trading hours. Hence, BoJ YCC exit doesn’t seem to be the reason long rates have increased over the past month. Instead, likely drivers of US rates over the past month are the US sovereign downgrade, fewer dollars for China to recycle in a falling exports environment, Fed QT, the significant budget deficit, the large stock of T-bills, and the Treasury’s intention to increase coupon auction sizes.

Related: Raising Anchor and China Isn't Selling Treasuries and American Gothic

We normalize the shock to tightening by 100bps. Investment in intellectual property products (IPP) in the national accounts (NIPA) declines by about 1%. The magnitude is comparable to the decline in traditional investment in physical assets. R&D spending in Compustat data for public firms declines by about 3%. VC investment is more volatile, and declines by as much as 25% at a horizon of 1 to 3 years after the monetary policy shock. Patenting in important technologies declines by up to 9%  2 to 4 years after the shock. An aggregate innovation index constructed using estimates of the economic value of patents also declines by up to 9%. Based on estimates of the output and total factor productivity (TFP) sensitivity to the aggregate innovation index, a 9% decline in the index can contribute to 1% lower real output and 0.5% lower TFP 5 years later.

Related: Data Update 2 for 2023: A Rocky Year for Equities

The college wage premium is especially large for Asian workers, with college graduates earning more than twice what high school graduates earn. This reflects about a 120% premium, compared with about a 70–80% premium for the other three racial/ethnic groups. The college wage gap is also somewhat larger for Black workers than for Hispanic and White workers, although the premiums for those groups have largely converged in recent years. All four groups saw gains through at least the early part of the recovery from the 2007–09 recession. While the premium continued to rise for Asian workers, the premium flattened for White workers in the latter half of the recovery and fell for Hispanic and Black workers. Moreover, since the 2020 pandemic recession, the college wage premium edged down slightly for all groups except Hispanic workers.

Related: Why Do Wages Grow Faster for Educated Workers? and The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Labor Market 

Half of the global population growth from 2022 to 2050 will occur in sub-Saharan Africa. The region’s population is currently growing three times faster than the rest of the world, and by the end of the century, it will be home to a third of all people in the world, compared to only 14% in 2019. This means that the burden of rapid population growth will fall on some of the poorest countries in the world, with nearly half of the region having a gross national income per capita below $1,135, and in places that are among the most vulnerable to climate change.

Related: Saudi Forces Accused of Killing Hundreds of Ethiopian Migrants and How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World

The essence of fiscal dominance is the need for the government to fund its deficits on the margin with non-interest-bearing debts. Inflation taxation has two components: expected and unexpected inflation taxation. Both are limited in their ability to fund real government expenditures. The expected component of inflation taxation (per period) is the product of the nominal interest rate and the inflation tax base, which consists of all non-interest bearing government debt. Unexpected inflation taxation occurs when the nominal value of outstanding government debt falls unexpectedly (thereby taxing government debtholders), and this component is also limited by the ability of government to surprise markets by creating unanticipated inflation.  It is quite possible that a fiscal dominance episode in the US would result in not only the end of the policy of paying interest on reserves, but also a return to requiring banks to hold a large fraction of their deposit liabilities as zero-interest reserves.

Related: The Return of Quantitative Easing and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook

Large, persistent primary budget surpluses are not in the political cards. It is difficult to imagine more favorable interest-rate-growth-rate differentials (favorable interest-rate-growth-rate differentials reducing debt ratios in an accounting sense). Real interest rates have trended downward to very low levels. It is hard to foresee them falling still lower. Faster global growth is pleasant to imagine but difficult to engineer. Inflation is not a sustainable route to reducing high public debts. Statutory ceilings on interest rates and related measures of financial repression are less feasible than in the past. Investors opposed to the widespread application of repressive policies are a more powerful lobby. Financial liberalization, internal and external, is an economic fact of life. The genie is out of the bottle. All of which is to say that, for better or worse, high public debts are here to stay.

Related: American Gothic and Did the U.S. Really Grow Out of Its World War II Debt?

Many of us thought we had a pretty good understanding of the forces behind low r* before Covid struck. Investment demand is largely driven by expectations about future economic growth, and prospects for U.S. growth seemed low in part because of demography — growth in the working-age population has stalled — and in part because, despite all the hype about technology, productivity has grown slowly since the mid-2000s. The demographic story hasn’t changed. There are a couple of other forces that might have increased r*. Budget deficits have gotten bigger, which could be providing a fiscal boost. The Biden administration’s industrial policies seem to be catalyzing a boom in manufacturing investment. But manufacturing investment isn’t that big a part of overall investment spending, so it’s not clear how much this matters for interest rates.  One possible reason to think that r* may have risen is the surprising resilience of the economy in the face of Fed rate hikes.

Related: Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest After COVID-19 and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet)

This summer, nearly half the world’s oceans are experiencing a marine heatwave, defined as warmer than 90% of previous temperature observations on the same date.  There are other possible explanations in addition to climate change and the El Niño/La Niña cycle. New pollution rules have cut airborne sulfur aerosol particles released by commercial ships over parts of the ocean, clearing the air and allowing more sunlight to reach the ocean surface. That in turn might be heating the water along some shipping routes, although the amount is in dispute. In January 2022, an underwater volcano near Tonga blasted 50 million tons of water vapor into the stratosphere. Some researchers believe that vapor might be acting as a planet-warming greenhouse gas and nudging up ocean temperatures. Both theories are still under investigation, and their overall impact is up for debate.

Related: Long-term Surface Impact of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai-like Stratospheric Water Vapor Injection and The Rapid Loss Of Antarctic Sea Ice Brings Grim Scenarios Into View and Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century

Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers union since March, has declared “war” on the Detroit Three automakers, with contract demands that even he calls “audacious,” including proposals for a 46% raise, a return to traditional pensions and a 32-hour work week. The automakers counter that meeting those demands would threaten their existence, driving up labor costs by $80 billion and increasing total pay and benefit expenses to more than $150 an hour, from about $64 now, Bloomberg has reported. Higher labor costs contributed to Chrysler, Ford and GM’s lack of price competitiveness against foreign brands in the 1990s and 2000s.

Related: UAW Warns Contract Talks With Big Three Carmakers Are Moving ‘Too Slow’ and The ‘Summer of Strikes’ Isn’t Living Up to the Hype and Everyone Wants to Work at UPS After Teamsters Deal

Data compiled by Bloomberg on more than 370 suppliers and their factory locations reveals which of Apple’s manufacturing partners are building new capacity and where. The result is the clearest picture yet of all the ways the Cupertino, California-based company’s network of producers increasingly crisscrosses the developing world. Vietnam and India are the biggest winners, with smaller production hot spots appearing elsewhere in Asia. Producers from the US and Japan have reduced their footprint in China, even as Chinese firms join the supplier list at a rapid clip. China still houses the majority of Apple’s device-making factories, and will remain an integral part of the company’s supply chain. But the shift to a more diffuse production network is undeniable and accelerating.

Related: What it Would Take for Apple to Disentangle itself from China and Apple’s Complex, Secretive Gamble to Move Beyond China and India Equity: An Unsung Long-Term Performance Story

Xi Jinping has deep-rooted philosophical objections to Western-style consumption-driven growth, people familiar with decision-making in Beijing say. Xi sees such growth as wasteful and at odds with his goal of making China a world-leading industrial and technological powerhouse. Chinese officials also emphasized avoiding a current-account deficit, which would signal greater dependence on the outside world at a time of simmering tensions between Beijing and the West. Chinese officials told their counterparts at multinational institutions that the many hardships Xi survived during the Cultural Revolution—when he lived in a cave and dug ditches—helped shape his view that austerity breeds prosperity, the people said. “The message from the Chinese is that Western-style social support would only encourage laziness,” one person familiar with the meetings said.

Related: Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent? and China’s Defeated Youth and China Is Now Growing Slower Than the U.S.

We decompose the movements of debt/GDP into the effects of primary surpluses and deficits; distortions of real interest rates from surprise inflation and from pegged nominal rates; and the difference between the undistorted real interest rate and the growth rate of output (r⋆ − g). For the period up to 1974, we find that the fall in the debt-GDP ratio is explained mostly by primary surpluse and interest-rate distortions. Absent those factors, with the path of the ratio determined entirely by r⋆ − g, the ratio of 106% in 1946 would have fallen only to 74% in 1974 rather than the actual trough of 23%. As of the end of fiscal year 2022, the actual debt/GDP ratio stands at 102%, close to its peak of 106% in 1946. Over the last 76 years, however, g > r⋆ has contributed only modestly to debt reduction. History should not make us optimistic that the U.S. will grow out of its debt.

Related: Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years and American Gothic

New motorway bridges in the UK cost more than three times as much per lane mile than in France, Denmark, or Norway, and additional lanes on existing British roads are twice as expensive as in Germany. In both cases, only the US faces even higher costs.

Related: Government Infrastructure Spending Is Expensive and Inefficient

Almost a third of house builders in Florida said buyers’ concerns about home insurance were “somewhat slowing sales.” The proportion in Southern California was very similar, at 29%, the survey by John Burns Research & Consulting found. That is much higher than the national figure of 9% of builders reporting sales affected by insurance concerns. The risks of disasters haven’t been fully priced into property markets, partly because of flaws in the way federal flood insurance was priced, researchers say. If flood risks were taken into account, U.S. residential properties would be worth at least $121 billion less, according to a study earlier this year by nonprofit the First Street Foundation, the Federal Reserve and others. In Florida alone, properties in flood zones are overvalued by more than $50 billion.

Related: Your Homeowners’ Insurance Bill Is the Canary in the Climate Coal Mine and Why California and Florida Have Become Almost Uninsurable and How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters

China’s imports of semiconductor equipment have surged to record highs ahead of the implementation of export curbs by US allies. Chinese customs data shows the country’s chip production tool imports in June and July totalled nearly $5bn, up 70% from $2.9bn in the same period last year. Most of the imports came from the Netherlands and Japan, two countries that have imposed export restrictions on chipmaking equipment as they work with the US to slow China’s technological advancement.

Related: China Fears Japan’s Chipmaking Curbs Go Further Than US Restrictions and Huawei Building Secret Network for Chips, Trade Group Warns

The results document that shifts in population age structure significantly affect economic growth. A 1% increase in the working-age share raises income per capita by about 1%. A 1% greater working-age share amplifies growth by 0.1–0.4% in subsequent periods. These patterns are stable for both OECD and non-OECD countries. We combine the empirical estimates with demographic predictions and project economic growth in 2020–2050. Without population aging, income per capita in OECD countries is projected to grow on average by 2.5% annually between 2020 and 2050. With population aging, growth is projected to slow by 0.8 pp if we measure working ages retrospectively but only by 0.4 pp if we measure [changes in age patterns of health]. In contrast, population aging is projected to spur average growth of income per capita in non-OECD countries.

Related: Labor Market Indicators Are Historically Strong After Adjusting for Population Aging and How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World and The Forever Labour Shortage

When interest rates increase, holders of fixed income get a higher cash flow. The problem is that the Fed and foreigners own 50% of Treasuries outstanding, and foreigners own 28% of [investment grade and high-yield corporate] credit outstanding, so a lot of the additional cash flow created by higher US yields is not boosting US GDP growth. The bottom line is that higher interest rates are a net negative for the US economy.

Related: Why the Era of Historically Low Interest Rates Could Be Over and Rising Rates Slowing Growth Through Higher Debt Servicing Costs and Interest Rates Hit 16-Year Record

In the figure above, the gap in patent applications and earnings between inventors who go to incumbents and entrants are indistinguishable before the job change, and then begin to diverge after they start working in different types of firms. Two equally productive inventors, one working for a young/small firm and another working for an incumbent/large firm, will be told to work on problems that are different. The inventor in the large firm might be asked to work on innovations that are less likely to threaten the firm’s existing product lines, and therefore less likely to lead to patents (let alone high-impact patents). Akcigit and Goldschlag (2023) suggest that’s because large firms are paying their inventors better but asking them to work on projects less likely to lead to new patents and products.

Related: The Size of Firms and the Nature of Innovation and America’s Corporate Giants Are Getting Harder To Topple and Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone? Employment Dynamics of US Inventors

Out of some 900 sectors in America the number where the four biggest firms have a market share above two-thirds grew from 65 in 1997 to 97 by 2017. The Economist has come up with a crude estimate of “excess” profits for the world’s 3,000 largest listed companies by market value (excluding financial firms). Using reported figures from Bloomberg we calculate a firm’s return on invested capital above a hurdle rate of 10% (excluding goodwill and treating research and development, R&D, as an asset with a ten-year lifespan). This is the rate of return one might expect in a competitive market. In the past year excess profits reached $4trn, or nearly 4% of global GDP. American firms collect 41% of the total, with European ones taking 21%. The energy, technology and, in America, health-care industries stand out as excess-profit pools relative to their size.

Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and America’s Corporate Giants Are Getting Harder To Topple and Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation

Re: Russia, an analysis and policy network, has examined various estimates and available data from countries that have accepted large numbers of Russian émigrés. They found that between 817,000 and 922,000 people have left Russia since February 2022. Re: Russia reckons that the wartime emigrants account for roughly 1% of Russia’s workforce, exacerbating an acute labour shortage. The Gaidar Institute, a think-tank in Moscow, said that 35% of manufacturing businesses did not have enough workers in April, the highest figure since 1996. Shortages of specialists are especially severe: according to one Kremlin official, at least 100,000 IT professionals left the country in 2022.

Related: Russian Power in Decline and Russia’s Population Nightmare is Going to Get Even Worse and Pollution Reveals What Russian Statistics Obscure: Industrial Decline

Huawei moved into chip production last year and acquired at least two existing plants and is building at least three others. The Semiconductor Industry Association estimates there are at least 23 fabrication facilities in the works in the country with planned investments of more than $100 billion by 2030. By 2029 or 2030, China is on track to have more than half the industry’s global capacity in older-generation semiconductors. “China is roughly spending as much in subsidies as the rest of the world combined,” said Chris Miller, author of “Chip War.”

Related: China’s ‘Two Sessions’ 2023: Xi Jinping Directly Accuses US of Leading Western Suppression of China and US Adds 36 Chinese Companies to Trade Blacklist

If the labor force had continued to grow more or less in line with history and GDP, we’d have almost 5M more workers out there. But we don’t. The gap is shrinking—it was closer to 7M a year ago—but it is still a very large number, and, given retirements, skill mismatches, and aging, it seems unlikely we will close that gap quickly, if ever. Absent a wave of immigration, which creates its own problems, politically and otherwise, and doesn’t necessarily fill the observed skill gaps, something needs to change. Historically, when this has happened—labor became more expensive than capital—economies have responded with automation, so we should expect that again today. We think, contrary to hyperbole, we are already at the tail end of the current wave of AI. We need to look past the limits of current AI technology if we are to break free from the past few decades of tech—enabled automation, where there is high worker displacement without commensurate productivity gains impact—where minimal human flourishing is created.

Related: Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment and Labor Market Indicators Are Historically Strong After Adjusting for Population Aging and Unions’ Inflation Warning?

The annual debt servicing cost of the US government is close to $1 trillion, and the net interest expense as a share of total government revenues is near all-time high levels. Higher rates are not only slowing down consumers and corporates through higher borrowing costs. Higher rates are also a drag on growth through higher debt servicing costs for the government. In other words, higher debt servicing costs are impacting not only consumers and corporates but also the government. The bottom line is that when government debt levels are high, it is more difficult for interest rates to stay elevated for a long time because the negative impact on the economy of higher rates is also working through higher debt servicing costs for the government.

Related: Interest Rates Hit 16-Year Record and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

The ratio of deposits to disposable income is currently relatively high, at least compared to over the past 30 years. Our estimated ratio of deposits to disposable income in 2023 Q2 would be around 9.8pp above the average in 2019 and around 11.5pp higher than the average over 2010-19. Using Bank of America internal data, we can estimate where the overall rise in deposits relative to 2019 is currently (as of 2023 Q2) held across the income distribution. On this basis, just under a quarter of the rise in total deposits is held by those households on incomes of less than $50,000, with another 30% of households on incomes between $50,000 and $100,000. Therefore, a reasonably large proportion of the remaining deposit buffers appears to be held by middle- and lower-income households, which implies they can still make a meaningful contribution to overall consumer spending.

Related: Excess No More? Dwindling Pandemic Savings and The Trickling Up of Excess Savings and Accumulated Savings During the Pandemic: An International Comparison with Historical Perspective

India has landed an uncrewed probe near the Moon’s unexplored South Pole, a milestone in the country’s efforts to become an international power in space exploration.  The high-profile mission came days after a Russian attempt to land at the South Pole, Moscow’s first lunar mission since 1976, ended in failure. The uncrewed Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the surface on Sunday. Moscow and New Delhi had been racing to become the first to explore the Moon’s South Pole. Scientists have said the region is of particular interest because it could contain water, which would make it crucial to any ambitions to inhabit the Moon.

Related: US and India Announce Defence and Technology Deals During Visit By Narendra Modi and Indian Stock Market Surges as Foreign Funds Buy Into National Growth Story and India Equity: An Unsung Long-Term Performance Story

China has developed technology for the mass production of ultra-strong carbon fibre, which could help break international monopolies to supply materials for the aerospace and defence industries. Changsheng Technology worked with Shenzhen University to produce high-performance carbon fibre on a production line that can make 1,700 tonnes of the material per year. Carbon fibre is indispensable for the aerospace, defence, transport, new energy and marine engineering industries. China had been largely blocked from carbon fibre production because of US and Japanese bans on exports of manufacturing equipment to the country.

Related: China’s ‘Two Sessions’ 2023: Xi Jinping Directly Accuses US of Leading Western Suppression of China and US Adds 36 Chinese Companies to Trade Blacklist

We found that only 52 of the [Fortune] 500 were born after 1990, our yardstick for the internet era. That includes Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, but misses Apple and Microsoft. Merely seven of the 500 were created after Apple unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, while 280 predate America’s entry into the second world war. In 1990 just 66 firms in the Fortune 500 were 30 years old or younger and since then the average age has crept up from 75 to 90. One explanation is that the digital revolution has not been all that revolutionary in some parts of the economy. Another is that inertia has slowed the pace of competitive upheaval in many industries, buying time for incumbents to adapt to digital technologies. A third explanation is that [incumbents’] scale creates a momentum of its own around innovation.

Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and The Race of the AI Labs Heats Up and The National Economic Council Gets It Wrong on the Roles of Big and Small Firms in U.S. Innovation and The Size of Firms and the Nature of Innovation and Mega Firms and Recent Trends in the U.S. Innovation: Empirical Evidence from the U.S. Patent Data

The present value of short and long term expected earnings for S&P 500 firms, computed using a constant required return, fully explains observed stock market fluctuations btw 1980-2022. When long term earning growth (LTG) is high relative to historical standards, analyst forecasts of short and long term profits are systematically disappointed in the future, inconsistent with rationality. High LTG also correlates with higher survey expectations of stock returns, in contrast with standard theories, in which investors expect low returns in good times. High LTG thus proxies for excess optimism: it points to investors being too bullish about future profits and stock return. This evidence offers additional support to the hypothesis that boom-bust dynamics in non-rational expectations about the long-term act as an important driver of the volatility of key asset prices. A one standard deviation increase in LTG fuels an investment boom. Crucially, the investment boom sharply reverts 2 years later, and that reversal is fully explained by the predictable disappointment of the initially high LTG.

Related: Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

The yield on 10-year inflation-protected Treasuries on Monday pushed over 2% for the first time since 2009, extending its ascent from year-to-date lows near 1%. Not long after, the yield on 10-year Treasuries without that protection surpassed October’s peak, climbing nearly 10 basis points to as much as 4.35%, a level last seen in late 2007, before slightly paring the gain.

Related: What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and In Search of Safe Havens: The Trust Deficit and Risk-free Investments! and Summers and Blanchard Debate the Future of Interest Rates

American Airlines pilots approved a new contract that would provide 46% in cumulative pay raises and retirement contributions over its four-year term, along with a bonus, improved scheduling, sick leave, and insurance benefits. The pact will add about $9.6 billion in incremental costs for the airline over its duration, the Allied Pilots Association said in a statement Monday. That makes it the most expensive labor contract ever for a US carrier, topping the $7.2 billion value of an accord Delta Air Lines Inc. pilots secured in March.

