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Paul Krugman joined in ridiculing billionaire Jeff Greene, a person who richly deserves to be ridiculed. (He wants people to get used to lower living standards.) However people are wrongly attacking Greene when they complain about his betting against subprime mortgage backed securities.
Subprime mortgage backed securities were the fuel for the housing bubble that entrapped tens of millions of people, laid the basis for the economic collapse, and ruined millions of lives. The securities were in fact bad. Greene betting against them made that clear in the markets somewhat sooner than would have otherwise been the case, bringing down the bubble earlier and more rapidly.
This is good. It meant that fewer people were caught up in it than if the bubble had continued to grow for another six months or year. It would have saved people an enormous amount of pain if there had been lots of Jeff Greenes betting against subprime mortgage backed securities in 2003-2004. They could have prevented the housing bubble from ever growing to such dangerous proportions. Certainly his actions were much more commendable in this one that the profiteers and enablers like Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, and Timothy Geithner.
Just to be clear, Greene was acting out of greed, not a desire to help the economy and society. But this is a case where greed was good. Of course he is still a wretched person, flying across the Atlantic in his private jet with two nannies to tell the rest of us that we will have to get used to a lower standard of living.
Note: Name corrected — thanks John Wright.
Paul Krugman joined in ridiculing billionaire Jeff Greene, a person who richly deserves to be ridiculed. (He wants people to get used to lower living standards.) However people are wrongly attacking Greene when they complain about his betting against subprime mortgage backed securities.
Subprime mortgage backed securities were the fuel for the housing bubble that entrapped tens of millions of people, laid the basis for the economic collapse, and ruined millions of lives. The securities were in fact bad. Greene betting against them made that clear in the markets somewhat sooner than would have otherwise been the case, bringing down the bubble earlier and more rapidly.
This is good. It meant that fewer people were caught up in it than if the bubble had continued to grow for another six months or year. It would have saved people an enormous amount of pain if there had been lots of Jeff Greenes betting against subprime mortgage backed securities in 2003-2004. They could have prevented the housing bubble from ever growing to such dangerous proportions. Certainly his actions were much more commendable in this one that the profiteers and enablers like Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, and Timothy Geithner.
Just to be clear, Greene was acting out of greed, not a desire to help the economy and society. But this is a case where greed was good. Of course he is still a wretched person, flying across the Atlantic in his private jet with two nannies to tell the rest of us that we will have to get used to a lower standard of living.
Note: Name corrected — thanks John Wright.
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By almost every measure there continues to be a great deal of slack in the labor market. Unemployment rates remain high even for college graduates and even college graduates with degrees in the STEM fields have since little increase in wages in recent years.
Given this backdrop, it is not clear what information the NYT thinks it is giving readers when it reports :
“His company [a cable start-up based in Denver] has created about 60 jobs in the past year, but Mr. Binder said that vacancies often showed the structural problems in the economy. His business sometimes struggles to find qualified candidates for technologically demanding positions, but it is deluged with 700 applicants when it needs to hire an accountant.”
The normal way in which businesses attract qualified candidates is by offering higher pay. Clearly these candidates exist, they just might work for Mr. Binder’s competitors. Insofar as Mr. Binder’s difficulties in getting qualified candidates for technologically demanding positions is evidence of a structural problem, the problem is that we have people in top positions in businesses who apparently do not understand how the labor market works.
By almost every measure there continues to be a great deal of slack in the labor market. Unemployment rates remain high even for college graduates and even college graduates with degrees in the STEM fields have since little increase in wages in recent years.
Given this backdrop, it is not clear what information the NYT thinks it is giving readers when it reports :
“His company [a cable start-up based in Denver] has created about 60 jobs in the past year, but Mr. Binder said that vacancies often showed the structural problems in the economy. His business sometimes struggles to find qualified candidates for technologically demanding positions, but it is deluged with 700 applicants when it needs to hire an accountant.”
The normal way in which businesses attract qualified candidates is by offering higher pay. Clearly these candidates exist, they just might work for Mr. Binder’s competitors. Insofar as Mr. Binder’s difficulties in getting qualified candidates for technologically demanding positions is evidence of a structural problem, the problem is that we have people in top positions in businesses who apparently do not understand how the labor market works.
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Other news sources just told us what the Republicans said in reaction to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, National Public Radio told us what they really thought. Its top of the hours news summary on Morning Edition (sorry, no link) told listeners that Republicans “see it as more tax and spend.”
Other news sources just told us what the Republicans said in reaction to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, National Public Radio told us what they really thought. Its top of the hours news summary on Morning Edition (sorry, no link) told listeners that Republicans “see it as more tax and spend.”
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I thought that reporters had finally learned that monthly wage data are erratic and best ignored, but noooooooo, they apparently still believe that they give us real information about the rate of growth of wages. The immediate cause for complaint is a Morning Edition State of the Union fact check segment in which Scott Horsley told listeners that wages rose in November, but then fell in December.