Related: UAW Warns Contract Talks With Big Three Carmakers Are Moving ‘Too Slow’ and Everyone Wants to Work at UPS After Teamsters Deal and The ‘Summer of Strikes’ Isn’t Living Up to the Hype

Saudi border forces have killed hundreds of Ethiopian migrants attempting to cross into the kingdom from Yemen over the past 18 months, according to a human rights group. New York-based Human Rights Watch alleges in a 73-page report that the security forces “fired explosive weapons” at migrants and in some cases asked them which of their limbs they would prefer to be shot. The kingdom is home to hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian workers.

Related: How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World and Progressives Are Winning the Immigration Debate — But It Doesn’t Feel Like It

The ten-year Treasury Note interest rate closed at 4.30% on Thursday, the highest since 2007. Meanwhile, the three-month Treasury Bill rate closed at 5.56% and the 30-year Treasury Bond at 4.41%. All three are at or near their highest level in 16 years. CBO's most recent baseline projections are based on a ten-year rate of 3.9% and a three-month rate of 4.6% this quarter. Based on this, we estimate that interest rates across the yield curve average about 75bps above baseline projections. If rates remain 75bps above CBO’s projections, it could add $2.3T (6% of GDP) to the debt over the next ten years and $350B (0.9% of debt-to-GDP) to the deficit in 2033. Under that scenario, interest costs would exceed combined spending on Medicaid, SSI, and SNAP as well as spending on defense by next year. By 2026, the cost of interest would reach a record high 3.3% of the economy.

Related: American Gothic and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

Every quarter, Fed officials project where rates will settle over the longer run, which is in effect their estimate of neutral. The median estimate declined from 4.25% in 2012 to 2.5% in 2019. After subtracting inflation of 2%, that yielded a real neutral rate (sometimes called “r*” or “r-star”) of 0.5%. In June, the median was still 0.5%. That also happens to track a widely followed model co-developed by New York Fed President John Williams that also puts neutral at 0.5%. A model devised by the Richmond Fed, which before the pandemic closely tracked Williams’s model, put the real neutral rate at 2% in the first quarter. Larry Summers has recently suggested neutral has gone up because of higher deficits and the investment to transition to a lower-carbon economy.

Related: Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest After COVID-19 and The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet) and In Search of Safe Havens: The Trust Deficit and Risk-free Investments!

By any measure real rates have steadily risen as both actual and expected inflation have trended lower and nominal rates have trended higher. Without any change, policy would be unnecessarily tightening. Rates cuts and QT would together have a steepening impact on the curve and help address some concerns in the banking sector, whose margins have been squeezed by curve inversion. The Japanese experience with a persistently flat or inverted curve was poor growth and potential financial stability concerns as some investors reached for risk. This in part motivated the BOJ’s 2016 foray into YCC, which steepened the curve by raising 10 year JGB yields above the deposit rate. The financial system needs an upward-sloping curve to work well, so the Fed may be nudging it in that direction.

Related: Hidden to Market and Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest After COVID-19 and World Economic Outlook Chapter 2 The Natural Rate of Interest: Drivers and Implications for Policy

In the short run, the Fed should be aiming to stabilize inflation below 3% for at least six months. If it can achieve this goal, then it should shift to a higher target range for inflation when it updates its overall strategy around 2025. We have spent nearly half of the past 20 years with interest rates at the zero lower bound. Considerations led policy makers to conclude that 2% was the right number in the 1990s would lead them to consider something higher, like 3%, today to give the Fed more scope to cut interest rates and thereby stimulate the economy.

Related: It is Time to Revisit the 2% Inflation Target and When Should We Declare Victory Over Inflation? and What We’ve Learned About Inflation

The National Federation of Independent Business survey shows a sharp rise in 2021-22, then a steep fall that has brought us most of the way back to prepandemic inflation. This really doesn’t sound like an economy in which businesses are forgoing price hikes because of weak demand. It sounds like an economy in which inflation is coming down because of improved supply, not reduced demand.  Does this mean that the Fed was wrong to raise rates? Not necessarily. If it hadn’t raised rates, the economy might be running really, really hot. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker currently shows the economy growing at 5.8 (!!!), which isn’t really plausible but does suggest a lot of heat; so the Fed may not have caused disinflation, but rate hikes may have been necessary to permit disinflation caused by other forces.

Related: The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and Rate Cuts

[Meta’s] Code Llama will make it easier for companies to develop AI assistants that automatically suggest code to developers as they type, and it could siphon customers from paid coding assistants such as Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI. Generating automated code suggestions has been among the most popular uses of LLMs, as code is based on language. LLMs also power conversational text services like ChatGPT. GitHub a year ago began charging developers $10 per month for Copilot, and a slew of other coding assistant companies have raised venture funding in recent months. Companies might gravitate to using an open-source coding model to develop their own coding assistant in order to safeguard their source code, said one person who has worked on Code Llama.

Related: Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment and Integrating the Goldman AI Report Into Our Views

American nominal growth is clocking a 6.5% pace this year against 4.8% for China, according to Bloomberg Economics, which still sees the world's second-biggest economy expanding faster in real terms. The strengthening US dollar against the yuan has also contributed to China’s rival pulling away, for now, in the global race when GDP is measured in dollars.

Related: How Soon and At What Height Will China’s Economy Peak? and The Neoclassical Growth of China and US-China Relations Have Entered a Frightening New Era

Xi and some of his lieutenants remain suspicious of U.S.-style consumption, which they see as wasteful at a time when China’s focus should be on bolstering its industrial capabilities and girding for potential conflict with the West, people with knowledge of Beijing’s decision-making say. The leadership also worries that empowering individuals to make more decisions over how they spend their money could undermine state authority, without generating the kind of growth Beijing desires.

Related: Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent? and China’s Defeated Youth and Can China Fix Youth Unemployment Woes With Military Recruitment

China’s total fertility rate—a snapshot of the average number of babies a woman would have over her lifetime—fell to 1.09 last year, from 1.30 in 2020, according to a study by a unit of the National Health Commission cited this week by National Business Daily, a media outlet managed by the municipal government of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. At 1.09, China’s rate would be below the 1.26 of Japan. Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin who has studied China’s demographics expects fewer than eight million newborns in China this year, based on indicators including marriage and newborn-medical-checkup data. That would be less than half the number in 2016, when China scrapped its one-child policy and recorded around 18 million births. By last year, the figure had fallen below 10 million.

Related: An Economic Hail Mary for China and China’s Collapsing Birth and Marriage Rates Reflect a People’s Deep Pessimism and China’s Population Likely Fell in 2022 as Births Hit New Low

There is in fact evidence that the natural rate of interest, or r-star, has in fact risen over the last year, and by some measures, it would appear as if r-star may be at levels not that far from those seen just prior to the financial crisis of 2008.  If that were the case, then a “soft-landing scenario where inflation fell back to 2% would be one where the Federal Fund Rate fell back to the 3 ½-4% level, rather than the 2 ½-2 ¾ % level implied by the HLW model or the FOMC’s “dot plots.”  In addition, if r-star has risen significantly, then recent Federal Reserve policy has not been as “restrictive” as many have suggested.  If that were the case, then one would have expected the economy to have performed better than the “consensus” forecast, which in fact has been the case. Related: The Evolution of Short-Run r* After the Pandemic and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet)

What if higher mortgage rates have turned the low-rate mortgages of 2021 into golden handcuffs, locking owners into their existing homes? 42% of American homeowners own their homes with no mortgage. Most existing homeowners with mortgages have large equity cushions by virtue of purchasing before the massive pandemic-era home price appreciation. Excluding people who owned their homes free and clear, the median level of housing debt is only 52% of the value of the home, and those homeowners with large equity cushions should also be less affected by lock-in. Related: The "New Normal" Mortgage Rate Range and The Great Pandemic Mortgage Refinance Boom

China’s current problems can be traced back to its massive post-2008 investment stimulus, a significant portion of which fueled the real-estate construction boom. After years of building housing and offices at breakneck speed, the bloated property sector – which accounts for 23% of the country’s GDP (26% counting imports) – is now yielding diminishing returns. This comes as little surprise, as China’s housing stock and infrastructure rival that of many advanced economies while its per capita income remains comparatively low. The debt supercycle may have lasted longer than initially expected, perhaps because of the pandemic. But it was a critical piece of the story, and now, as China’s economy falters, it is the best explanation for what might come next. Related: Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent? and China Begins Nationwide Push to Reveal Hidden Government Debt and Housing, Household Debt, and the Business Cycle: An Application to China and Korea

Property developer China Evergrande has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US, as the company pursues a prolonged restructuring agreement with international creditors that hold billions of dollars in bonds. Evergrande defaulted on its dollar-denominated debts in late 2021, sparking a sector-wide liquidity crisis that has weighed on China’s economic growth and put increasing pressure on policymakers in Beijing. The company has about $19bn in overseas liabilities, according to Bloomberg data. Related: Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent? and China Begins Nationwide Push to Reveal Hidden Government Debt and Housing, Household Debt, and the Business Cycle: An Application to China and Korea

A careful reading of the present situation does not support the view that China's growth is now gripped by a severe cyclical downward spiral that will persist for several years. Falling retail prices could lead households to postpone consumption on the expectation that goods would become cheaper tomorrow. That would reduce consumption and economic growth. But the widely noted 0.3% decline in consumer prices in July 2023 compared with a year ago was mostly due to elevated food prices in the same period of 2022. Stripping out volatile prices of food and energy, core consumer prices in July rose by 0.8%, up from the 0.4% increase in June. It may be premature to raise the specter of deflation based on one month of data. Related: The Neoclassical Growth of China and China Stops Reporting Youth Unemployment as Economic Pressures Mount and China Cannot Allow Jobless Young To ‘Lie Flat’

A former Google researcher who co-authored a paper that kick-started the generative AI revolution has joined forces with an ex-colleague to found a Tokyo-based artificial intelligence start-up. Jones, Sakana’s chief technology officer, was one of eight Google researchers who collaborated on building a software known as the transformer, which underpinned the rise of generative AI, including chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard, and image generators such as Stability AI, Midjourney and Dall-E. The Transformers research paper was first published in June 2017. Since then all of its co-authors have left Google, primarily to found their own start-ups. Jones was the last of the eight to exit Google. Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and The Size of Firms and the Nature of Innovation and The National Economic Council Gets It Wrong on the Roles of Big and Small Firms in U.S. Innovation

Overall, despite differing methodologies and assumptions, the existing body of work on household savings following the pandemic recession firmly points to the rapid accumulation and drawdown of excess savings in the United States. The red area in Figure 1 shows our updated estimate for cumulative drawdowns, which reached more than $1.9 trillion as of June 2023. This implies that there is less than $190 billion of excess savings remaining in the aggregate economy. Should the recent pace of drawdowns persist—for example, at average rates from the past 3, 6, or 12 months—aggregate excess savings would likely be depleted in the third quarter of 2023. Related: The Rise and Fall of Pandemic Excess Savings and Accumulated Savings During the Pandemic: An International Comparison with Historical Perspective and The Trickling Up of Excess Savings

When goods have strong positive externalities—such as decreasing our carbon emissions, improving supply chain resilience, or promoting national security—the market can underprovide, as private actors do not experience all of the social benefits of their production. In these instances, government action, such as by lowering the cost of production for the firm, can correct the failure of the market to provide sufficient supply and improve overall welfare. These funding streams, combined, are designed to de-risk new technologies, support the development of necessary infrastructure, and more, making new technologies and domestic manufacturing cost-competitive. Related: Making Manufacturing Great Again and Factory Boom Sweeps US With Construction at Record $190 Billion and Republican Districts Dominate US Clean Technology Investment Boom

Prices for reinsurance rose as much as 40% on Jan. 1 from a year earlier, according to a report by Gallagher Re, a brokerage firm that puts together reinsurance coverage deals. The price increases jolted insurers, who then made changes to where and for what they offered coverage. When State Farm announced in May that it would stop accepting new applications for certain policies in California, it cited “a challenging reinsurance market.” Allstate also cited reinsurance costs when it paused some of its activities in California. Last month, reinsurers specializing in agriculture insurance announced that they were pulling out of Iowa, where, three years ago, a severe windstorm caused nearly $4 billion in damage. Related: Why California and Florida Have Become Almost Uninsurable and Home Insurers Are Charging More and Insuring Less and Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse and Farmers Insurance Limits Sales in Florida, California Amid Storm, Wildfire Risks

In early US trading Thursday the 30-year Treasury yield rose as much as seven bps to 4.42%, slightly exceeding last year’s high. It was below 4% as recently as July 31. The US 10-year yield approached 4.31%, within a few basis points of its 2022 peak. The higher yields in the US continue to draw in buyers. Investors pumped $127 billion this year into funds that invest in Treasuries, on pace for a record year, Bank of America said last week. Related: In Search of Safe Havens: The Trust Deficit and Risk-free Investments! and The Fed and the Secular Decline in Interest Rates and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate?

Inflation is likely to trend at a faster pace than in the past, perhaps 2.5%. A real return, which could be 1.5% to 2% over time when thinking of the government’s increasing borrowing needs — driven by the need for more defense spending, the likelihood of some Trump administration tax cuts getting extended, and higher average interest costs on outstanding debt. A term premium, which is the compensation investors get for buying a longer-term security rather than rolling over investments in short-term ones. Typically this has averaged about 0.75 to 1 percentage point. Adding up the three components, then it’s likely investors over the next decade will be “looking at 4.75 on the 10-year — and it obviously could end up being higher than that.” Related: What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

China’s aging society problem will accelerate over the next decade, with the number of citizens aged over 60 expanding by an average of 10 million per year, according to a leading demographer, adding further strain to the state pension fund, elderly care facilities, and medical services. The acceleration will push the number of senior citizens to 520 million by 2050, or 37.8% of the population, according to Renmin University of China vice-president Du Peng. China had 209.78 million people aged over 65 last year, accounting for 14.9% of the population, up from 200 million in 2021, according to official data. Last year, 29.1% of Japan’s population were aged over 65, with 17% in the United States and South Korea and 7% in India, according to World Bank data. Related: China Is Facing a Moment of Truth About Its Low Retirement Age and China Is Dying Out and China’s Population Likely Fell in 2022 as Births Hit New Low

Unemployment among urban Chinese aged 16 to 24 has been running at over 20% for months, about double the age group’s pre-pandemic level. Our calculations show that in 2021 over 70% of those unemployed youngsters were graduates. To get a sense of how young people feel, we have interviewed dozens of them. Their message is strikingly consistent. “We have no hope,” says a 27-year-old in Huizhou. The malaise felt by him and his cohort has led to the emergence of a new nihilistic vocabulary, featuring phrases such as tangping (lying flat) and bailan (letting it rot). Using sentiment-analysis tools to extract feelings from text on social media, we found that the mood of young Chinese is growing ever darker. A surprising number of young couples are not even having sex. In a survey conducted in 2020, 14.6% and 10.1% of partnered men and women born between 1995 and 2003 reported having had no sex in the past year. Related: China Urges Jobless Graduates To ‘Roll Up Their Sleeves’ and Try Manual Work and Chinese Youth Suicide Rate Quadruples In Over A Decade and China’s Singles Fight Family Pressure to Get Married as Population Declines and China’s Collapsing Birth and Marriage Rates Reflect a People’s Deep Pessimism and A Revolution Is Coming for China’s Families

Despite continued low unemployment, our jobs-workers gap is trending down on the back of reduced job openings. And while average hourly earnings grew a faster-than-expected 0.4% in July, other wage indicators such as the Q2 ECI and the Atlanta Fed wage growth tracker measure came in on the softer side; all told, our GS wage tracker has slowed from a peak of nearly 6% in 2022 to the 4½-5% range now. Related: The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes and Furman On Jobs Report and Soft Landing Optimism Is Everywhere. That’s Happened Before

There is no better way to show the emptiness of "the Fed did it" argument than to plot out the US treasury bond rate each year against a crude version of the fundamental risk-free rate, computed by adding the actual inflation in a year to the real GDP growth rate that year. No one (including central banks) cannot fight fundamentals: Central banks and governments that think that they have the power to raise or lower interest rates by edict, and the investors who invest on that basis, are being delusional. While they can nudge rates at the margin, they cannot fight fundamentals (inflation and real growth), and when they do, the fundamentals will win. Related: The Fed and the Secular Decline in Interest Rates and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and The Evolution of Short-Run r* After the Pandemic

The leader of the United Auto Workers union on Tuesday asked members to grant him the ability to call a strike, arguing contract talks with the three major Detroit carmakers are moving too slowly. Earlier this year, the UAW gave each carmaker a list of demands that included pay raises of more than 40%, inflation protection, better treatment of temporary workers, and improved perks for retirees. The UAW also wants all workers paid the same wage, regardless of the job they do or whether they work on electric vehicles. If the union got everything it demanded it would cost carmakers $80 billion over the four years of the deal, Bloomberg has reported. Related: The ‘Summer of Strikes’ Isn’t Living Up to the Hype and Unions’ Inflation Warning? and Everyone Wants to Work at UPS After Teamsters Deal

Goldman Sachs economists argued the neutral rate will likely be higher than the Fed currently expects. "We expect the funds rate to eventually stabilize at 3-3.25%." If the neutral rate is in that range then the 30-year fixed mortgage rate will be in the low to mid 6% range. With a 3.25% Fed Funds rate, a 4.45% 10-year yield, we’d expect 30-year mortgage rates around 6.45%. Recent buyers, with 7%+ mortgage rates, might be able to refinance, but most buyers will be locked into their current rate. The bottom line is it appears 30-year mortgage rates will be in current range for some time (barring a crisis). Related: Could 6% to 7% 30-Year Mortgage Rates be the "New Normal"? and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and Rate Cuts

More than 40% of America’s scientific production—measured by the number of high-quality papers that U.S.-based scientists produce—involves cooperation with researchers abroad, according to Clarivate, a London-based data firm that tracks global scientific research. China and the U.S. are each other’s No. 1 partner in producing scientific research, with collaborative research between the two consistently among the most-cited papers across fields, according to an analysis of Clarivate’s data by Caroline Wagner, a professor of public policy at Ohio State University. The U.S. depends more heavily on China than China does on the U.S. in some strategic areas, according to an analysis by Clarivate of studies in respected journals shared exclusively with The Wall Street Journal. Related: Creating and Connecting US and China Science: Chinese Diaspora and Returnee Researchers and Xie Xiaoliang Is Latest Chinese Scientist to Give Up US Citizenship and Award-Winning Chinese Mathematician Sun Xin Returns from US to Work at Peking University

In July the PBOC and other banks collectively sold more foreign currency and FX forwards than in any month since January 2017. Is this meaningful? It depends on perspective. One potentially interesting question is how this might affect spreads on mortgage-backed securities (MBS) backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. After all, Chinese entities have been big buyers of agency MBS even when they were reducing (maybe) their holdings of U.S. Treasury notes and bonds. If they have now switched to selling reserve assets, or are simply buying less than before, that could have potential ramifications for convexity premiums and interest rate volatility. Related: Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent? and The Neoclassical Growth of China and The Rise & Fall of Foreign Direct Investment in China

Most of the [IRA’s] spending comes in the form of tax credits that are uncapped, and those unlimited credits are designed to be rolled out over a 10-year span. In September 2022 CBO estimated the clean energy and climate portions of the bill would cost about $391 billion between 2022 and 2031. A team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, working with Goldman Sachs, updated their own earlier estimate of $385 billion with a staggering new figure in excess of $1 trillion. The report’s authors cited “newer implementation” details and more optimistic assumptions about how much private capital will pour into the economy, particularly electric vehicles, in response to the promise of leveraging tax credits. Related: Making Manufacturing Great Again and Republican Districts Dominate US Clean Technology Investment Boom and Unpacking the Boom in U.S. Construction of Manufacturing Facilities

Our analysis suggests that in 2Q, San Antonio, Dallas, and Orlando have the most constrained housing supply as buoyant labor markets continue to attract people. St. Louis, Detroit, and Miami seem to have the highest housing stock relative to their population. The good news is that cities with lower housing supply are already seeing higher construction trends but if the current population dynamics are maintained there will continue to be a strong housing need in the growing parts of the country. Looking more broadly at population flow, Bank of America internal data suggests that in 2Q, 13 out of the 27 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) we track continue to see positive year-over-year growth in population with Jacksonville and Columbus leading the gain. Charlotte, Nashville, and Las Vegas saw accelerating pace of increase in residents than in 1Q. Related: A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South and What’s the Matter With Miami? and Young Families Have Not Returned to Large Cities Post-Pandemic

The [homeless] data so far this year are up roughly 11% from 2022, a sharp jump that would represent by far the biggest recorded increase since the government started tracking comparable numbers in 2007. The next highest increase was a 2.7% jump in 2019, excluding an artificially high increase last year caused by pandemic counting interruptions. The Journal reviewed available data from more than 300 entities that count homeless people in areas ranging from cities to entire states, accounting for eight of every nine homeless people counted last year. The Journal’s tally thus far includes more than 577,000 homeless people. The biggest driver remains high housing costs, which are now taking a heavier toll following the wind down of pandemic-era relief spending and policies such as eviction moratoriums, according to advocates for the homeless.

The labor force participation (LFP) rate remains persistently low at 62.6% as of July 2023, almost a percentage point below its pre-pandemic level in February 2020.  We project that the trend in the aggregate LFP rate will decline an additional 1pp btw 2022 and 2032.  The projected decline comes entirely from changes in the population composition. Population aging looms large in this projection: we project the aggregate trend will decline as more of the population enters age groups with low participation rates. This is expected to more than offset the positive effect on LFP from the projected growth for people with higher educational attainment, as LFP tends to increase with education. Related: Labor Market Indicators Are Historically Strong After Adjusting for Population Aging and Wage Inequality and the Rise in Labor Force Exit: The Case of US Prime-Age Men and Where Are the Missing Gen Z Workers? and “The Great Retirement Boom”: The Pandemic-Era Surge in Retirements and Implications for Future Labor Force Participation

Underlying inflation has fallen by only about one pp – much less than the six pp decline in headline inflation. Moreover, this has happened while labor markets – understood broadly – have loosened considerably, although in a relatively benign manner, with job openings falling instead of unemployment rising. It is not clear how much further this cost-free disinflation can go. And, in fact, today many of the temporary factors appear to be mitigating inflation rather than fueling it. If inflation does painlessly fall to 2%, we should celebrate – and engage in more serious soul-searching regarding the standard economic models. But if it does not, the US Federal Reserve will need to be prepared to go further to bring inflation down to an acceptable range. Related: The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet) and What We’ve Learned About Inflation

It remains extremely difficult for me to reconcile persistent per-worker income growth of ~5% a year with any credible forecast of ~2% inflation. Just as investors and policymakers were right to look through the “transitory” inflation of 2021-2022, they should also strip out the “transitory” disinflation of 2022-2023 to get a handle on where such pressures will settle in the years ahead. Since inflation is just the difference between changes in nominal spending and real production, that means focusing on wage trends: the largest and most reliable source of financing for consumer spending…This explains Fed officials’ continued focus on “softening” the job market via higher interest rates. That presents a risk that interest rates may not come down as quickly as implied by market prices, which in turn could affect other asset valuations. Related: The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet) and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and Rate Cuts 

China has said it will stop publishing data on youth unemployment, weeks after the gauge hit a record level, in a sign of mounting pressure on policymakers as new data pointed to weakness in the recovery of the world’s second-largest economy. Youth unemployment, which China began reporting in 2018, hit 21.3% in June, but the figure was not included in a wider data release for July on Tuesday. Related: Why Has Youth Unemployment Risen So Much in China? and Can China Fix Youth Unemployment Woes With Military Recruitment Drive? and Chinese Professor Says Youth Jobless Rate Might Have Hit 46.5%

Why might the FOMC not cut? The simplest reason is that inflation might not come down quite enough. Another possible reason is that even if it does, if GDP growth is above potential, the unemployment rate is pushing below its 50-year low, and financial conditions have eased further on enthusiasm about a soft landing, then stimulating an already-strong economy by cutting might seem like an unnecessary risk, especially with the memory of the recent inflation surge still fresh. In that scenario, the FOMC could say that the short-run neutral rate is higher than common estimates of the medium-run neutral rate, and as a result the monetary policy stance is actually not so restrictive and the need to cut is not so immediate. Related: What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and The Evolution of Short-Run r* After The Pandemic and The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet)

The Fed started raising rates in March 2022, and the effects are clear. Higher costs of capital have pushed more and more companies into bankruptcy. This is the idea behind raising rates: to slow the economy down with the ultimate goal of getting inflation back to 2%. Every day there are companies that cannot get new loans or refinance, and this trend higher in bankruptcies will continue as long as interest rates stay high. Related: A Default Cycle Has Started and Most Global Economies Remain in Disequilibrium, Requiring Policy Action and Furman On Jobs Report

Excluding Treasuries, there are over $30t of debt securities outstanding. Credit spreads have widened since the lows of 2021, but remain within historical ranges. The slight deterioration seen recently in credit quality across a range of metrics most likely indicates normalization rather than the beginning of financial distress. Looking at bankruptcy filings, filings notably increased in 2023 but only from historically low levels. Given elevated inflation, nominal GDP growth remains high that thus supportive of further revenue growth to support interest expense payments. Interest expense burdens may also further ease next year as the Fed potentially cuts rates next year in line with declining inflation. The overall picture thus suggests a continued benign credit environment. Related: A Default Cycle Has Started and How Is the Corporate Bond Market Functioning as Interest Rates Increase? and Settling Into 4% Inflation?

The new industrial boom has mostly bypassed the areas hit hardest by the China Shock. Just 16 of the 100 most affected commuter zones have been the sites of any newly announced projects over the past two years. These areas are projected to receive just 11.4% of the value of those projects, or $57.4 billion. And, of that sum, a lone IBM announcement accounted for $20 billion. White House spokesman Michael Kikukawae says those zones represent only 4% of the US population, so the analysis understates their impact. Related: The Geography of Work and Trading Places: Mobility Responses of Native and Foreign-Born Adults to the China Trade Shock and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

More than 80% of investment in large-scale clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing pledged since last year’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act is destined for Republican congressional districts, a Financial Times analysis found. Republicans’ success in attracting investment is partly due to their districts often having large swaths of available land and cheap labour, but states such as Georgia and Ohio have also rolled out their own hefty tax breaks and subsidies to attract developers, including through roadshows in Europe and Asia. Related: Small Towns Chase America’s $3 Trillion Climate Gold Rush and ‘Transformational Change’: Biden’s Industrial Policy Begins to Bear Fruit and Why Laws Meant to Create Jobs Can Be So Destructive for Our Cities

China accounted for 13.3% of U.S. goods imports during the first six months of this year, below a peak of 21.6% for all of 2017. The current level is the lowest since 12.1% for the year in 2003, two years after China’s accession to the WTO. Starting in early 2019, China’s share of U.S. imports fell below the total share from a basket of 25 other Asian nations including India, Thailand, and Vietnam. That group of nations accounted for 24.6% of U.S. imports in the 12 months ending in June, compared with 14.9% for China, according to census data. When the dollar values of exports and imports are combined, Mexico is now the U.S.’s No. 1 trading partner, followed by Canada, pushing China to third place. Related: How America Is Failing To Break Up With China and Setser On China's Trade Surplus and Sester On Kearney Reshoring Index

When MPCs [marginal propensities to consume] are realistically large and the elasticity of substitution between energy and domestic goods is realistically low, there is a direct link between high energy prices and aggregate demand: increases in energy prices depress real incomes and cause a recession, even if the central bank does not tighten monetary policy. When nominal and real wage rigidities are both present, imported energy inflation can spill over to wage inflation through a wage-price spiral; this, however, does not mitigate the decline in real wages.. Fiscal policy, especially energy price subsidies, can isolate individual energy importers from the shock, but it raises world energy demand and prices, imposing large negative externalities on other economies. Related: The Many Channels Of Firms’ Adjustments To Energy Shocks: Evidence From France and Europe: Well-Positioned To Get Through Next Winter Without Major Gas Shortages and How Europe is Decoupling from Russian Energy

Trade surplus that had emerged in the wake of the euro crisis has returned with a vengeance, although the distribution of the surplus has shifted somewhat. At the European aggregate level, Germany’s investment slump and stagnant consumption were offset by building booms in Spain, Greece, and central and eastern Europe. Since the beginning of 1999, there has been more investment in fixed capital (buildings, equipment, R&D, etc) net of depreciation in Spain than in Germany, even though Spain has only half of Germany’s population and has had almost no net investment since 2010. There was just as much net investment in Italy from 1999 through 2011 as in Germany—and Italy was far from booming in the 2000s, as well as far smaller. Related: The New Geopolitics of Global Finance and Germany's Industrial Slowdown and Pettis On Pozsar

Xi Jinping said authorities must take “hard measures that grow teeth” to maintain 120mn hectares of cultivated land across the country — the level widely seen by Beijing as necessary to secure self-sufficiency. Authorities have reclaimed more than 170,000 hectares since 2021 as Beijing tries to reduce its reliance on imported food amid fears confrontation between China and the US could disrupt global supply chains. "China is preparing for the worst-case scenario in which it couldn’t buy any food from abroad”, said Yu Xiaohua, an agricultural economics professor at the University of Göttingen. “The authority is counting on the reclamation drive to improve the country’s grain self-sufficiency.” Related: Could Economic Indicators Signal China’s Intent To Go To War? and China Ups Food Security Drive, Plans To Grow 90 Percent Of Its Grain By 2032, Warning For US And Thai Farmers

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, found an ultra-sensitive magnetic detector could pick up traces of the most advanced submarine from long distances away. The result “provides a new solution for the detection and tracking of submarines”, according to the paper published on August 1 by the Chinese Journal of Ship Research. The journal is run by the China Ship Scientific Research Centre, which has a long and respected history of cutting-edge developments in ship and ocean engineering. The researchers calculated that the extremely low frequency (ELF) signal produced by a submarine’s bubbles could be stronger than the sensitivities of advanced magnetic anomaly detectors by three to six orders of magnitude. Related: Aukus Allies Unveil Plan to Supply Australia With Nuclear-Powered Submarines and Nearly 40% of US Attack Submarines Are Out of Commission for Repairs and UK and Australia Urge Washington to Ease Secrecy Rules in Security Pact

Removing London’s output and headcount would shave 14% off British living standards, precisely enough to slip behind the last of the US states. Britain in the aggregate may not be as poor as Mississippi, but absent its outlier capital it would be. By comparison, amputating Amsterdam from the Netherlands would shave off 5%, and removing Germany’s most productive city (Munich) would only shave off 1%. Most strikingly, for all of San Francisco’s opulent output, if the whole of the bay area from the Golden Gate to Cupertino seceded tomorrow, US GDP per capita would only dip by 4%. Related: From Strength To Strength and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and Europe Has Fallen Behind America and the Gap Is Growing

Germany’s economy has eked out extremely low growth over the last 5 years—recent revisions to GDP data mean its output is once again barely above pre-pandemic levels, but that still means the country has seen less than 0.5% cumulative GDP growth since late-2018. German industrial investments have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels at a time when countries like the US are pouring record amounts of resources into factory construction and equipment purchases. Real German fixed investment in equipment remains below 2018 levels nearly 5 years later, despite a strong recovery in late 2022 and early 2023. Related: Germany Is Running Out of Workers, Putting Growth in Jeopardy and China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s  and Germany's Niche Companies Are a Model for Life After Globalization

In 2022, foreign investors purchased nearly $670 billion of long-term U.S. securities and short-term Treasury bills. Not only were the purchases by China, India, and the Middle East oil exporters in 2022 large compared to those by other countries, they were also sizable when measured against these countries' average purchases over the previous nine years. Net purchases in 2022 were well above average annual net purchases from 2013-2021 in every case. As before, under increased financial fragmentation, one would not expect these countries to be making larger purchases of U.S. assets compared to purchases in previous years. Related: How Was the U.S. Current Account Deficit Financed In 2022? and The New Geopolitics of Global Finance and Saudi Arabia's PIF and the New Petrodollar Recycling

Last year’s 9.56mm births in China represented the lowest total in modern history. “The expected number of births in 2023 is estimated to be around 7 million to 8 million,” Qiao Jie, dean of the Health Science Centre at Peking University, said on Tuesday. Last year, wedding registrations declined to 6.83 million, marking the ninth consecutive annual decline and reaching the lowest level since the late 1970s. Related: A Revolution Is Coming for China’s Families and China and India Have Fewer People Than the UN Thinks and An Economic Hail Mary for China

In terms of sea ice extent, this year has been particularly unusual. July’s sea-ice levels were three times further from the average than what had ever been seen previously. At the moment, Antarctica’s ice reflects a large amount of solar radiation back into space, helping keep the world cool. Only 0.2-0.4% of the continent is exposed above the ice at the moment, but that proportion is likely to increase with further warming. That reduces the albedo – or reflectivity – of the surface and increases the heat absorbed by the planet. It’s an effect we’re already seeing in the Arctic, which is now warming four times faster than the rest of the planet. Related: The Rapid Loss Of Antarctic Sea Ice Brings Grim Scenarios Into View and Antarctic Sea Ice Has Shrunk By An Area Nine Times The Size Of Britain and Antarctic Sea Ice Levels Dive In 'Five-Sigma Event', As Experts Flag Worsening Consequences For Planet

Within the next ten years, the federal government budget deficit relative to national income will grow significantly beyond historical experience.  We project that debt-to-GDP will be 134% in 2032 and 263% in 2052, compared to CBO’s 115% and 189%, respectively. Real interest rates rise in the long run in a ratcheting cycle of higher interest payments and growing deficits and debt. Our projection of national health expenditures relative to GDP in 2072 is 29.6%, compared to 28.4% by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services used by the Medicare Trustees. These higher rates of healthcare inflation arise from labor shortage effects in an aging economy because healthcare is produced in a low productivity, labor-dependent sector. This rise in healthcare expenditures further deteriorates the federal budget and lowers consumer welfare. Related: The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook  and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years

From the model’s perspective, short-run r* has increased notably over the past year, to some extent outpacing the large increase in the policy rate. The chart decomposes the change in real r* (black line) and its forecast (red line) between June 2022 and March 2023.  Note that these are changes in the real variable.  The chart shows that “financial’’ shocks (yellow) are the key driver of this change. These shocks capture the fact that financial conditions, as measured for instance by corporate spreads, have remained very resilient in spite of the increase in the policy rate (and of the recent banking turmoil). Related: What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest After COVID-19 and The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet)

Although most projections are for the southwestward trend for the median center of US population to continue, without additional sources of water, changes in housing policy, and progress on climate change the southwestward trend will slow - or maybe even reverse. Climate change might make some areas further north more desirable. Perhaps the Carolinas (away from the coast), TN, and KY will see more growth. And maybe even areas further north that have more affordable housing will experience new growth. Climate change might make those areas - from MO to WV on up to the Great Lakes - more attractive over the next 50 years. For the southwestward trend to continue, there will have to be an increase in water supply, progress on global warming, and changes to housing policies (to make housing more affordable). Related: What’s the Matter With Miami? and Climate Change and the Geography of the U.S. Economy and A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South

2-month CPI rose from 3.0% in June to 3.2% in July. Overall real average hourly earnings (both private and production and non-supervisory which excludes managers) continue to rise. But they are 4% and 3% below their immediate pre-pandemic trend respectively.  Overall, assuming August is relatively moderate as well there is no reason for the Fed to raise rates at their September meeting. I outlined my views on this earlier. If some of the good news proves transitory, however, they'll need to go back & do more. Related: Settling Into 4% Inflation? and What We’ve Learned About Inflation and The Second Great Experiment Update

42% of adult Japanese women may end up never having children. In a more optimistic scenario, a quarter of women born in 2005 may end up not having offspring. The midpoint estimate by Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research calls for a third of them not having children. The percentage of childlessness is even higher for men, with as many as 50% never seen having children, according to the report. Related: Japan Demographic Woes Deepen as Birthrate Hits Record Low and How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World and Inflation in The *Very* Long Run

The Biden administration will ban some US investment into China’s quantum computing, advanced chips, and artificial intelligence sectors, as it boosts efforts to stop the Chinese military from accessing American technology and capital. The new executive order unveiled by President Joe Biden on Wednesday will come into force next year and will also require companies to notify the government of other investments in the three Chinese sectors. The action will largely affect private equity and venture capital firms as well as US investors in joint ventures with Chinese groups. Related: US Adds 36 Chinese Companies to Trade Blacklist and China Fears Japan’s Chipmaking Curbs Go Further Than US Restrictions and The Rise & Fall of Foreign Direct Investment in China

In 2021 China exported nearly 1.6m cars. By 2022 it hit 2.7m. International sales are set to rev up further in 2023. Customs data show that the country shipped nearly 2m cars in the first six months of the year, or more than 10,000 a day. For all its manufacturing might, China never mastered internal-combustion engines, which have hundreds of moving parts and are tricky to assemble. The arrival of battery-powered vehicles, which are mechanically simpler and easier to build, helped China catch up. State investment in the EV technology, an estimated $100bn between 2009 and 2019, put the country in pole position. Today battery-powered vehicles account for a fifth of car sales in China and a third of exports. In Japan and Germany only 4% and 20% of exports, respectively, are electric. Related: China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s and Can Volkswagen Win Back China? and The Chinese Carmakers Planning to Shake Up The European Market

Net FDI into China has been negative for four consecutive quarters (from Q3 2022 to Q2 2023). The bottom line is that foreign investors have shifted in recent quarters from reinvesting their earnings on their Chinese operations to repatriating those earnings. Whether this simply reflects cash management and carry considerations or is a harbinger of a slowdown in future foreign direct investment in China is too soon to say. If the recent trend to repatriate earnings is a signal about future investment intentions, it could have implications for future Chinese production and export capacity and economic growth.  Either way, the repatriation of foreign investors’ profits from their Chinese operations is negative for the CNY. Related: The Mysterious $300 Billion Flow Out of China and NYC Becomes One Billionaire Family’s Haven From China Property Crash and Singapore Asks Banks to Keep Quiet on Wealth Inflows During China Boom

The variable that best captures the change in circumstances is the real Treasury yield—what investors expect to earn on a 10-year note after inflation. It was around zero in August 2011, soon to go negative. Today, it is 1.7%, near the highest since 2009. One takeaway is that the global saving glut—the wall of money in search of safe assets that kept yields down a decade ago—is no more. independent economist Phil Suttle estimates private investors will be asked to absorb government debt worth 7.7% of developed economies’ GDP this year and 9.2% next, more than double the 4.3% of 2011. Private borrowers thus face competition from governments for capital, which in the long run hurts investment and growth. We got a taste of that last week when yields jumped on news of larger-than-expected quarterly Treasury auctions. Related: Raising Anchor and American Gothic and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible?