As I tried to explain after the big wage jump in November was reported, the monthly changes are dominated by noise in the data. The 0.4 percent nominal wage rise reported in the month followed a month where the wage reportedly rose by just 0.1 percent and a prior month where it did not rise at all. Employer pay patterns in the economy as a whole do not change that much from month to month, it should have been obvious this was just noise in the data.
The wage drop reported in December should have further confirmed this. Horsley tried to explain the drop as a composition story, that we hired more people in lower paying industries. This is hard for two reasons. First, we added 48,000 jobs in the high-paying construction industry in December, compared to just 20,000 in November. We added only 7,700 jobs in the low-paying retail sector in December, compared to 55,700 jobs in November. In other words, the mix story seems to go the wrong way.
The other reason is the mix from month to month can only make a marginal difference in average wages. To see this, let’s take an extreme case. The gap in pay between the construction sector and the overall average is just over $2 an hour. By contrast, pay in the leisure and hospitality sector is about $10 an hour less than the average. Suppose that we saw 100,000 new jobs in construction and no other jobs in any other sector. This is equal to approximately 0.07 percent of total employment. This means this jump in construction employment would raise wages by less that 0.2 cents an hour. By contrast, the surge in restaurant employment would lower the average hourly wage by 1.0 cent.
In other words, even these extraordinary shifts in composition would have no measurable effect on the pace of wage growth. Anyone looking to explain month to month changes in wages by job mix is looking in the wrong place. The only responsible way to report on the wage data is to take averages over longer periods, the monthly changes simply don’t mean anything.
I thought that reporters had finally learned that monthly wage data are erratic and best ignored, but noooooooo, they apparently still believe that they give us real information about the rate of growth of wages. The immediate cause for complaint is a Morning Edition State of the Union fact check segment in which Scott Horsley told listeners that wages rose in November, but then fell in December.
As I tried to explain after the big wage jump in November was reported, the monthly changes are dominated by noise in the data. The 0.4 percent nominal wage rise reported in the month followed a month where the wage reportedly rose by just 0.1 percent and a prior month where it did not rise at all. Employer pay patterns in the economy as a whole do not change that much from month to month, it should have been obvious this was just noise in the data.
The wage drop reported in December should have further confirmed this. Horsley tried to explain the drop as a composition story, that we hired more people in lower paying industries. This is hard for two reasons. First, we added 48,000 jobs in the high-paying construction industry in December, compared to just 20,000 in November. We added only 7,700 jobs in the low-paying retail sector in December, compared to 55,700 jobs in November. In other words, the mix story seems to go the wrong way.
The other reason is the mix from month to month can only make a marginal difference in average wages. To see this, let’s take an extreme case. The gap in pay between the construction sector and the overall average is just over $2 an hour. By contrast, pay in the leisure and hospitality sector is about $10 an hour less than the average. Suppose that we saw 100,000 new jobs in construction and no other jobs in any other sector. This is equal to approximately 0.07 percent of total employment. This means this jump in construction employment would raise wages by less that 0.2 cents an hour. By contrast, the surge in restaurant employment would lower the average hourly wage by 1.0 cent.
In other words, even these extraordinary shifts in composition would have no measurable effect on the pace of wage growth. Anyone looking to explain month to month changes in wages by job mix is looking in the wrong place. The only responsible way to report on the wage data is to take averages over longer periods, the monthly changes simply don’t mean anything.
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Robert Samuelson used his column on Monday to debate the need for the Fed to clamp down on wage growth and came down on the right side: hurry up and wait. This is good to see, but there are a few more data points that make the case even more strongly.
First, the quit rate — the share of unemployment due to people voluntarily quitting their jobs — is still at levels that we would expect in a recession. This is important because it is a relatively direct measure of workers’ confidence in their labor market prospects. If they are unhappy at their job, but they don’t feel they have much opportunity to find a better one, they will be reluctant to quit unless they have a new job lined up.
Percentage of Unemployment Due to Job Leavers
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The second noteworthy point is the high number of people who report working part-time involuntarily. We can debate the reasons that prime age workers might have dropped out of the labor force, but there is no plausible case that people who work part-time jobs and say they want full-time employment, don’t actually want full-time employment. This number is still up by more than 2 million (@ 50 percent) from pre-recession levels, suggesting a large amount of labor market slack.
The last point is that we really don’t have much basis for fear about getting this wrong by being too lax. According to research from the Congressional Budget Office, the terms of the trade-off between unemployment and inflation have flattened. This research indicates that even if the unemployment rate was a full percentage point below the NAIRU for a full year, the inflation rate would only rise by 0.3 percentage points.
The NAIRU or non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, is supposed to be the lowest unemployment rate we can hit without having the inflation rate start to rise. We don’t know exactly where it is, but most economists put it between 5.2 percent and 5.5 percent unemployment. (I think we can go far lower.) But the point is that if the “true” number is 5.5 percent, and we allowed the unemployment rate to fall to 4.5 percent for a full year, the inflation rate would only be 0.3 percentage points higher than at the end of the year than the beginning. In the current environment, that would mean going from a 1.6 percent core inflation rate to a 1.9 percent core inflation rate.