Only three of the 15 most affluent metro areas in 1949 (San Francisco, New York and Washington) are still in the top 15, two (Buffalo and Cleveland) have fallen into the bottom 15 and four (Toledo, Dayton, Akron and Youngstown) have median incomes low enough to make the bottom 15 but not enough inhabitants to qualify. So there seems to be a lot more persistence at the bottom than the top. There’s also regional persistence, with Southern metros in the majority on the least affluent list in 1949 and now. On a regional level, things weren’t always so static — from 1929 until the 1970s, there was a lot of convergence in the BEA's estimates of state and regional per-capita personal income (that is, average income, as opposed to the median incomes). But they stopped coming together after that, and the Southeast and Southwest were the country’s poorest regions in 2022 just as they were in 1929. Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and Young Families Have Not Returned to Large Cities Post-Pandemic and Sunbelt Cities Nashville and Austin Are Nation’s Hottest Job Markets

For many, Trump’s legacy will be his assault on the American democratic system. But, in important respects, Trump brought about a lasting revolution in US foreign and domestic policy. Trump repudiated the previous 40-yr pro-globalization consensus, argued that US policy towards China has failed, and that the Communist party will never be a “responsible stakeholder” in the int’l system. He made “great-power competition” with China the centerpiece of his approach to the world, pulled America out of the TPP, made a deliberate effort to hobble the WTO, imposed a raft of tariffs on China, and renegotiated NAFTA. The Biden administration has retained most of these Trump-era policies. Biden made no attempt to rejoin the TPP and continues to block the WTO's appellate court. Trump’s victory in 2016 also forced Democrats to take the plight and anger of US workers more seriously. “Bidenomics” are driven by a Trump-like desire to reindustrialize America and rebuild the middle class. Related: Bidenomics and Its Contradictions and Aukus Allies Unveil Plan to Supply Australia With Nuclear-Powered Submarines and US and India Launch Ambitious Tech and Defence Initiatives

UPS lowered its full-year profit forecast, in part due to rising costs after the tentative labor agreement. UPS said the guidance change was “primarily to reflect the volume impact from labor negotiations and the costs associated with the tentative agreement.” UPS shared some details of the new labor contract on its earnings call. Full-time drivers will make around $170,000 in annual pay and benefits by the end of the five year contract. Part-time union employees will earn at least $25.75 per hour and receive full health care and pension benefits. Related: Settling Into 4% Inflation? and The ‘Summer of Strikes’ Isn’t Living Up to the Hype and The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Labor Market

In some of the materials used in batteries and more niche products, China’s market share is close to 100%. Goldman data suggests that China can build an EV factory in about a 1/3 of the time it takes in other countries while a battery factory in the US will cost nearly 80% more than in China. Bernstein says the cost of some manufacturing in the US can be three times more than in China. This highlights how China’s rivals must grapple with not only limited access to resources and upfront technology costs, but also labour shortages, wage inflation and higher environmental standards. Related: Can the World Make an Electric Car Battery Without China? and Why China Could Dominate the Next Big Advance in Batteries and China’s Curb On Metal Exports Reverberates Across Chip Sector

We consider three scenarios for the one-year period spanning 2023:H2 and 2024:H1. The first scenario ("Baseline") assumes that Europe maintains gas imports from Russia and all other sources at the same average level as in 2022:H2 and that gas consumption in each month is the same as its 2015–2021 average level.4 The second scenario ("Harsh Winter") is the same as the baseline, except that it assumes that next winter will be historically cold and, as a result, gas consumption in each month reaches its maximum 2015–2021 level. The third scenario ("Adverse Scenario") is the same as the baseline, except that it assumes that Europe's imports from non-Russian sources fall back to their 2015–2021 average in each month, while natural gas imports from Russia are the same as in the baseline. Related: How Europe is Decoupling from Russian Energy and Germany Opens Floating Gas Terminal at North Sea Port  and War in Ukraine Drives New Surge of U.S. Oil Exports to Europe 

Look at the countries that benefit from reduced direct Chinese trade with America. Caroline Freund of the University of California, San Diego found that countries which had the strongest trade relationships with China in a given industry have been the greatest beneficiaries of the redirection of trade, suggesting that deep Chinese supply chains still matter enormously to America. This is even truer in categories that include the advanced-manufacturing products where American officials are keenest to limit China’s presence. When it comes to these goods, China’s share of American imports declined by 14pp between 2017 and 2022, whereas those from Taiwan and Vietnam—countries that import heavily from China—gained the greatest market share. In short, Chinese activity is still vital to the production of even the most sensitive products. Related: Setser On Rumors Of Decoupling and US-China Trade is Close to a Record, Defying Talk of Decoupling and Global Firms Are Eyeing Asian Alternatives to Chinese Manufacturing

A US-based research center rebutted claims of a sensational breakthrough in the technology, heaping pressure on scientists to validate those findings as soon as possible.  The University of Maryland’s Condensed Matter Theory Center challenged claims made by the Seoul-based Quantum Energy Research Centre that it synthesized a material capable of conducting electricity with zero-resistance at room temperature and ambient pressure, known as LK-99. Related: Korean Team Claims To Have Created The First Room-Temperature, Ambient-Pressure Superconductor  and Origin Of Correlated Isolated Flat Bands In Copper-Substituted Lead Phosphate Apatite 

SpaceX launched 15 more of its Starlink internet satellites Monday night and landed the returning rocket on a ship at sea. A Falcon 9 rocket topped with the Starlink spacecraft lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base. The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned, landing on the SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You about 9.5 minutes after launch. This was the second Starlink launch for SpaceX in as many days. A Falcon 9 lofted 22 of the satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Sunday night. SpaceX has now launched 4,918 Starlink spacecraft to date, and more than 4,500 of them are currently functional. Related: Despite An Explosion, Elon Musk Is Closer to His New Space Age and SpaceX Rocket Explodes Before Reaching Orbit

The dashed line presents our baseline forecast of year-over-year shelter inflation over the next 18 months based on the average of cumulative shelter inflation forecasts at the CBSA level. Blue shading shows the area in which 95% of the model’s out-of-sample forecast errors fall, indicating the range of confidence regarding the accuracy of our model estimates. The solid line plots actual year-over-year shelter inflation. Our baseline forecast suggests that year-over-year shelter inflation will continue to slow through late 2024 and may even turn negative by mid-2024. This would represent a sharp turnaround in shelter inflation, with important implications for the behavior of overall inflation. The deflationary component of this forecast would be the most severe contraction in shelter inflation since the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09. Related: Rangvid On Housing Inflation and New Tenant Repeat Rent Index

The country’s large urban areas were hit hard by the pandemic and subsequent economic recovery on a number of fronts. Between 2020 and 2021, IRS data shows that net migration subtracted more than $68 billion (Adjusted Gross Income, or AGI) from large urban counties’ aggregate taxable income. Meanwhile migration added to taxable income in all other types of counties, even smaller urban peers. The scale of decline in large urban areas was equivalent to nearly two percent of total taxable incomes in such counties. In contrast, newcomers to rural counties have added more than 1.5% to taxable income in each of 2020 and 2021. Manhattan alone lost more than $16 billion in federally-taxable income (spread across more than 37,000 returns) through net migration, equivalent to more than 13% of remaining residents’ combined taxable incomes. Net migration out of San Francisco left that city’s federal income tax base more than $8 billion—or 20% —smaller between 2020 and 2021 alone. Related: Young Families Have Not Returned to Large Cities Post-Pandemic and Sunbelt Cities Nashville and Austin Are Nation’s Hottest Job Markets and Taxing Billionaires: Estate Taxes and the Geographical Location of the Ultra-Wealthy

Treasury plans to issue a bit more debt at each auction with the understanding a portion of the proceeds would be used to purchase old debt. In effect, the composition of Treasuries outstanding would be tilted towards the more liquid new issues. The program could one day be deployed to influence monetary conditions. For example, Treasury could effectively ease financial conditions by issuing short dated debt to purchase longer dated debt. There is no indication of this today, but treasuries and the central banks do not always have the same goal, and conflicts between the two are common in history.

Chipmakers have announced more than $200bn-worth of investments in America. By 2025 American chip factories will be churning out 18% of the world’s leading-edge chips. TSMC is splurging $40bn on two fabs in Arizona. Samsung of South Korea is investing $17bn in Texas. Intel, America’s chipmaking champion, will spend $40bn on four fabs in Arizona and Ohio. If all the planned investments materialise, America will produce enough cutting-edge chips to meet barely a third of domestic demand for these. Apple will keep sourcing high-end processors for its iPhones from Taiwan. So, in all likelihood, will America’s nascent AI-industrial complex. Related: Can Intel Become The Chip Champion The US Needs? and TSMC Delays Start of First Arizona Chip Factory, Citing Worker Shortage and The Extreme Shortage of High IQ Workers

To deny Trump the nomination, even if unsuccessful, could alienate the 1/3 of Republican voters who are strong supporters of Trump. They might not show up for Senate races without Trump on the ballot. Even if the quarter of Republicans who vehemently opposed Trump vote against Trump, they will [likely] revert to the GOP down ballot. That’s what happened in 2020. A nominee other than Trump might have a better chance of winning the presidency but could imperil hopes of winning back the Senate. A lot of Republicans would be okay with that outcome: Trump gets his comeback shot, loses, but does so with enough clout in Congress to rein in the Democratic president. And if Trump pulls off an upset, he does so with a Republican Senate and probably the House. But, given the narrowness of the current GOP House majority, if Trump gets thrashed in the general election, it could deliver both chambers of Congress and the White House for Democrats. Related: For Some Key Voters, Trump Has Become Toxic and The Road to A Political Realignment in American Politics and What Happened In 2022

Average sea surface temperatures across the globe have been rising by just over 0.1C/0.2F per decade since 1970 — about half as fast as the atmosphere. The overall increase in the past year is closer to 0.2C/0.4F, with much more intense marine heatwaves in some regions. On August 1, average global sea surface temperatures reached an all-time high just short of 21C/70F, Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service says. This record is particularly disconcerting because March is usually the hottest month for the world’s oceans. Related: What This Year’s ‘Astonishing’ Ocean Heat Means for the Planet and Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century and The Rapid Loss Of Antarctic Sea Ice Brings Grim Scenarios Into View

Volcanic eruptions typically cool the Earth's surface by releasing aerosols which reflect sunlight. However, a recent eruption released a significant amount of water vapor-a strong greenhouse gas-into the stratosphere with unknown consequences. This study examines the aftermath of the eruption and reveals that surface temperatures across large regions of the world increased by over 1.5°C for several years, although some areas experience cooling close to 1°C. Additionally, the research suggests a potential connection between the eruption and sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific, which warrants further investigation. Related: What This Year’s ‘Astonishing’ Ocean Heat Means for the Planet and Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century and The Rapid Loss Of Antarctic Sea Ice Brings Grim Scenarios Into View

We estimate that the average interest rate on the current stock of corporate debt will rise from 4.20% in 2023 to 4.30% in 2024 and 4.50% in 2025, based on our assumptions about the future path of Fed policy and market interest rates. This would imply that private sector interest expense as a share of current private sector gross output will rise from 3.35% in 2023 to 3.40% in 2024 and 3.60% in 2025, an increase of 0.25pp from 2023 to 2025.  The increase in interest expense that we estimate would therefore reduce capex growth by 0.10pp in 2024 and 0.25pp in 2025 and labor cost growth by 0.05pp in 2024 and 0.15pp in 2025. Related: Data Update 3 for 2023: Interest Rates and Bond Returns

Job churn is coming down, yet nominal wage growth has remained stubbornly stuck around 5% a year. Given the rough historical link between wages, output, and prices, the implication is that the trend growth rate of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) is now around 5-6% a year while trend inflation is around 4% a year. Related: What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet) and Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest After COVID-19 

If you are using equity risk premiums or even earnings yield for market timing, recognize that having a high R-squared or correlation in past returns will not easily translate into market-timing profits, for two reasons. First, the past is not always prologue, and market and economic structures can shift, undercutting a key basis for using historical data to make predictions. Second, even if the correlations and regressions hold, you may still find it hard to profit from them, since you (and your clients, if you are a portfolio manager) may be bankrupt, before your predictions play out. Statistical noise (the standard errors on your regression predictions) can create havoc in your portfolios, even if it eventually gets averaged out. Related: The Benefit of Owning Stocks Over Bonds Keeps Shrinking and The Rasputin Effect: Global Resilience To Higher Rates and Most Global Economies Remain in Disequilibrium, Requiring Policy Action 

The phenomenon of the largest stocks delivering the best returns is new, in our opinion. In fact, from 1994 to 2013, an annually rebalanced portfolio of the largest 5 stocks (“Big 5”) in the US had a comparable return to the entire S&P 500. But both portfolios significantly lagged a large-cap value portfolio (per Ken French). The last 10 years have seen a concentration of returns to the tech sector and to a few companies within that sector. This is both notable and unusual. With the advent of exciting new technologies like AI and superconductors, we think it’s plausible that the top 5 largest companies 10 years from now may look quite different from the top 5 today. In which case, a diversified portfolio would likely serve investors better than a highly concentrated size-defined portfolio. Related: Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

You can get a debt spiral if r is significantly larger than g; in that case rising debt leads to faster accumulation of debt, and we’re off to the races. Even after the rate surge of the past few days, the interest rate on inflation-protected 10-year U.S. bonds was 1.83%, which is close to most estimates of the economy’s sustainable growth rate. If you take the low end of such estimates, we could possibly face a debt spiral, but it would be a very slow-motion spiral. Put it this way: If r is 1.8, while g is only 1.6, stabilizing the debt ratio with debt at 100% of G.D.P. would require a primary surplus of 2% of G.D.P.; increase debt to 150%, and that required surplus would increase only to 3%. Related: Summers and Blanchard Debate the Future of Interest Rates and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

CPI and PCE core inflation (orange and gray) are how the US calculates inflation less food and energy, but including housing. We do an economically sophisticated measure that tries to measure the "cost of housing" by rents for those who rent, plus how much a homeowner pays by "renting" the house to him or herself. You can quickly come up with the plus and minus of that approach, especially for looking at month to month trends in inflation. Europe in the "HICP core" line doesn't even try and leaves owner occupied housing out altogether. Jesper's point: if you measure inflation Europe's way, US inflation is already back to 2%. The Fed can hang out a "mission accomplished" banner. (Or, in my view, an "it went away before we really had to do anything serious about it" banner.) And, since he writes to a European audience, Europe has a long way to go. Related: Striking Similarities (and Differences) Between Inflation Today and In the 1970s 

We find that mismeasurement error has biased construction-sector productivity growth downward by 3⁄4pp per year at the very most. This brings an estimate of average productivity growth from 1987 to 2019 up to positive territory, but just barely (from negative 0.5% to positive 0.2%), and still about 1pp below productivity growth of the next-lowest major industries and more than 11⁄2pp below the average for the nonfarm business sector. Consequently, we conclude that productivity growth may well have been quite low in the construction industry, even if it has not been as low as implied by the official statistics. While this estimated growth rate is higher than the growth rate of the published data, it does not change the qualitative result that productivity growth in this sector has been quite low. And our estimate of productivity growth in the construction sector remains much lower than in other industries. Related: The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the U.S. Construction Sector and Construction Industry Has Work, Needs More Workers

US government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time. Researchers at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who achieved ignition for the first time last year, repeated the breakthrough in an experiment on July 30 that produced a higher energy output than in December, according to three people with knowledge of the preliminary results. The improved result at NIF, coming “only eight months” after the initial breakthrough, was a further sign that the pace of progress was increasing, said one of the people with knowledge of the results. Related: How US Scientists Moved One Step Closer to Dream of Fusion Power and When Will Fusion Be Ready for Prime Time? Watch These Three Numbers and Tech Billionaires Bet on Fusion as Holy Grail for Business

Beijing is trying to send strong signals about its preparation for an attack on Taiwan, with People’s Liberation Army soldiers pledging to sacrifice themselves. The pledges are part of the eight-episode documentary series Zhu Meng, or “chasing dreams”, aired on state broadcaster CCTV from Tuesday to mark the PLA’s 96th anniversary and show the readiness of military personnel to fight “at any second”. In one instance, a pilot in one of the PLA’s most advanced stealth fighter jets vows to launch a suicide attack if necessary.

Early-stage business activity across the United States remains robust through the first half of 2023, as the pace of new business formation strengthened over last year. Individuals filed nearly 2.7 million applications to start a business between January and June of this year, a 5% increase over 2022 and a staggering 52% increase over the same period in 2019. One-third of those filings were for new businesses likely to hire employees—a key subset of applications from the Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics demonstrating a “high propensity” to hire staff, if and when the business becomes operational. The volume of likely employer applications also remained well above prepandemic levels, surpassing the total from the first six months of 2019 by 36%. Related: Startup Surge Stood Firm Against Economic Headwinds in 2022 and Like the Broader Economy, the High Tech Sector is Becoming Less Dynamic and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

American equity exceptionalism is possible, for at least two reasons. First, the US is set to capture a sizeable share of productivity benefits from technology such as artificial intelligence. Second, a moderating global economy could work against more cyclically biased equity markets overseas, favouring those geared towards organic growth drivers.  Over multi-year periods, domestic growth has been found to dominate local equity returns. A 2011 study by Clifford Asness, Roni Israelov and John Liew suggests that 39% of 15-year returns could be explained by domestic economic performance. Growth is fundamentally a function of labour and productivity. Given that most of the developed world (and China) faces at least directionally similar labour constraints, the US seems likely to be a relative growth winner thanks to prospects for greater productivity gains. Related: Market Resilience or Investors in Denial: The Market at Mid-Year 2023 and Most Global Economies Remain in Disequilibrium, Requiring Policy Action and Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation 

What are all those new Floridians doing for a living? Well, a significant number are retired. Retirees have been moving to Florida for the warm winters for a long time.  But there are a lot more potential retired migrants now than in the past: between 2010 and 2020 the overall U.S. population grew only 7.4%, but the population 65 and older grew 38.6%. And since retirees spend money on local services, the influx of seniors creates jobs for younger adults as well. Related: Miami Sees Its First Population Drop in Decades and A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South and Florida Ocean Temperatures At ‘Downright Shocking’ Levels

The six major US pharmaceutical firms that provide fairly detailed data reported making $215 billion worth of sales in the US for 2022. Given America's systematically higher prices, their sales abroad were logically more modest — totaling $170 billion. Despite this discrepancy, the companies reported earning very, very little in profits — in some cases, absolutely nothing — in the US. Of their $100 billion combined profit, the companies said $90 billion was made abroad, while a paltry $10 billion came from their US operations. That comes out to a profit margin of 5% in the US and a margin of over 50% abroad.

The unemployment rate fell back to 3.5%. Has been in a 3.4% to 3.7% band for 17 straight months. The last time this happened was Nov 2007. Given the recovery in the (age-adjusted) participation rate this has brought the employment-population rate for prime age workers (25-54) above the pre-pandemic rate. The wage growth slowdown earlier this year has largely gone away. Earlier this year average hourly earnings were growing at a 3.5% annual rate, now they're up to a 5% annual rate--unchanged since early 2022. Note, these are noisy and can be revised a lot. Overall this report is mixed for the inflation outlook: Jobs/hours: Cooling Unemployment rate: Neutral Wages: Heating I tend to think the order I listed them above is roughly right for what signals matter so think this report is slightly favorable for inflation.

While a simple read of the yield curve points to recession, the health of the US corporate sector does not: the corporate sector financial balance is still in surplus, a condition which has never preceded a recession. Central banks have only removed around one third of the $11 trillion in global liquidity they created in 2020/2021. There’s still plenty of liquidity in the system and the cost of money is not prohibitive. Excess US household savings are projected to run out sometime in 2024, and while current economic indicators are robust, there’s weakness in Conference Board leading indicators. The overall pulse does not point to a significant contraction, just to modestly weaker US conditions in 6-9 months. Related: Most Global Economies Remain in Disequilibrium, Requiring Policy Action

The U.S. federal budget deficit has widened by about 3-4pp of GDP since the start of 2022. The downturn in revenues is mostly attributable to the plunge in capital gains tax receipts after the windfall of 2021/2022, as well as the collapse in dividends paid by the Federal Reserve to the Treasury. Meanwhile, the increase in outlays is almost entirely attributable to the surge in interest payments on Treasury debt. Related: Net Interest Payments On External US Debt and The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2023 to 2033 

Inflation is the economic equivalent of a partial default. The debt was sold under a 2% inflation target, and people expected that or less inflation. The government borrowed and printed $5 Trillion with no plan to pay it back, devaluing the outstanding debt as a result. Cumulative inflation so far means debt is repaid in dollars that are worth 12.4% less than if inflation had been 2%. That's economically the same as a 12.4% haircut.  If you only repaid 87.6% of your mortgage, you can be sure the bank would see you as a worse credit risk going forward. The probability that the US inflates again, that in the next crisis they do the same thing, is unquestionably larger. The world's appetite for boundless amounts of US debt is unquestionably smaller. Related: What We’ve Learned About Inflation 

The median age at IPO was 7.9 years from 1976 to 2000 and rose to 9.5 years from 2001 to 2022. One implication of companies staying private longer is that wealth creation has shifted to private markets from the public markets. To illustrate the point, Amazon’s market capitalization was $749 million when it went public in 1997 and $1.3 trillion as of June 30, 2023 (in 2022 dollars). The company was three years old when it did its IPO. Essentially all of its wealth creation occurred when it was public. Hendrik Bessembinder, a professor of finance, has measured the wealth creation of more than 28,000 U.S.listed companies since 1926. A company creates wealth if it generates returns in excess of one-month Treasury bill rates. He found that from 1926 to 2022, just under 60% of them destroyed $9.1 trillion and the other 40% or so created $64.2 trillion. Just 2% of the sample created $50 trillion of the net total of $55.1 trillion, and the top 3 firms (Apple, Microsoft, and ExxonMobil) created almost $6 trillion. Related: Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

California has more billionaires  — 113 — than in any country except China. The ranks of mere millionaires have grown as well, far outpacing any loss of high-net-worth taxpayers during the pandemic. From the end of 2019 through 2021, California added more than 116,000 millionaire taxpayers, according to the state’s Department of Finance. The number of residents making more than $50 million surged 158% to 3,182. And that likely underestimates the riches. While the tax data reflects salaries along with income from stock and real estate sales, the ultra-wealthy often avoid income taxes by borrowing against their wealth instead of selling assets that would incur a tax burden. In total, more than 288,000 Californians, or 0.7% of residents, reported over $1 million in income in 2021. Related: The Population of California Declined, Again and Taxes, Revenues, and Net Migration In California and Taxing Billionaires: Estate Taxes and the Geographical Location of the Ultra-Wealthy

One of the leading short-term explanations is unusual patterns of wind and waves. Throughout June and July, gusts traveling from the Bellingshausen Sea towards the South Pole prevented ice from forming near the Antarctic Peninsula. Weather systems emanating from storms in the Indian Ocean—brought about by shifts in two regular atmospheric fluctuations, the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Southern Annular Mode—may also have broken up sea ice as it began to form in East Antarctica.  The ring of sea ice around Antarctica holds in place the continent’s coastal ice shelves, which in turn do the same for its glaciers and ice sheets. If those ice shelves were to collapse—as the Conger shelf in east Antarctica did in 2022—the gates would open for continental ice to flow rapidly into the oceans. The west Antarctic ice sheet alone contains enough water to increase global sea level by 11 feet. Related: Antarctic Sea Ice Levels Dive In 'Five-Sigma Event', As Experts Flag Worsening Consequences For Planet and Antarctic Sea Ice Has Shrunk By An Area Nine Times The Size Of Britain

The planet’s average sea surface temperature spiked to a record high in April and the ocean has remained exceptionally warm ever since. The North Atlantic has seen some of the most exceptional warmth, with recent temperatures consistently reaching more than 2°F higher than what is typical for this time of year. Last week, one reading from a buoy recorded a stunning 101.1°F, possibly a world record for sea surface temperatures. The eruption of an underwater volcano in the Pacific Ocean near Tonga last year, which spewed tens of millions of tons of water vapor into the stratosphere, may have also influenced this year’s ocean temperatures. Water vapor, like carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas that traps heat near Earth’s surface. Scientists expect warm ocean conditions to continue into the fall, with El Niño intensifying in the months ahead. Related: Florida Ocean Temperatures At ‘Downright Shocking’ Levels

A one-time $5 trillion fiscal blowout causes a one-time rise in the level of prices, just enough to inflate away the value of the debt by $5 trillion. Then inflation stops, even if the Federal Reserve does nothing.  The Fed is still important in fiscal theory. The Fed bought about $3 trillion of the new debt and converted it to interest-paying reserves. Giving people checks backed by reserves is arguably a more powerful inducement to spend than giving people Treasury bonds. Now, by raising interest rates, the Fed lowers current inflation but at the cost of more-persistent inflation. That smoothing is beneficial.  These are core propositions of fiscal theory, stated ahead of time and at odds with conventional theories. Related: Waning Inflation, Supply and Demand and The Second Great Experiment Update 

I created a “broken-windows arrest rate” analogous to the violent and property crime rates by summing arrests in the eight categories, dividing them by the size of the city’s population, and expressing the result as the number of arrests per 100,000 population. To ensure that all these qualified as minor crimes, I included only arrests that were charged as misdemeanors, violations, or infractions, excluding arrests charged as felonies. The graph below shows the proportional change in those arrest rates using 2013 as the baseline. In New York and Los Angeles, the fall in arrests for broken-windows offenses was steep and steady from 2013 to 2020. Washington is different, with a sudden rise in broken-windows arrests in Washington in 2019. The anomaly was created entirely by a one-year spike in arrests for prostitution and solicitation, the result of a policy decision to clear the streets of prostitutes near hotels. If arrests for prostitution and solicitation are deleted from the Washington data, the trendline of broken-windows offenses shows the same unbroken decline as the trendlines for New York and Los Angeles. As of 2022, arrests for broken-windows offenses since 2013 had fallen by 74% in New York, 77% in Washington, and 81% in Los Angeles. There was no apparent “Floyd effect” in New York or Los Angeles. A case for a small effect can be made for Washington. Related: Pandemic Murder Wave Has Crested. Here’s the Postmortem 

The rate at which households saved out of income saw large fluctuations during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019 the saving rate hovered around 9%. After the saving rate spiked to unprecedented levels in 2020 and 2021, it fell dramatically in 2022. In June 2022 households saved less than 3% of DPI, which was close to a historically low level. As of May 2023, the saving rate remains low at 4.6%. Some households may be on a precipice where real income and real wealth do not show marked improvement. To maintain relatively healthy balance sheets, such households can moderate the pace of consumer spending (particularly goods spending). Alternatively, households can maintain the current trends in spending, increasingly financing spending with borrowing, and financial health could deteriorate in a worrying way. Related: Accumulated Savings During the Pandemic: An International Comparison with Historical Perspective and The Rise and Fall of Pandemic Excess Savings

You can draw comparable charts for many other economic variables, some of them just showing levels like the two figures above, others showing deviations from the pre-2008 trend. Their consistent shapes all tell the same story: The U.S. economy remained significantly depressed for many years — indeed, a decade or so, after the financial crisis — and this lost decade could have been avoided with the right policies. How do we know that it could have been avoided? Because of what happened the past few years, when the U.S. economy, boosted by major federal spending programs, came roaring back from the Covid slump, regaining all the lost ground in just over three years. If America had done as well after the financial crisis, we would have been back on trend by mid-2011. Related: Unintended Consequences Accurately Predicted The Slow Recovery 

The strikers in 2018 and 2019 were mostly teachers and other state and local government employees, while this year most are employees of private companies. A lot of current private-sector organizing is on a location-by-location basis with strikes that don’t show up in the BLS counts because they involve fewer than 1,000 workers, with the more inclusive Cornell-ILR Labor Action Tracker counting 224,000 workers involved in stoppages last year, nearly double the BLS tally of 120,600. The 340,000 workers who didn’t go on strike at UPS because the company gave into their wage demands should probably count as a significant union victory even if doesn’t show up in the strike statistics. And according to the US BLS other main measure of strike activity, days on strike divided by total working time, this year may still prove a standout, at least by post-1980 standards. Related: America Is Barreling Toward a Summer of Strikes and Unions Inflation Warning 

While the Bank of Japan has signaled it will let yields to trade toward 1% from roughly 0.5% now, its decision to step into the market on Monday suggests that won’t happen anytime soon. Still, with domestic investors holding around $2.5 trillion of US stocks, bonds and credit, the very idea that Japan will one day join the developed world in retreating from zero rates has Wall Street sizing up a volatile fallout that could add fuel to the higher-for-longer interest rate era. Related: Raising Anchor and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet)

In June, Xing Haiming, China’s ambassador in Seoul, publicly warned South Korea against “decoupling” from the Chinese economy under the influence of the US. South Korea has already embarked on an unmistakable — albeit untrumpeted — pivot away from the Chinese economy. According to data released by the Bank of Korea in June, South Korea exported more goods to the US in 2022 than it did to China for the first time since 2004 when China’s nominal gross domestic product was still less than that of the UK.

The BOJ’s low interest policy remains an anchor of global bond yields, but that anchor will soon be set at a higher level. U.S. bonds will appear even more unattractive to Japanese investors, whose exit from the market would allow U.S. bond yields to drift higher. The eventual Fed rate cuts would reduce FX hedging costs and potentially bring back some Japanese investors, but until then it looks like one more marginal source of demand is evaporating even as Treasury supply is set to increase. This suggests that Treasury yields will continue to drift higher. Related: American Gothic and China Isn't Selling Treasuries

Bloomberg calculates that US imports of tariffed goods from China are down about $150 billion from where they’d otherwise be. Mexico is filling much of the gap. The share of manufacturing in India’s gross domestic product stands at 13%, well below Modi’s 25% goal. China outperforms India in making sophisticated technology—the so-called value-add that leads consumers to pay more for items such as electronics. Chinese manufacturers’ value-add is currently 49%, compared with 20% for India’s, the government says. Related: Mexico Seeks to Solidify Rank As Top U.S. Trade Partner, Push Further Past China and Take Away China, and a Stealth Bull Market Emerges 

The extra reward for holding stocks instead of bonds has fallen to its lowest level in 20 years, threatening a recent hot streak for major indexes.  One method for gauging the value of stocks is to compare their earnings yield—calculated by dividing a company’s expected earnings over the next year by its stock price—to the yield on government bonds, considered the closest thing to a risk-free return. The gap between the earnings yield of the S&P 500 and the yield on the 10-year U.S. government bond dropped to around 1.1pp last week, its narrowest since 2002. The spread to the yield on the 10-year Treasury inflation-protected security, seen by some analysts as the better benchmark because corporate earnings tend to adjust with inflation, has similarly fallen to its lowest level since 2003, at around 3.5pp. Related: Market Resilience or Investors in Denial: The Market at Mid-Year 2023 and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs 

Miami-Dade lost 79,535 people through net migration to other parts of Florida or other states between 2020 and 2022, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the Brookings Institution. Although foreign immigration offset some of the loss and helped the county’s population rise slightly last year, Miami-Dade County’s population still shrank between 2019 and 2022—its first population loss over a multiyear period since at least 1970, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Home prices in Miami have soared 53% since June 2020, according to online listing site Zillow, the second most out of the top 50 metropolitan housing markets after Tampa. Related: Young Families Have Not Returned to Large Cities Post-Pandemic and Home Insurers Are Charging More and Insuring Less and A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South

A recent report of room temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure in Cu-substituted apatite (‘LK99’) has invigorated interest in the understanding of what materials and mechanisms can allow for high-temperature superconductivity. Here I perform density functional theory calculations on Cu-substituted lead phosphate apatite, identifying correlated isolated flat bands at the Fermi level, a common signature of high transition temperatures in already established families of superconductors. I elucidate the origins of these isolated bands as arising from a structural distortion induced by the Cu ions and a chiral charge density wave from the Pb lone pairs. These results suggest that a minimal two-band model can encompass much of the low-energy physics in this system. Related: Korean Team Claims To Have Created The First Room-Temperature, Ambient-Pressure Superconductor

For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.  In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area. While the complete data aren’t in for 2023, global tracking up to July 29 by the Global Wildfire Information System shows that more land has burned in the Americas than usual. But much of the rest of the world has seen lower burning—Africa and especially Europe. Globally, the GWIS shows that burned area is slightly below the average between 2012 and 2022, a period that already saw some of the lowest rates of burned area. Related: Canada Sees Its Farthest-North 100-Degree Temperature As Wildfires Rage 

Elon Musk is predicting U.S. consumption of electricity will triple by around 2045. “I can’t emphasize enough: we need more electricity however much electricity you think you need, more than that is needed.”  He anticipates an electricity shortage in two years that could stunt the energy-hungry development of artificial intelligence. For the past 20 years, U.S. electricity demand has grown at an average rate of 1% each year, according to a Deloitte study. PG&E expects electricity demand will rise 70% in the next 20 years, which, the California company notes, would be unprecedented. Similarly, McKinsey expects U.S. demand will double by 2050. Deloitte estimates the largest U.S. electric companies together will spend as much as $1.8 trillion by 2030. Related: Gridlock: How a Lack of Power Lines Will Delay the Age of Renewables and Summers and Blanchard Debate the Future of Interest Rates

Not only has real per-capita consumption recovered to pre-COVID levels, but it has actually broadly returned to its pre-COVID trend at the fastest pace of any modern recession—in stark contrast to the permanent scars on consumption left by the 2008 recession. In fact, growth in real consumption of durable goods has not only vastly exceeded the pre-pandemic trend but briefly caught up with the pre-Great Recession trend, and remains high even as it hasn’t grown in several years. The 2010s saw durable goods’ share of spending sink by roughly 3% in 3 years and barely recover afterward. Not until the pandemic did durable goods consumption spending climb back to its pre-recession share of household budgets. That meant more than a decade of, effectively, household underinvestment in some of the most-important big-ticket items that provide long-term welfare and enhance people’s economic productivity—and that is being partially undone today.

The overall picture is that occupations where pay rose the fastest in 2021-2022 have since seen pay growth normalize, while jobs in the rest of the economy are still experiencing persistently faster pay growth. There has been some deceleration relative to the peak at the beginning of 2022, but it has been very modest.  One good reason to think that the “neutral” policy rate has gone up is that the post-2000 investment drought is finally ending thanks in no small part to the U.S. government’s subsidies. In this environment, short-term interest rates of 5.5%—which is what the U.S. endured in the second half of the 1990s without problems when inflation was slower—do not seem particularly high. If that is correct, then 4% yields on 10-year Treasury notes could be too low, which could also have implications for the appropriate discount rates for stocks. Related: What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? 

Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Oregon, Illinois and Utah had the biggest total of approved increases, ranging from 20% to 30%. In states such as California, some insurers are halting sales of new policies. Companies are also pulling back from some areas vulnerable to disasters. The escalating cost of catastrophes is reflected in a steep increase in premiums for the reinsurance coverage that home-insurance companies buy to pass on some of their risk. Depending on the state regulator, those higher premiums can feed directly through to the price charged to homeowners. Data shows reinsurance premiums were up on average 33% for June 1 renewals, which includes many Florida carriers, and 50% for renewals at the start of this year. Related: Why California and Florida Have Become Almost Uninsurable and Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse and Farmers Insurance Limits Sales in Florida, California Amid Storm, Wildfire Risks

Sending electricity at very high voltage is more efficient, if more expensive, with losses potentially as low as 3% per 1,000km for direct current systems, which have less resistance. This is about 30-40% lower than for alternating current systems. “HVDC [high-voltage direct current] becomes economic at about the 60km mark” for subsea systems, says Ian Douglas, chief executive of cable company XLCC. Demand for high-voltage cables is booming, with the market climbing from a typical $3bn of new projects awarded per year between 2015-20 to $11bn in 2022. This year, the estimated value of new orders is likely to exceed $20bn before settling at $18bn-$20bn per year, according to Massimo Battaini, incoming chief executive of Prysmian. “We are fully booked until 2026/27,” he says. Related: Gridlock: How a Lack of Power Lines Will Delay the Age of Renewables

When Plant Vogtle unit 3 finally delivers commercial electricity to the Georgia power grid, it will be the first nuclear reactor the country has built from scratch in more than three decades. The 1,100-megawatt Vogtle unit 3 was initially supposed to enter service in 2016. Georgia Power, the utility driving the project, most recently said it would start commercial operations in July after the latest delay caused by a degraded seal in its main generator. The $14bn original cost of Vogtle units 3 and 4 has now ballooned to more than $30bn. The cost for Georgia Power, with a 45% share of the project, will be about $15bn. Related: Pricey Things

Global warming no longer needs to be a theory; it’s a reality. Extreme heat is significantly more common in major cities these days (2019-23) than it was in the early 1950s. To be precise, there are 2.7 times as many days with mid-afternoon temperatures above 30 C in Athens; 3.7 times in Barcelona; 8.1 times in Paris; and an amazing 10.4 times in London. The mountains are seeing temperatures rise roughly as much as the beaches. The effects on snow cover in the Alps are all too familiar to European skiers. Short shores, long hills may not turn out to be the trade of the century. But short shores, long hills feels right. Related: Climate Change and the Geography of the U.S. Economy and Global Temperatures Have Broken Records Three Times In A Week 

The investigations so far show the Chinese effort appears more widespread — in the United States and at American facilities abroad — than they had initially realized. But officials acknowledge that they do not know the full extent of the code’s presence in networks around the world, partly because it is so well hidden. There is a debate inside the administration over whether the goal of the operation is primarily aimed at disrupting the military, or at civilian life more broadly in the event of a conflict. Related: Volt Typhoon Targets US Critical Infrastructure with Living-Off-The-Land Techniques and CIA Chief Warns Against Underestimating Xi's Ambitions Toward Taiwan 

The US will provide Taiwan with $345mn in weapons, marking the first time the Pentagon will send arms directly to the country. The White House on Friday announced its plan to provide weapons from US stockpiles in the first tranche of an annual $1bn “presidential drawdown authority” (PDA) Congress approved last year to support Taiwan. Successive US administrations have approved the sale of weapons to Taiwan. But this is the first time the arms have been directly provided under the PDA — the same authority that the Biden administration has been using to send weapons to Ukraine. Related: US To Link Up With Taiwan and Japan Drone Fleets To Share Real-Time Data and US Effort to Arm Taiwan Faces New Challenge With Ukraine Conflict 

Dale and Krueger had classified everyone who earned more than $200,000 into the same category, making no distinction between an affluent doctor earning $250,000 and Jeff Bezos. Chetty and his authors use a slightly different approach. They classify everyone’s income into percentiles—80th, 81st, etc. Among top students, 19% who attend the top schools make it to the richest 1% of the income distribution, versus 12% who didn’t attend. Chetty’s co-author Deming compares those upper-tail outcomes to winning the lottery: Elite schools have lots of lottery tickets lying on the ground, whereas most other colleges only have a few. For most people, the lottery ticket will be worth nothing. For a few, it is a jackpot. Related: Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

Cur­rently, Medicare pays hos­pi­tal-owned fa­cil­i­ties two to three times as much as in­de­pen­dent physi­cian of­fices for the same ser­vice, ac­cord­ing to the Al­liance for Site Neu­tral Pay­ment Re­form. This cre­ates an enor­mous in­cen­tive for large hos­pi­tal chains to ac­quire out­pa­tient prac­tices. A re­port by the Physi­cian Ad­vo­cacy In­sti­tute found that the share of hos­pi­tal-owned physi­cian prac­tices more than dou­bled, from 14% to 31%, be­tween 2012 and 2018. By 2020 more than half of physi­cians worked di­rectly for a hos­pi­tal or at a physi­cian prac­tice owned by a hos­pi­tal, ac­cord­ing to the Amer­i­can Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion.  Re­mov­ing these per­verse in­cen­tives could save pa­tients and tax­pay­ers be­tween $346 bil­lion and $672 bil­lion over the next decade.

Core PCE inflation came in very low (albeit a touch above expectations), the second lowest pace of the inflationary period. If you swap in new rents for all rents you see a more pronounced slowdown (although not nearly as dramatic as the same adjustment for the CPI). This is a 2.3% annual rate over the last 3 months. In sum, this tells the same story as the CPI: inflation is slowing, there is reason to believe there will be further slowing as shelter comes down but also some worries about some of the good news being transitory. But overall the June inflation data was good news. Related: A June Inflation Surprise and Is This Disinflation "Immaculate" or "Transitory"?

China imports nearly three-quarters of the oil it uses. The substance accounts for only 20% of the country’s energy use, but it would be crucial to any war effort. If China were to start increasing its reserves—it currently has enough to last three months at today’s consumption rate—that would be one of the best indicators that it is preparing for war. China imports more agricultural produce than any other country. Obsessed with food security, it already has enormous stockpiles. In 2021 an official said its wheat reserves could meet demand for 18 months. Over the past decade, China has greatly increased its purchases of wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans.

The historical record may not be particularly instructive in 2023, said Michael Feroli, the chief U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan. This has not been a typical business cycle, in which the economy grew headily, fell into recession, and then clawed its way back. Instead, growth was abruptly halted by coronavirus shutdowns and then rocketed back with the help of widespread government stimulus, leading to shortages, bottlenecks and unusually strong demand in unexpected parts of the economy. All of the weirdness contributed to inflation, and the slow return to normal is now helping it fade.

The wealthy save a much larger part of their income than do workers or the middle class, and use a much smaller part for consumption, rising income inequality automatically reduces overall consumption and forces up savings by effectively transferring income from high consumers to high savers. If lower consumption is not balanced by higher investment, total demand must decline. To prevent this from happening, Washington typically does one of two things. First, the Federal Reserve can implement policies that encourage household borrowing to fund additional consumption. In that case, the reduction in the income share of ordinary Americans is balanced by an increase in their borrowing, so the same level of consumption can be maintained. Second, Washington can itself borrow and use the proceeds to replace the demand lost by the reduction in household consumption. Related: Pettis On CBO Numbers 

The employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) has returned to its age (and gender)-adjusted prepandemic trend. The labor force participation rate (LFPR) age-adjusted in June 2023 was consistent with rates last seen in 2001. When looking over extended periods of time, labor market indicators should be age-adjusted to distinguish between secular demographic trends versus other cyclical economic effects. Second, after accounting for demographic shifts in labor supply and demand, the current U.S. labor market is unusually strong from a historical perspective, posting elevated and even record measures of participation and employment. Related: Unions’ Inflation Warning?

The Chinese and Korean booms are comparable with the booms that occurred in the United States and United Kingdom from 2001 to 2007. [Going forward] in both countries, consumer spending could be quite weak. This is an especially pronounced problem in Korea, where the debt service ratio has risen substantially and is now at an exceptionally high level. A rise in the debt service ratio during a household debt boom portends slower growth in the historical data, and Korea appears likely to follow that historical pattern. The allocation of production to real estate and construction activities over the past decade in China is historically unprecedented. It is difficult to imagine that the rate of activity in the real estate sector is sustainable, and it is difficult to see what sectors can take up the production slack if there is a continued decline in real estate activity. Related: Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent?

A major physics journal is retracting a two-year-old scientific paper that described the transformations of a chemical compound as it was squeezed between two pieces of diamond. Such an esoteric finding — and retraction — would not typically garner much attention. But one of the leaders of this research is Ranga Dias, a professor at the University of Rochester in New York who made a much bigger scientific splash earlier this year, touting the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor. While Dr. Dias continues to defend the work, to some scientists, there is now clear evidence of misconduct. “There’s no plausible deniability left,” said N. Peter Armitage, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who is among the scientists who have seen the reports. “They submitted falsified data. There’s no ambiguity there at all.” Related: The Scientific Breakthrough That Could Make Batteries Last Longer and Room-Temperature Superconductor Discovery Meets with Resistance 

In their papers, the team claims to have measured samples of LK-99 as electricity was applied and found its sensitivity fell to near zero. They also claim that in testing its magnetism, it exhibited the Meissner effect—another test of superconductivity. In such a test, a sample should levitate when placed on a magnet. The team has provided a video of the material partially levitating. They claim that the levitation was only partial because of impurities in their material.

According to my calculations, the real (inflation-adjusted) interest rate is around 1.5%, which is one percentage point higher than the Fed’s estimate of the neutral real policy rate (which neither stimulates nor reduces economic activity). Prior to previous recessions, the real rate has been higher.  While current market pricing suggests that the Fed will increase the federal funds rate once more this cycle, I think that is optimistic. Between stubborn and high underlying inflation, financial conditions that aren’t tightening, and real interest rates that are lower than is typical before a significant economic slowdown, there are ample reasons for the Fed to raise rates more than economists and investors currently seem to expect. If that happens, the risk of recession will increase. Related: Furman On CPI Report and A Default Cycle Has Started 

The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium. That was roughly 12,800 years ago when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more.  New research published in Nature Communications [projects] the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC could collapse around midcentury. Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude. Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain. Related: Antarctic Sea Ice Has Shrunk By An Area Nine Times The Size Of Britain and Florida Ocean Temperatures At ‘Downright Shocking’ Levels 

“No one noticed—but we noticed,” said Ford CEO James Farley on an earnings call last month, “something monumental happened in our industry, where China became the number one exporter of vehicles globally. It had always been the Germans or the Japanese.” Despite the record-setting rise in gross exports and China’s newfound motor vehicle trade surplus, net exports still remain below Japanese and German levels. The per-car value of Chinese vehicles still tends to be lower than their foreign competitors, and a lot of the rise in exports has been matched by a rise in imports. Related: China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s and The Chinese Carmakers Planning to Shake Up The European Market

The energy price shock also generates a fall in production and employment: a 10% increase in electricity price translates into a 1.6% fall in production and a 1.5% fall in employment. Energy efficiency increases at the firm level. Profits fall but modestly or only for the most gas-intensive firms. However, these negative impacts wane over time. Our interpretation is that during 1995–2019, firms adapted their technology and production processes to higher energy prices and a selection process eliminated those not able to adjust. All in all, these results suggest that firms are able to adjust and adapt strongly to energy shocks but that the competitiveness impact is significant.

Seven major automakers announced a plan on Wednesday to nearly double the number of fast chargers in the United States in an effort to address one of the main reasons that people hesitate to buy electric cars. The carmakers — BMW Group, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz Group,, and Stellantis — will initially invest at least $1 billion in a joint venture that will build 30,000 chargers on major highways and other locations in the United States and Canada. The United States has about 32,000 fast chargers — those that can replenish a drained battery in 10 to 30 minutes. The chargers will have plugs designed to use the connections used by most carmakers other than Tesla, as well as the standard developed by Tesla that Ford, G.M.,, and other companies have said they intend to switch to in 2025.

The reduction in interest and corporate tax rates was responsible for over 40% of the growth in real corporate profits from 1989 to 2019. Moreover, the decline in risk-free rates over this period explains the entirety of the expansion in price-to-earnings (P/E) multiples. These two factors therefore account for the majority of this period’s exceptional stock market performance. From 1989 to 2019, real corporate profits grew at the robust rate of 3.8% per year. This was almost double the pace seen from 1962 to 1989. The difference in profit growth between these two periods is entirely due to the decline in interest and corporate tax rates from 1989 to 2019. One way to see this is to compare the growth of earnings before subtracting interest and tax expenses (EBIT). In fact, real EBIT growth was slightly lower from 1989 to 2019 compared to 1962 to 1989: 2.2% versus 2.4% per year. The outlook for stock price growth is bleak. Related: The Curious Incident of the Elevated Profit Margins and Charlie Munger: US Banks Are ‘Full of’ Bad Commercial Property Loans 

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) measure of China’s inflation-adjusted trade-weighted exchange rate (based on differences in consumer prices) is down by roughly 14% since the recent peak last March, which is the largest decline out of 64 countries tracked by the BIS. This appears to be a policy choice. While China’s official foreign reserves are substantially lower now than at the peak in 2014, the consolidated position of the PBOC and the state-run banks looks a bit different. As I suggested two years ago, there are good reasons to think that the PBOC has deliberately outsourced reserve management to Chinese banks (which among other things helps explain the continued reductions in reserve requirements). After the PBOC mostly stopped buying foreign currency reserves, it switched to lending increasingly large sums to the domestic banking system. Related: Setser On China's Trade Surplus and China's Surplus Again Topped 10% Of GDP

A wide range of banks have reported a squeeze on net interest margins as deposit funding costs have surprised to the upside. In a typical rate hiking cycle, interest income on bank assets tend to rise more quickly than interest paid on deposits. This led to a steady expansion of net interest margins over the past quarters that is suddenly reversing. Banks now see customers both shifting out of non interest bearing deposits and demanding higher interest for interest bearing deposits. This was widely reported in recent earnings calls by all but the largest banks. Related: All Clear and Bank Funding during the Current Monetary Policy Tightening Cycle

Markets are not taking the ongoing rise in default rates for HY and loans seriously. The reality is that more and more companies are defaulting because the cost of capital is higher, and Fed Chair Powell says that interest rates will stay at these levels “for a couple of years,” so tight monetary policy will continue to have a greater negative effect on the economy and capital markets. In fact, higher costs of capital is precisely how monetary policy works: By making it more difficult to get financing. Once there is a default by some household name in credit, we will likely see an overnight change in market sentiment from bullish to bearish. Related: Small Bank Thoughts John Cochrane and Credit Allocation and Macroeconomic Fluctuations 

In the last decade, fentanyl has become the leading cause of death for young adults in the US. Fentanyl now causes most of the more than 85,000 annual opioid overdose deaths in the US and Canada. All the fentanyl needed to supply the US for one year weighs the equivalent of 5 tonnes and would easily fit into one lorry, according to researchers at Rand Corporation. That compares with about 125 tonnes for heroin and even more for cocaine. Related: Only One Thing Will Solve the Fentanyl Crisis and Drug Overdose Deaths Topped 100,000 Again in 2022 

Chipmakers are on course to add about 115,000 jobs by 2030 [according to]  Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). Based on a study of current degree completion rates, though, about 58% of those projected positions could remain unfilled. Not enough Americans are studying science, engineering, math and technology-related subjects, according to the SIA. And people from other countries who are acquiring those skills are leaving, the group said. At US colleges and universities, more than 50% of master’s engineering graduates and 60% of those with a Ph.D. in engineering are citizens of other countries. About 80% of those master’s graduates and 25% of those who earn doctorates depart the US — either by choice or because immigration policy doesn’t allow them to stay. Related: The Extreme Shortage of High IQ Workers and TSMC To Send Hundreds More Workers To Speed U.S. Plant Construction

The sea ice around Antarctica is in sharp decline, scientists observed an all-time low in the amount of sea ice around the icy continent, following all-time lows in 2016, 2017 and 2022. Usually, the ice has been able to recover in winter but this year is different. For the first time, the sea ice extent has been unable to substantially recover this winter, leaving scientists baffled. Physical oceanographer Edward Doddridge said vast regions of the Antarctic coastline were ice free for the first time in the observational record. "To say unprecedented isn't strong enough, for those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it's five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we'd expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years." Antarctic Sea Ice Has Shrunk By An Area Nine Times The Size Of Britain and Earth Keeps Breaking Temperature Records Due to Global Warming

Normally there is a fairly close inverse relationship between unemployment and quits, a quit-rate version of the famous Beveridge Curve linking unemployment to vacancies. During the pandemic and its aftermath, however, quits were much higher than the normal relationship to the unemployment rate would have predicted, presumably reflecting the dislocation of labor markets in a time of wild and crazy changes. Here too we see recombobulation, with the relationship of quits to unemployment moving back toward the historical norm, which is probably the main reason wage growth appears to be slowing. Stories about recombobulation — the fading away of pandemic-era distortions — driving disinflation are clearly supported by the data. Claims that Fed tightening drove it are sketchier and much more speculative. Which is not to say that the Fed was wrong to raise rates. Related: When Should We Declare Victory Over Inflation? and The Second Great Experiment Update and Fiscal Arithmetic and the Global Inflation Outlook

Adjusted durables remain volatile, of course, but over 3 months are now close to typical pre-pandemic lows. Services remain elevated, about 2ppts above pre-pandemic norms. Overall, the Fed can be encouraged by the disinflation of underlying core inflation—though the reading is still well above 2%.  There may be two risks ahead. The first would be if durables goods begin to show even sharper deflation, perhaps portending more general price pressures. The second is if service inflation becomes entrenched at current levels—lower than a year ago, but well above a rate consistent with the Fed’s target.

The unemployment rates in 25 states are currently at or within 0.1 percentage point of a record low [according to] Bureau of Labor Statistics data. In a dozen states and DC, the number of people on payrolls remains below pre-pandemic levels. That includes New York and Hawaii. Idaho, Utah, Texas, and Florida were among the states with the biggest gains in employment since February 2020. Related: Labor Inelasticity and Unions’ Inflation Warning? and America Is Barreling Toward a Summer of Strikes

American prime age 25-54 labor force participation is at a two decade high of 83.5% as an uptick in prime age female LFP has offset a decline in male prime age LFP since 2000. In the first months of the pandemic, nearly four million prime-age workers left the labor market, pushing participation in early 2020 to the lowest level since 1983—before women had become as much of a force in the workplace. Prime-age workers now exceed prepandemic levels by almost 2.2 million. The resurgence of midcareer workers is driven by women taking jobs. The labor-force participation rate for prime-age women was the highest on record, 77.8% in June. That is well up from 73.5% in April 2020. Related: The Labor Supply Rebound from the Pandemic and Where Are the Missing Gen Z Workers

Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation.  The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families.  Highly selective public colleges that follow more standardized processes to evaluate applications exhibit smaller disparities in admissions rates by parental income than private colleges that use more holistic evaluations. Related: Why Do Wages Grow Faster for Educated Workers? and Multidimensional Human Capital and the Wage Structure and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

The biggest recipient of Chinese investment so far this year is nickel-rich Indonesia, according to a preliminary estimate of Chinese investments compiled by the American Enterprise Institute. Direct overseas investment from China to the rest of the world fell by 18% from a year earlier by one new measure released recently. The latest level marks a decline of 25% from a peak in 2016, as overseas mergers and acquisitions have plummeted and Beijing has tightened rules to curb capital flight. Related: Exodus of Wealthy Chinese Accelerates with End of Covid Zero and Singapore Asks Banks to Keep Quiet on Wealth Inflows During China Boom and The Mysterious $300 Billion Flow Out of China

A marked change in the occupational structure of jobs has meant that the proportion of low pay, low skill, informal sector jobs has been rising at the expense of higher paid, high skill jobs in manufacturing and construction. According to Stanford University professor Scott Rozelle, the ratio of informal to formal sector jobs 15 years ago was 40:60, but has now flipped. This is a particular problem for younger workers who are over-represented in low pay sectors and the gig economy. Related: China’s Youth Left Behind As Jobs Crisis Mounts and Why Has Youth Unemployment Risen So Much in China? and Can China Fix Youth Unemployment Woes With Military Recruitment Drive?

More than a century of long-term population growth in California could be over, according to new projections that show the state will have about the same number of people in 2060 as it does now. The California Department of Finance predicts that there’ll be 39.5 million people in the state by 2060. Just three years ago, forecasters were expecting the number to be 45 million — and a decade ago, the population was seen surging to almost 53 million. If there’s a bright spot in the forecast, the state is at least expected to recoup its pandemic population decline in the coming years — returning to its 2020 population level in the 2030s, before peaking in 2044. Related: Taxes, Revenues, and Net Migration In California and The Population of California Declined, Again

Related: War and Subsidies Have Turbocharged the Green Transition and Clean Energy Sets $1.1 Trillion Record That’s Bound to Be Broken 

In a landmark step for enhanced geothermal technology’s potential as a dependable carbon-free energy source, startup Fervo Energy has wrapped up a full-scale, 30-day well test at its Project Red site in northern Nevada, which was able to generate 3.5 megawatts of electricity. (One megawatt can power roughly 750 homes at once.) Project Red will connect to the grid later this year and power Google's data centers and infrastructure throughout Nevada. With the demo complete, Fervo is attempting to repeat its success at its southwest Utah site, which is currently under construction. With design improvements maximizing power output as expected, the Utah site is predicted to deliver about 400 megawatts by 2028, roughly enough electricity to power 300,000 homes at once. Related: This Geothermal Startup Showed Its Wells Can Be Used Like a Giant Underground Battery

Wildfires in California and hurricanes in Florida produced lots of claims. Housing prices and bills for construction and repairs have gone up, making claims larger. And insurance companies have had to pay more for reinsurance: Worldwide, average rates for reinsurance rose by a quarter last year and by another third this year, according to the London-based reinsurance broker Howden Tiger, an arm of Howden Group Holdings. Related: Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse and Farmers Insurance Limits Sales in Florida, California Amid Storm, Wildfire Risks and Your Homeowners’ Insurance Bill Is the Canary in the Climate Coal Mine 

We show that, rather than resulting from a smooth upward trend, the increase was almost entirely concentrated in the 2007-2010 period, the time of the Great Recession, a result not uncovered in prior work. The disproportionate increase in pain among the less educated is also shown to have occurred primarily at the time of the Recession, with either little or no trend before or after. The Recession jump occurred only at older ages and primarily only at the points during each cohort’s lifetime when they experienced the Recession. However, we too find the jump difficult to explain, for while there is necessarily a temporary decline in employment during a Recession, why there should be a permanent increase in pain as a result is unclear. Related: Drug Overdose Deaths Topped 100,000 Again in 2022 and America’s Work Ethic Is Under Assault 

TSMC Chairman Mark Liu said construction in Arizona is hampered by a shortage of skilled workers and that the company might have to bring in experienced technicians temporarily from Taiwan. He said this would delay the start of mass production of 4-nanometer chips in the first factory until 2025.  Previously TSMC described the 4-nanometer chip as the leading product of the first Arizona factory and said production would start in 2024. Overall, it expects to invest $40 billion in Arizona.   “We are now entering a critical phase of handling and installing the most advanced and dedicated equipment. However, we are encountering certain challenges,” Liu said. Related: TSMC To Send Hundreds More Workers To Speed U.S. Plant Construction and The Semiconductor Trade War

While small firms account for 49% of U.S. employment, they account for just 16% of business spending on R&D, while firms of more than 25,000 workers account for 36%. Likewise, small firms account for 18.8% of patents issued, while the largest firms account for 37.4% of patents. When ITIF surveyed almost 1,000 U.S. scientists and engineers involved in filing triadic patents (patents filed in the United States, Europe, and Japan), they found that approximately 75% of materials science and IT patents and 60% of life science patents were filed by firms with more than 500 employees. Countering the popular narrative that large firms are sluggish copiers and small firms the true innovators, firms with 500 or fewer workers in the sample accounted for only around 30% of patents, yet they employed 48.4% of workers. Related: Mega Firms and Recent Trends in the U.S. Innovation: Empirical Evidence from the U.S. Patent Data and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

Dunn and Folk gathered 494 peer-reviewed papers, in which one of the five happiness strategies was evaluated against a control group. When they weeded out weakly designed work, only 57 studies were left. The vast majority of papers were too poorly designed to support their conclusions. The remaining subset of studies met at least one of two conditions for good science: They included sufficient numbers of study participants or the researchers committed to hypotheses or study plans before analyzing their data. These studies failed to confirm that three of the five activities made people happy. “The evidence melts away when you look at it,” Dunn said. A handful of scandals in psychology in the 2010s—including a bombshell paper that demonstrated the danger of p-hacking—sent shock waves through the field and forced researchers to re-examine the status quo. This reform isn’t limited to psychology. “Every field that has bothered to look at issues of rigor and reproducibility in their evidence has found challenges."

If 16 million non-students "lying flat" at home or relying on their parents were included, the rate at that time could have been as high as 46.5%,  Zhang Dandan wrote in an online article in respected financial magazine Caixin. The article by Zhang, associate professor of Economics at the university's National School of Development, was published on Monday but has since been removed. The official youth jobless rate, which only includes people actively seeking work, rose further to a record 21.3% in June after the world's second-biggest economy lost steam in the second quarter. Related: Why Has Youth Unemployment Risen So Much in China? and China’s Youth Left Behind As Jobs Crisis Mounts

While clearly not all of the foreign asset allocation that was previously done by Saudi Central Bank is now being done by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), some significant portion of it does seem to be. Hence a look at PIF’s Annual Reports can provide some basic insights into some aspects of the new form of petro-dollar recycling. In particular, we focus on the more transparent and traditional assets PIF shows on balance sheet. Of the roughly $777bn in total assets at end 2022, $305bn are listed as current assets, and $472bn are listed as non-current assets. However, of the non-current assets, nearly half—$225bn—are held as investment securities. Related: The New Geopolitics of Global Finance

The share of mega firms in novel patent applications had been declining for almost two decades but there has been a turnaround since the early-mid 2000s. By the mid-2010s, the share of mega-firms was the highest since 1980 when our sample starts. We show that mega firms are more likely to apply for novel patents even after controlling for various firm characteristics including size, industry, and the total number of patents. This finding also holds within firms––firms produce more novel patents than before as they become mega firms. This suggests that closing on market leadership is associated with more, not less new combinations. We also examine the opposite side of the spectrum, the not-yet-public VC-backed startups, and find that those also play a disproportionately large role in generating novel patents, especially “hit” novel patents, so that successful novel patents appear to be produced in a bi-modal pattern, both by super large mega firms and relatively small startups. Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone? Employment Dynamics of US Inventors 

More than 650,000 American workers are threatening to go on strike this summer — or have already done so — in an avalanche of union activity not seen in the US in decades. The combined actors and writers strikes in Hollywood are already a once-in-a-generation event. Unions for UPS and Detroit’s Big Three automakers are poised to join them in coming weeks if contract negotiations fall through. One Bank of America Corp. analyst put the odds of a United Auto Workers strike at more than 90%. And while logistics experts and financial analysts expected the Teamsters to reach a deal with UPS, their confidence has dwindled as the July 31 deadline approaches. Even before the 100,000-plus actors joined in last week, both the number of strikes and workers on strike were up in the first half of this year. Related: Unions Inflation Warning 

Consider the Social Capital Index developed by the Joint Economic Committee. States shaded red and orange have the lowest levels of social capital, whereas states shaded green and blue have the highest levels of social capital. Each of the five states in the lowest decile of social capital—Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, and Arizona—consistently rank below the median on each subindex, suggesting that each subindex captures related features of social capital. Similarly, the six states in the highest decile of social capital—Utah, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado—tend to rank above the median across subindexes. Of the 21 cross-state correlations among the seven subindexes, all but one are positive.

A sustained exodus over the next few years will likely continue to drive Chinese property investments abroad. About 712,000 people from the country will migrate to the US, Canada, and Australia from 2023 to 2025, a report by real estate firm Juwai IQI’s estimated. Capital flight from the mainland could reach $150 billion this year, as more people park their money abroad for fear of additional measures at home. Related: Booming Chinese Family Offices Recruit Top Bankers in Singapore and China Notes, July ’23: On Technological Momentum 

Figure 1 shows that the ambitious mission to send a manned crew to the Moon led to a massive expansion of federal investment in R&D – NASA received over 0.7 percent of GDP at the peak of the Space Race.  Space Race spending was economically large so we might expect local effects through a fiscal multiplier channel even without technological spillovers. We compare the fiscal multiplier for NASA contractor spending implied by our estimates to the literature to get a sense of this. We find that R&D contractor spending on the Space Race had a similar impact as typical government expenditures. There is no credible empirical estimate of the space mission’s contribution to economic growth. The magnitudes of the estimated effects seem to align with those of other non-R&D types of government expenditures.

The S&P has had a strong first half of 2023, increasing 15.91%, the NASDAQ has delivered almost twice that return, with its tech focus.After a year for the record books, in 2022, when the expected return on stocks (the cost of equity) increased from 5.75% to 9.82%, the largest one-year increase in that number in history, we have had not just a more subdued year in 2023, but one where the expected return has come back down to 8.81%. In the process, the implied equity risk premium, which peaked at 5.94% on January 1, 2023, is back down to 5% at the start of July 2023. Even after that drop, equity risk premiums are still at roughly the average value since 2008. If the essence of a bubble is that equity risk premiums become "too low", the numbers, at least for the moment, don't seem to be signaling a bubble. Related: Data Update 2 for 2023: A Rocky Year for Equities

46 million Americans owe some money to the Department of Education for their student loans. The vast majority of borrowers also have comparatively small balances remaining, with 3/4 of debtors having balances less than $40k and 1/2 having balances under $20k. The small contingent of borrowers with large balances holds a disproportionately large share of the outstanding debt—although they make up only 16% of total borrowers, those with balances in excess of $60,000 hold the majority of student loan debt. Related: Debt Moratoria: Evidence from Student Loan Forbearance

Social sciences researchers hoping to become public influencers have one clear path: through the mainstream media. Unfortunately, journalists aren’t unbiased arbiters. For more than a decade, the media has praised economists Saez, Zucman and Piketty. Their data purport to show the income share of the top 1% of [US] earners climbed to 21% in 2019 from 9% in 1970. In a recent paper that has received far less attention, Auten of the U.S. Treasury and Splinter of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation find the income share of the top 1% climbed to 13.7% in 2019 from 9.2% in 1970. and, incorporating increases in redistributive government policy, the income share of the top 1% only increased to 8.8% in 2019 from 6.8% in 1970. In 2017, [Harvard’s Raj Chetty]  published findings that U.S. trends in the likelihood of children achieving a higher income status than their parents has grown progressively worse, a point that received intense media coverage. Research published by Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute shows the fall in mobility was a direct consequence, not of inequality, but of slowing economic growth that began in the 1970s. Journalists’ propensity to ignore research that refutes their beliefs encourages academics to pander to the liberal tilt of mainstream news organizations, leading to the general public’s misunderstanding of important policy issues.

The general political environment poses perhaps the greatest threat to technological momentum. In the last few months, I’ve chatted with a good number of Chinese undergrads in the US, who almost to a person tell me that their parents are urging them not to return to the mainland. China retains considerable strengths, one which doesn’t depend so much on slowing economic growth or demographic drags. The main one is its entrenched workforce that continues to advance manufacturing complexity. I think about the humming engine that is outlined by Kevin Kelly’s concept of the “technium” that describes an ecosystem of intertwined, co-dependent, and complex technologies with a mind of its own. But I grow less certain that a third-Xi term China will sustain an innovative drive. Related: 2022 Letter and U.S. Bound Migrants Surge at Darien Jungle Crossing in Panama 

Chinese growth in 2023 has been anemic, especially relative to the starting point. So far this year, economic output was just 5.5% higher than in the first half of 2022, which in turn was up only 2.5% compared to the first half of 2021. Officially, China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew just 0.8% between 2023Q1 and Q2 compared to the 2017-2019 quarterly average of 1.6%. That would be bad enough, but there is also reason to think that output may actually have shrunk in the most recent quarter. Nominal spending in March-June 2023 was 16.6% higher than in March-June 2019, which corresponds to an average yearly growth rate of just 3.9%. Before the pandemic, Chinese consumer spending was rising about 7.4% a year. Related: Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent? and The Neoclassical Growth of China 

The US current account deficit, the largest deficit of all, is mainly financed via portfolio debt flows. Geographically, the financing of the US current account deficit has become increasingly mediated by financial centers in recent years. This contrasts with the pre-GFC period, when the US current account deficit was financed largely through reserve accumulation from surplus countries. Balance-of-payments data show a declining role for China. Related: Brad Sester On The Balance Of Payments  and How Was the U.S. Current Account Deficit Financed In 2022? 

The link between extreme heat and population growth was strongly positive in the 1980s.  That relationship weakened substantially over the subsequent two decades and vanished entirely over 2010-2020. The projections for the decades ahead show a continuation of this pivot.  “Hot” climate counties have gotten considerably hotter -  to a point where they are no longer as tolerable.  The 90th percentile county over 1951-1980 averaged about 62 days per year of daily average temperatures above 80◦F. That number grew to 72 days from 1991-2020. The projected climate changes are predicted to cause a general shifting of population from the Southeast and parts of the Southwest to the North, the Mountain West, and most of the Pacific coastline. Related: Sunbelt Cities Nashville and Austin Are Nation’s Hottest Job Markets and Young Families Have Not Returned to Large Cities Post-Pandemic 

Artificial intelligence could exert downward pressure on consumer prices if it provides the sort of large, sustained boost to productivity growth that we expect. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a similar productivity boom led by the technology sector enabled the Fed to let the labor market become quite tight by historical standards without running into an inflation problem. A future productivity boom should have similar effects. Artificial intelligence is likely to boost productivity by lowering production costs and improving consumer goods and services in more qualitative ways. These effects should also lower measured consumer prices. Related: Summers and Blanchard Debate the Future of Interest Rates and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate?

This paper documents the economic consequences of a large amnesty program implemented in France. In July 1981, the newly elected government of President François Mitterrand proposed to regularize all undocumented workers. The regularized workers were predominantly male, low-skill, and lived disproportionately in the Paris region. The regularized immigrants composed 2.0% of workers in Paris and nearly 1% of all workers in France. In short, by reducing monopsony power in the undocumented labor market, a regularization program improves labor market efficiency and can generate a substantial increase in output, a “regularization surplus.” Our empirical analysis of employment, wage, and output data in the French labor market confirms that the regularization program indeed had positive effects on the employment and wages of many groups, and particularly for male, low-skill workers. Moreover, there was a sizable jump in the growth rate of per-capita GDP in the affected region, suggesting an increase in total French GDP of around 1%. Related: Immigration to Drive All US Population Growth Within Two Decades and Immigrants & Their Kids Were 70% of U.S. Labor Force Growth Since 1995

The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal. During Covid’s worst phases, the total number of Americans dying each day was more than 30% higher than normal, a shocking increase. For long stretches of the past three years, the excess was above 10%. But during the past few months, excess deaths have fallen almost to zero, according to three different measures. The Human Mortality Database estimates that slightly fewer Americans than normal have died since March, while The Economist magazine and the Center for Disease Control both put the excess-death number below 1% percent. Related: Our Model Suggests That Global Deaths Remain 5% Above Pre-Covid Forecasts 

Since 40%-60% of IPOs generate negative returns even in good times, their value proposition is whether a small subset of winners offsets all the losers. A highly skewed investment universe is characterized by average returns that are much higher than median. As shown below, IPOs are an example of that; in many years, average net returns were positive while median net returns were close to zero. But these positive average returns are highly skewed: look how quickly they decline when excluding the best 3%, 5%, and 7% of IPOs. Even when only excluding the top 3%, average net returns become negative, and average absolute returns fall by more than half. In other words, long-term IPO survival odds are low and skewed to a small number of mega-winners.

In East Asia and Europe, extraordinary numbers of retirees will be dependent on a shrinking number of working-age people to support them. Not only are Asian countries aging much faster, but some are also becoming old before they become rich. While Japan, South Korea, and Singapore have relatively high income levels, China reached its peak working-age population at 20 percent the income level that the United States had at the same point. Vietnam reached the same peak at 14 percent the same level. Slightly higher fertility rates and more immigration mean the United States and Australia, for example, will be younger than most other rich countries in 2050. In both the United States and Australia, just under 24 percent of the population is projected to be 65 or older in 2050, according to U.N. projections — far higher than today, but lower than in most of Europe and East Asia, which will top 30 percent. Related: The Forever Labour Shortage and Fully Grown - European Vacation!

At the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, nominal consumer spending was rising about 7% annualized. So far this year, nominal PCE is rising about 6% annualized. The change in spending has been negligible compared to the slowdown in inflation, which suggests that improvements in the match between real production and demand have been more important than any shift in monetary policy. None of this is to suggest that interest rates should have stayed at zero, but it does suggest that the bulk of the disinflation that we have experienced so far can be attributed to benign developments in businesses’ ability to produce the real goods and services that consumers want.

The New Tenant Repeat Rent (NTRR) Index uses the same underlying microdata as the CPI to look at price changes for only the subset of units where new tenants have signed leases. That gives a much better picture of where the housing market is right now, and by proxy where official rent inflation is headed. Critically, the NTRR tends to lead the official CPI rent components by one year—and right now, it is saying we should expect significant disinflation over the next three quarters. Inflation is now mostly a housing phenomenon—rising rents are the single-largest contributor to the CPI by a wide margin, and outside of shelter headline inflation has completely flatlined over the last year. Related: New Tenant Repeat Rent Index 

The eurozone economy grew about 6% over the past 15 years, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the U.S., according to International Monetary Fund data. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every U.S. state except Idaho and Mississippi. Private consumption has declined by about 1% in the 20-nation eurozone since the end of 2019 after adjusting for inflation. In the U.S., where households enjoy a strong labor market and rising incomes, it has increased by nearly 9%. The European Union now accounts for about 18% of all global consumption spending, compared with 28% for America. Fifteen years ago, the EU and the U.S. each represented about a quarter of that total. Related: From Strength To Strength and The Economics Of Inequality In High-Wage Economies 

Americans’ growing paychecks surpassed inflation for the first time in two years, providing some financial relief to workers, while complicating the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tame price increases. Inflation-adjusted average hourly wages rose 1.2% in June from a year earlier, according to the Labor Department. That marked the second straight month of seasonally adjusted gains after two years when workers’ historically elevated raises were erased by price increases. Related: US Job and Wage Growth Beat Expectations, Making the Fed’s Job Harder and Low Earners in the US Enjoy Fastest Wage Growth

The return of money funds as major investors in bills provides a mechanism where banking system reserves can be replenished and removes a significant obstacle to QT. While the recent bout of bill issuance was largely used to replenish the Treasury General Account (TGA), future bill issuance will be used to finance ongoing government spending. This means that money will flow out of the RRP, into the TGA, and then be spent into the banking system through fiscal spending. Bank reserves can remain abundant for an extended period of time, and net deposit outflows will be smaller than expected. QT can continue for the expected two more years given that bank reserves are likely to remain abundant. Related: Probing LCLoR and How Was the U.S. Current Account Deficit Financed In 2022? 

A new Pew Research Center analysis of verified voters and nonvoters in 2022, 2020, 2018, and 2016 finds that partisan differences in turnout – rather than vote switching between parties – account for most of the Republican gains in voting for the House last year. Overall, 68% of those who voted in the 2020 presidential election turned out to vote in the 2022 midterms. Former President Donald Trump’s voters turned out at a higher rate in 2022 (71%) than did President Joe Biden’s voters (67%). Relatively small shares of voters defected from their partisan affiliation or 2020 presidential vote. Among those who voted for both president in 2020 and for a House representative in 2022, just 6% crossed party lines between elections or voted for third-party candidates in either election. Related: What Happened In 2022 and Millennials Are Not an Exception. They’ve Moved to the Right

The value of US energy exports is now a significant component of total US exports. US exports last year hit $3,108 billion, making energy’s $420 billion 13.5% of the total. The growth contribution from energy is even more impressive. US exports jumped $541 billion last year from 2021’s level of $2,567 billion, which means the energy export advance of $143 billion easily comprised more than 25% of total export growth. Related: Portfolio Nuclear and Energy and the Presidents 

Insurance companies can be exposed to climate-related physical risk through their operations and to transition risk through their $12T of financial asset holdings. We assess the climate risk [CRISK] exposure of property and casualty [P&C] and life insurance companies in the U.S. In terms of transition risk for life insurers, we observe a notable increase in their transition climate beta during the 2019-20 fossil fuel price collapse. The aggregate transition CRISK for life insurers in the U.S. also significantly rose by more than $ 150B, equivalent to around 28% of their market cap. Excluding concurrent undercapitalization, the marginal CRISK attributed solely to climate stress increased by more than $ 85B during the same period. In terms of physical risk for P&C insurers, we find that the top ten P&C insurers mostly had negative CRISK values [excess reserves], indicating no sign of potential systemic under-capitalization under physical climate stress. As of the end of 2020, their aggregate marginal CRISK stood at $15B, equivalent to approximately 7% of their market cap. Related: Farmers Insurance Limits Sales in Florida, California Amid Storm, Wildfire Risks, Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse and Florida Ocean Temperatures At ‘Downright Shocking’ Levels

The cost of servicing US government debt jumped by 25% in the first nine months of the fiscal year, reaching $652 billion and contributing to a major widening in the budget deficit. For the nine months through June, the federal deficit hit $1.39 trillion, up some 170% from the same period the year before, according to Treasury Department data released on Thursday. As lower-yielding securities mature, the Treasury faces steady increases in the rates it pays on outstanding debt. The weighted average interest for total outstanding debt by the end of June was 2.76%, the highest level since February 2012, according to the Treasury. That’s up from 1.80% a year before, the department’s data show. Related: Net Interest Payments On External US Debt and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years

The main reason to worry is that nominal wages have consistently been rising about 5%-6% a year since last summer. The drop in the share of workers quitting their jobs for better opportunities elsewhere and the declining wage premium for workers switching jobs do not seem to be having an impact (yet). Regardless of what I want to happen, the experience of the past three years makes me reluctant to conclude that something fundamental has changed after only a few months of somewhat encouraging data. Broad price inflation cannot remain disconnected from nominal income growth by very much over any meaningful time horizon. At this point, the hope is that the current bout of disinflation buys time for wage growth to (somehow) slow down on its own without the need for any active measures to hurt the economy. The alternative does not seem to be priced in. Related: Furman On CPI Report 

This inflationary crisis was caused by excessive fiscal spending and it needs to be corrected by reducing fiscal spending. Demographic forces now act in the other direction [vs. the 1970s] and they are pushing up the pace of mandatory spending, even as growing geopolitical pressures demand ever more military spending. The inevitable conclusion is that Central Banks will ultimately have to purchase more and more government debt, or in other words create monetary inflation. Monetary inflation may not be the same thing as high street inflation, but over the long term, it runs close. Our two key criteria are: (1) rising Global Liquidity and (2) falling underlying inflation. Our analysis shows that a 2% point fall in trend inflation is equivalent to a 60% jump in Global Liquidity. Related: The Return Of Quantitative Easing 

23% percent of all mortgages outstanding have an interest rate below 3%, 38% are between 3% and 4%, and only 9% of all mortgages outstanding were originated with an interest rate above 6%. The bottom line is that homeowners across America do not have any incentive to move and get a new mortgage with mortgage rates currently at 7.25%. This is a key reason why the supply in the housing market continues to be so low. Related: Inflation Adjusted House Prices 3.8% Below Peak and The Great Pandemic Mortgage Refinance Boom

Mexico became the top U.S. trading partner at the beginning of 2023, with total bilateral trade between the two countries totaling $263 billion during the first four months of this year. Mexico’s gains mirror its rise in manufacturing, a key component of goods moving between it and the U.S. During the first four months of 2023, total trade of manufactured goods between Mexico and the U.S. reached $234.2 billion. Overall, Mexican imports to the U.S. totaled $157 billion; U.S. exports to Mexico reached $107 billion. Mexico–U.S. trade during the first four months of 2023 represented 15.4 percent of all the goods exported and imported by the U.S.; the Canada–U.S. share followed at 15.2 percent and then the China–U.S. share at 12.0 percent. Related: Pettis on “Friend-Shoring”  and Global Trade Is Shifting, Not Reversing

The production of war minerals is extremely concentrated. For each of our 13 war materials, the top three exporters account for more than 60% of global supply. China is the biggest producer, by far, for eight of these minerals; Congo, a troubled mining country, tops the ranking for another two; Brazil, a more reliable trading partner, produces nine-tenths of the world’s niobium, though most of it is sent to China. Many minerals are impossible to replace in the near term, especially for cutting-edge military uses. When substitution is possible, performance usually suffers. The combination of concentrated production, complex refining, and critical uses means trading happens under the radar.  All this makes building new supply chains much more difficult. Related: The U.S. China Rare Earths Battle and China’s Curb On Metal Exports Reverberates Across Chip Sector

As a share of global economic output, manufacturing has dropped from 19% in 1997 to 16% today, with the fall steepest in rich countries. In China and India industry’s share of economic output appears to be roughly where it was three decades ago, but even in these countries, it has slipped in recent years.  In recent decades there has been next to no relationship between economic growth and manufacturing’s share of the economy among countries in the OECD. Related: Why Laws Meant To Create Jobs Can Be So Destructive For Our Cities and New York State Built Elon Musk a $1 Billion Factory. ‘It Was a Bad Deal.’

Continued strength in manufacturing structures investment—which has grown at an average annualized rate of 43% over the last three quarters on the back of investment in battery and semiconductor facilities—should at least partly offset these headwinds to structures investment. The White House reports that companies have pledged $365bn of new battery and semiconductor investments over the last two years.  So far, only $90bn of investment has been tallied in the relevant construction spending category for battery and semiconductor facilities since the start of 2021, suggesting that the level of spending could remain elevated for quite some time (the current monthly annualized rate stands at $112bn vs. ~$10bn two years ago, or 0.40% of annual GDP vs. 0.05% of GDP). Related: Making Manufacturing Great Again and Unpacking the Boom in U.S. Construction of Manufacturing Facilities

During the first half of 2022, the LFP rate of partnered women with children increased by 1.06 percentage points. Our results suggest that had it not been for rising child care worker wages, we would have likely seen an even stronger LFP rate of partnered women with children today. One reason why this group dramatically increased their market work, despite the rising child care prices, may be related to the rise in the prevalence of telecommuting jobs for which this particular group has a high preference. Related: How Child Care Impacts Parents’ Labor Force Participation

Farmers Insurance is limiting sales of homeowners policies in Florida and California, becoming the latest big insurer to pull back from the hurricane- and wildfire-prone states. In Florida, Farmers is ending sales of home, auto, and umbrella insurance policies under its own brand, representing about 30% of the policies it sells in the state, the company said. It will continue offering insurance through other brands, including those for high-risk drivers, according to the statement. The ending of Farmers-branded sales in Florida affects around 89,000 policies, a person familiar with the matter said. Related: Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse and Florida Ocean Temperatures At ‘Downright Shocking’ Levels

The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19° cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside buildings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40%. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air. Jeremy Munday, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis, calculated that if materials such as Purdue’s ultra-white paint were to coat between 1% and 2% of the Earth’s surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising.

New York state paid to build a quarter-mile-long facility with 1.2 million square feet of industrial space, which it now owns and leases to Tesla for $1 a year. It bought $240 million worth of solar-panel manufacturing equipment. Musk had said that by 2020 the Buffalo plant each week would churn out enough solar-panel shingles to cover 1,000 roofs. A state comptroller’s audit found just 54 cents of economic benefit for every subsidy dollar spent on the factory, which rose on the site of an old steel mill. External auditors have written down nearly all of New York’s investment.  Related: Making Manufacturing Great Again and  Why Laws Meant To Create Jobs Can Be So Destructive For Our Cities

The US is the world's big net debtor -- with net external debt of around 50% of its GDP. The US is now getting 4% on average on its loans, while only paying 3% on its borrowing (mostly bonds) the implied net interest rate on US external debt works out to be 2.4% -- well below any current US interest rate. And as a result, net interest payments as a share of US GDP are only up 15 bps of US GDP or so (not much really). These predictable dynamics slow the adjustment in the U.S. balance of payments to higher interest rates, but they don't eliminate it. Net interest payments have a lot further to rise. They certainly will top their pre-GFC peak as a share of US GDP (1.5% or so). Related: Interest Costs Will Grow The Fastest Over The Next 30 Years and American Gothic

As of February 2023, the number of child care workers in the U.S. was about 6% below its pre-pandemic level while the cost of child care was up by 14%. The shortage of child care workers and rising child care prices have been deemed partly responsible for the lackluster rebound of labor force participation rates. Consistent with this hypothesis, a larger share of nonworking parents of young children and those working only part time currently report child care needs as the main reason for their low work hours. This fraction increased from about 15% prior to the pandemic to 18% in February 2023.  Interestingly, women with a partner and young children—the group we expected to be most sensitive to child care prices—showed the strongest rebound with their LFP index having surpassed its pre-pandemic level. As a result, we do not see clear evidence for weaker labor supply rebounds among households with small children by early 2023.

Related: Understanding The Missing Millions

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the cumulative decline of under-five populations in large urban counties is now more than 6% —nearly twice the rate of decline nationally.  Large urban areas are losing families with young children substantially faster than they are losing population overall. While the under-five population in such counties fell 6.1% between April 2020 and July 2022, the overall population declined by just 0.9%.  In some of the country’s very largest counties, including New York, Cook County, IL, and Los Angeles, the population of young children is more than 10% smaller than in April 2020.  Out-migration of young families from large and small urban counties has been more severe in the Mid-Atlantic and West Coast, while the under-five population actually grew in urban counties in the Southeast last year.

Related: Sunbelt Cities Nashville and Austin Are Nation’s Hottest Job Markets

The headline is CPI inflation fell to 3.0%. But mostly this is the huge June 2022 # dropping out & what is almost certainly a transitory 17% fall in energy prices over the last yr. But underneath the #s show moderation, with the lowest core reading of the inflationary period. Overall what is happening is that service price growth is gradually slowing--as was predictable and predicted given the lags in the shelter measure. And goods price growth which was unusually (and likely transitorily) high in recent months turned back down again.  The collapsing of "supercore," which excludes food, energy, shelter, and used cars (the narrowest category BLS publishes) is even more dramatic. Overall, core PCE inflation is still running well above Fed's target. Economy is very strong. Interest rates are not that high & most of the relevant increases happened a while ago. The banking sector stabilized. Fiscal policy may be mildly expansionary. Fed should still do more.

The Fed has raised the Fed funds rate to 5%, and the lagged effects of Fed hikes will continue to drag down growth over the coming 12 months. See chart above, which shows a simulation with the impact of a 5% increase in the Fed funds rate on the level of GDP done on a variant of the Fed’s FR/BUS model of the US economy. In other words, the transmission mechanism of monetary policy takes time, and the drag on growth from lagged Fed hikes over the coming year will be significant. That is why a recession is a more likely outcome than a soft landing, no matter what happens to inflation.

The late, great Rudi Dornbusch once opined, “The crisis takes a much longer time in coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.”. This idea got me thinking about what I am calling “slow burn Minsky moments.” Recall that Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis holds that stability begets instability. In essence, I am referring to situations characterized by economically unsustainable processes or systemic vulnerabilities that build up during “good times” but carry within them either the seeds of their own destruction or create fragilities that exacerbate any external shock far beyond what may have been commonly expected. Richard Vague suggests that a ratio of private sector debt to GDP in excess of 150% is an important threshold. As Exhibit 1 shows, the U.S. has spent most of the last 20 years at or above this level! No wonder we have experienced a litany of financial crises over this period.

As of February, retail employment in New York City sagged 38,000 jobs (11%) from its pre-pandemic level of 340,000 with no gain since, according to the Center for an Urban Future. The sector has declined since peaking at 360,000 jobs in 2015. Manhattan has been hardest hit, with a 20% decline. The other boroughs had single-digit declines. Subsectors facing the stiffest online competition have been hardest hit, with clothing employment down 34%, department stores off 20%, and general merchandise declining about 13%. The sector’s struggles are a key reason for the city’s high Black unemployment rate of 12.2%, compared to just over 1% for white workers. Workers of color account for 7 of 10 retail employees in the city.

In advanced economies, there’s a significant positive relationship between core inflation and sovereign debt growth since the start of the pandemic. The fiscal expansions delivered this decade will likely lead to price levels adjusting permanently higher. But this is not the same thing as permanently higher inflation: Our base case is that as temporary pandemic-related deficits gradually normalize, inflation is likely to diminish – and today’s restrictive monetary policies aim to accelerate this process. And unlike in the 1970s, monetary policy credibility appears intact, with medium-term inflation expectations still anchored around central bank targets. Related: The Second Great Experiment Update, Inflation and Debt Across Countries and Waining Inflation, Supply and Demand

There was a big expansion in M2 before the US inflation. Monetarists took a victory lap. M2 has since fallen a lot. There is not much correlation between monetary expansion and inflation across countries, however. The slope of the regression also clearly depends on one or two points.  Money or debt, which is it? When governments print money to finance deficits (or interest-bearing reserves), fiscal theory and monetary theory agree, there is inflation. Printing money (helicopters) is perhaps particularly powerful, as debt carries a reputation and tradition of repayment, which money may not carry. A core issue separating monetary and fiscal theory is whether a big monetary expansion without deficits or other fiscal news would have any effects. Would a $5 trillion QE (buy bonds, issue money) with no deficit have had the same inflationary impact? Monetarists, yes; fiscalists, no. Related: The Second Great Experiment Update, Waining Inflation, Supply and Demand and Fiscal Arithmetic and the Global Inflation Outlook

The foundational idea of our approach is that innovation in any one industry relies on complementary innovations in—and subsequent productivity gains from—its input and idea suppliers. Our framework yields a simple estimating equation that links growth in sectoral TFP to both the average TFP and the dispersion (variance) of TFP among that sector’s inputs. We estimate this equation using 462 manufacturing industries between 1977 and 2007, and also for the entire US economy between 1987 and 2007 by combining our manufacturing data with 42 non-manufacturing industries. Our estimates indicate that greater dispersion of TFP growth among an industry’s suppliers exerts a powerful negative influence on its own growth opportunities. At face value, our evidence implies that the bulk of the productivity slowdown in the United States (and several other industrialized economies) can be explained by the sizable increase in the cross-industry variance of TFP growth and innovation. Related: The Productivity Slowdown in Advanced Economies: Common Shocks or Common Trends? and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

We find substantial white flight from Asian students entering high-socioeconomic status suburban districts: on average, the arrival of one Asian student in a suburban school district leads to the departure of 1.5 white students, a rate of white flight that is somewhat lower but not too dissimilar from flight from Black/Hispanic We find substantial white flight from Asian students entering high-socioeconomic status suburban districts: on average, the arrival of one Asian student in a suburban school district leads to the departure of 1.5 white students, a rate of white flight that is somewhat lower but not too dissimilar from flight from Black/Hispanic populations documented in different settings. Academic performance also rises with Asian entry to high-SES suburban districts. After ruling out correlated patterns of Black/Hispanic entry and direct racial animus, and confirming that housing market dynamics cannot account for the observed departure rate, we suggest that white flight from high-SES districts may be due to parental concerns about academic competition, particularly in a state like CA where entry to public colleges and universities is determined in part by relative high school performance. This pattern is consistent with qualitative sociological evidence about white-Asian encounters in suburban settings. Related: Can Democrats Survive the Looming Crisis in New York City’s Outer Boroughs? and Where New York’s Asian Neighborhoods Shifted to the Right 

In the figures and tables that follow, NATO also uses economic and demographic information available from the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission (DG ECFIN), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In view of differences between both these sources and national GDP forecasts, and also the definition of NATO defence expenditure and national definitions, the figures shown in this report may diverge considerably from those which are quoted by media, published by national authorities, or given in national budgets. Equipment expenditure includes expenditure on major equipment as well as on research and development devoted to major equipment. Personnel expenditure includes pensions paid to retirees. Related: The Cost of the Global Arms Race and The Age-Old Question: How Do Governments Pay For Wars?

Delays at naval shipyards mean that nearly 40% of US attack submarines are out of commission for repairs, about double the rate the Navy would like, according to new data released by the service. As of this year, 18 of the US Navy’s 49 attack submarines — 37% — were out of commission, according to previously undisclosed Navy data published by the Congressional Research Service. That leaves the US at a critical disadvantage against China’s numerically superior fleet. That’s up from 28% overall in 2017 and 33% in 2022, and below the industry best practice of 20%. Related: Weapons Makers Can’t Hire Enough Workers as Ukraine War Drives Demand and US Can’t Keep Up with China’s Warship Building, Navy Secretary Says

In the desolate and oil-rich region of the Northwest Territories, nestled in the wooded Taiga Plains about 300 miles from the Arctic Ocean, the small town of Norman Wells hit 100 degrees on Saturday. It was “easily the farthest north in Canada with a reading of 37C (99F) or higher in the Canadian climate record,” tweeted climatologist Brian Brettschneider, before the mercury ultimately ticked up to 100. The scorching temperatures over western Canada exacerbated the country’s unprecedented wildfire crisis. A record 22.7 million acres (9.2 million hectares) have burned so far, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, blowing past the previous high mark of 17.5 million acres (7.1 million hectares) in 1995. There are months of the wildfire season to go. Related: Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse and Global Temperatures Have Broken Records Three Times In A Week

Much of Florida is seeing its warmest year on record, with temperatures running 3 to 5 degrees above normal. While some locations have been setting records since the beginning of the year, the hottest weather has come with an intense heat dome cooking the Sunshine State in recent weeks. That heat dome has made coastal waters extremely warm, including “downright shocking” temperatures of 92 to 96 degrees in the Florida Keys, meteorologist and journalist Bob Henson said Sunday in a tweet. “That’s boiling for them! More typically it would be in the upper 80s,” tweeted Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist at WFLA-TV in Tampa. The hot waters around Florida are connected to record-breaking ocean heat worldwide. About 40 percent of the world’s oceans are facing a marine heat wave, NOAA reported. That is the highest percentage on record, and it could reach 50 percent by September. Related: Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse and Global Temperatures Have Broken Records Three Times In A Week

The pandemic was a significant negative labor supply shock because it led to a wave of early retirements. This sudden labor shortage led to a spike in wages, which appeared to draw in people who were otherwise not looking for a job. The prime-age labor force participation rate has risen to multi-year highs and is not too far from all-time highs last seen in the 1990s. This suggests that there is very little slack in the labor market and additional workers will be increasingly difficult and expensive to find. While that shock has been digested, workers continue to retire and place increasing demand on a stagnant worker pool. In this scenario, moderating employment growth reflects labor scarcity and would be accompanied by reacceleration of wages similar to that seen in the most recent non-farm payroll report. Related: “The Great Retirement Boom”: The Pandemic-Era Surge in Retirements and Implications for Future Labor Force Participation and Unions’ Inflation Warning?

Statistics released last month by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics from the annual American Time Use Survey show that the time young men spent “playing games” — the survey doesn’t differentiate between electronic and non-electronic games, but most researchers assume it’s chiefly the former — rose by nearly three-quarters of an hour from 2019 to 2022, more than it had increased over the previous 16 years. It does appear that, since the pandemic, most of the additional gaming time has come from work and sports/exercise/recreation. American men 65 and older spent an average of just more than five hours a day watching TV in 2022, up from just more than four in 2003. Related: Is Technology Changing The Value Of Leisure? and Are We Ready For The Approaching Loneliness Epidemic?

This is how the imports to the US from Mexico and China have moved over the last three decades. For both countries, trade agreements made a huge difference, with Mexico suffering grievously from lost share after China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. Now, it appears to be benefiting from the retreat from China. These numbers are shown as 12-month moving averages to avoid the distortions that come with the Chinese lunar new year holiday. The last three months, on an un-smoothed basis, actually show Mexican imports exceeding those from China for the first time in 20 years. Related: Global Trade Is Shifting, Not Reversing and Globalization Isn’t Dead. But It’s Changing

Financial investors are snubbing copper. As interest rates rise, they prefer to hold cash-generating assets rather than commodities, which yield nothing. For much of this year,, “non-commercial” net positioning on copper-futures markets has been in the red, implying that more investors are betting prices will fall than recover. Yet today’s prices remain $2,500 a tonne above production costs at the marginal mine. This implies that the recent correction has taken froth out of the market, rather than pushed prices too low, suggesting they could stay subdued for a while. Supply may struggle to keep up. The average age of the world’s ten biggest mines is 64, which is forcing miners to dig deep for ores of ever lower quality, making each new tonne of refined copper costlier to produce. New mines are scarce. Assuming all certain and probable projects go ahead, McKinsey, a consultancy, forecasts that supply will hit 30m tonnes by 2031, 7m tonnes short of estimated demand. Related: Copper Mine Flashes Warning of ‘Huge Crisis’ for World Supply and Glencore Says This Time Is Different for Coming Copper Shortage

For EBITDA margins, we notice that PE firms tend to target companies outperforming their industries: EBITDA margin is on average 0.5% above industry standard in the three years before the deal. In the year the transaction is completed, the metric drop sharply. We hypothesize that major LBO transactions are distracting to management and lead to suboptimal outcomes from a sales and margin perspective during the deal year. Once the deal has been completed, growth and margins recover, but do not on average return to pre-deal levels. EBITDA margin averages out to exactly the industry standard, 50bps lower than pre-acquisition. While PE firms are typically praised for their efficiency and cost-control, the graph on EBITDA margins shows a negligible difference in actual profitability. The supposed efficiency and cost-cutting isn’t showing up in the numbers. Instead, PE firms appear to be buying slightly higher-performing companies that then experience some mean reversion post-acquisition. Related: Private Equity Fundamentals 

On July 3rd the average global air temperature reached a new record. On July 4th the average global air temperature reached a new record. And on July 6th the average global air temperature reached a new record. The biggest influence on the Earth’s temperature, aside from global warming, is the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This is the first El Niño in seven years. Previous highs have often occurred towards the end of a strong El Niño, when the warming pattern has heated the Earth. The recent switch to El Niño, therefore, is unlikely to be the cause of the latest record-breaking temperatures. Its effect should be in full swing next summer, when more records could be set. That would be the first time new records have been attained in two consecutive years. Related: Earth Keeps Breaking Temperature Records Due to Global Warming and Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse

During the 11-year period, the suicide rate among children aged 5 to 14 increased from about 0.2 to about 0.8 per 100,000 people, according to the study published June 23 in China CDC Weekly, the official journal of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The study also found that the suicide rate for 15- to 24-year-olds fell by 6.8% per year from 2010 to 2017, but then surged at an annual rate of 19.6% to 2021, the latest available data. Related: Youth Risk Behavior Survey and China Urges Jobless Graduates To ‘Roll Up Their Sleeves’ and Try Manual Work

In May, 20.8% of 16 to 24-year-olds were unemployed, the largest proportion since the data series started in 2018 and higher than in European countries such as France and Italy. China’s grueling national civil service examination, drew a record 2.6mn applicants this year, nearly twice the number in 2019. The success rate was just 1.4%. Why Has Youth Unemployment Risen So Much in China? and Can China Fix Youth Unemployment Woes With Military Recruitment Drive?

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) long-term baseline, federal spending as a percentage of GDP will grow to 29.1% over the next three decades. Driving a large part of that growth is spending on interest payments to service the national debt. Net interest payments hit a nominal dollar record of $475B Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 and will nearly triple by FY 2033 to $1.4T, growing to $2.7T in 2043 and $5.4T 2053. As a share of the economy, net interest will rise from 1.9% of GDP in FY 2022 to hit a record 3.2% by 2030 and more than double to 6.7% by 2053. By 2051, spending on interest will be the single largest line item in the federal budget, surpassing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all other mandatory and discretionary spending programs. Related: The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook and American Gothic

Production improvements since 2014 have pushed down the cost of drilling and fracking in the U.S. shale patch by 36%, according to J.P. Morgan, even as recovered oil volumes have increased. A major producer, EOG Resources, said it bored a well over 5 miles deep and nearly 3 miles long in South Texas early this year—a record length for the company. The increased efficiency means EOG can earn as much from oil priced at $42 a barrel today as it would have from oil trading at $86 nine years ago. People familiar with Saudi oil policy have said the government’s budget requires an estimated $81 a barrel. Brent crude is trading around $76 a barrel, down 13% from the start of the year.  Related: Portfolio Nuclear and Energy and the Presidents 

In 2021, US unemployment was 5.5% for those born in the country, and 5.6% for those born overseas. Black and white employment rates are now neck and neck. In France, unemployment is 7% among those born in the country, but 12% for immigrants, rising past 17% among those who arrived in the last ten years. Comparisons with Britain, whose demographics and colonial history perhaps make for a fairer benchmark, are similarly damning. Related: From Strengh To Strengh and France Has Poor Income Mobility Compared To US, Study Shows 

Credit expansions lead to disproportionate credit growth toward non-tradable sector firms and households. This pattern is in line with theories in which these sectors are more sensitive to relaxations in financing conditions and to feedbacks through collateral values and domestic demand. The sectoral allocation of credit, in turn, has considerable predictive power for the future path of GDP and the likelihood of systemic banking crises. Credit growth to non-tradable industries predicts a boom-bust pattern in output and elevated financial fragility. Credit to the tradable sector, on the other hand, is less prone to large booms and is associated with higher future productivity growth. Our evidence suggests that previous work, which could not differentiate between different types of corporate credit, has missed an important margin of heterogeneity. Figure 7 plots the average yearly change in sectoral credit-to- GDP for five years before and after a systemic banking crisis, relative to non-crisis times. The sample includes 59 crises. Non-tradable sector credit expands more than twice as rapidly relative to GDP as tradable sector credit, surpassing the growth of household debt in the three years immediately before crises.

A large share of immigrants keeps ties with their origin countries. Many send money, known as remittances, to family members in those countries, while others plan to eventually return to their birthplace. In either case, this means that a substantial part of immigrants’ spending, now or in the future, takes place in their origin country rather than in the city where they currently work. Hence, for immigrants, the local prices in the city where they work only matter for the fraction of their total budget spent there. This means, that, relative to native-born workers, immigrants are equally attracted to high wages in select cities but less deterred by high local prices—particularly housing. This simple mechanism can explain why immigrants concentrate so much in a small number of select cities, and why these cities tend to have the highest costs of living.

Net emigration from China, which had fallen as low as 125,000 in 2012 according to U.N. data, had rebounded to nearly 300,000 by 2018. The latest U.N. forecast puts net emigration in 2022 at over 300,000 again, after a net drain of about 200,000 in 2021. Strikingly, the U.N. data actually lines up surprisingly well with data from private sources looking at a more specific demographic—the wealthy. Data collated by South Africa-based New World Wealth and Henley & Partners, a London-based investment migration consulting firm, show a similar pattern. Net outflows of high net-worth individuals (with more than $1 million in assets) from China were steady at around 9,000 a year for most of the early 2010s. But in the late 2010s, that number started rocketing up: In 2017, net emigration by the wealthy was over 11,000 individuals, and by 2019 it was more than 15,000. Henley  estimate 13,500 wealthy individuals will, on net, leave China this year, following a 10,800 person net drain in 2022. Related: Singapore Asks Banks to Keep Quiet on Wealth Inflows During China Boom and U.S. Bound Migrants Surge at Darien Jungle Crossing in Panama