That doesn’t sound like a really bad story. For this reason, it’s hard to see why anyone should be talking about raising interest rates and deliberately slowing the economy right now.
Note: Link fixed.
Robert Samuelson used his column on Monday to debate the need for the Fed to clamp down on wage growth and came down on the right side: hurry up and wait. This is good to see, but there are a few more data points that make the case even more strongly.
First, the quit rate — the share of unemployment due to people voluntarily quitting their jobs — is still at levels that we would expect in a recession. This is important because it is a relatively direct measure of workers’ confidence in their labor market prospects. If they are unhappy at their job, but they don’t feel they have much opportunity to find a better one, they will be reluctant to quit unless they have a new job lined up.
Percentage of Unemployment Due to Job Leavers
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The second noteworthy point is the high number of people who report working part-time involuntarily. We can debate the reasons that prime age workers might have dropped out of the labor force, but there is no plausible case that people who work part-time jobs and say they want full-time employment, don’t actually want full-time employment. This number is still up by more than 2 million (@ 50 percent) from pre-recession levels, suggesting a large amount of labor market slack.
The last point is that we really don’t have much basis for fear about getting this wrong by being too lax. According to research from the Congressional Budget Office, the terms of the trade-off between unemployment and inflation have flattened. This research indicates that even if the unemployment rate was a full percentage point below the NAIRU for a full year, the inflation rate would only rise by 0.3 percentage points.
The NAIRU or non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, is supposed to be the lowest unemployment rate we can hit without having the inflation rate start to rise. We don’t know exactly where it is, but most economists put it between 5.2 percent and 5.5 percent unemployment. (I think we can go far lower.) But the point is that if the “true” number is 5.5 percent, and we allowed the unemployment rate to fall to 4.5 percent for a full year, the inflation rate would only be 0.3 percentage points higher than at the end of the year than the beginning. In the current environment, that would mean going from a 1.6 percent core inflation rate to a 1.9 percent core inflation rate.
That doesn’t sound like a really bad story. For this reason, it’s hard to see why anyone should be talking about raising interest rates and deliberately slowing the economy right now.
Note: Link fixed.
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The NYT ran an article headlined, “China’s Economy Expands at Slowest Rate in Quarter Century.” People who read the piece discovered that China’s growth rate for 2014 was estimated at 7.4 percent, which is more than three times the growth rate projected for the United States. More strikingly, this is not much of a slowdown from the last two years.
The I.M.F. reports growth in both of these years was 7.7 percent. Measured as a share of growth, a drop from 7.7 percent to 7.4 percent in China would be equivalent to a drop from 2.0 percent to 1.92 percent in the United States. It’s not clear that this sort of slowdown would draw headlines.
There are questions about the accuracy of China’s growth data, but this article refers only to the reported numbers. These do not provide much a basis for talk of a major slowing of China’s economy.
The NYT ran an article headlined, “China’s Economy Expands at Slowest Rate in Quarter Century.” People who read the piece discovered that China’s growth rate for 2014 was estimated at 7.4 percent, which is more than three times the growth rate projected for the United States. More strikingly, this is not much of a slowdown from the last two years.
The I.M.F. reports growth in both of these years was 7.7 percent. Measured as a share of growth, a drop from 7.7 percent to 7.4 percent in China would be equivalent to a drop from 2.0 percent to 1.92 percent in the United States. It’s not clear that this sort of slowdown would draw headlines.
There are questions about the accuracy of China’s growth data, but this article refers only to the reported numbers. These do not provide much a basis for talk of a major slowing of China’s economy.
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Usually when a country takes steps to “defend” its currency, the problem is that the value of its currency is falling in world currency markets. This is most often due to higher inflation in the country in question, although the situation can be worsened by speculative attacks. Raising interest rates is a standard form of defense, since it makes it more desirable to hold assets denominated in that currency.
Against this normal pattern, the NYT told readers that Denmark was “defending” its currency by cutting interest rates. Apparently the problem is that the krone, Denmark’s currency, was rising against the euro. The krone has been pegged against the euro since its inception. The recent upswing in its value threatened to push the krone above its designated range.
So in this case, the “defense” is intended to reduce the value of the currency, not to raise it.
Usually when a country takes steps to “defend” its currency, the problem is that the value of its currency is falling in world currency markets. This is most often due to higher inflation in the country in question, although the situation can be worsened by speculative attacks. Raising interest rates is a standard form of defense, since it makes it more desirable to hold assets denominated in that currency.
Against this normal pattern, the NYT told readers that Denmark was “defending” its currency by cutting interest rates. Apparently the problem is that the krone, Denmark’s currency, was rising against the euro. The krone has been pegged against the euro since its inception. The recent upswing in its value threatened to push the krone above its designated range.
So in this case, the “defense” is intended to reduce the value of the currency, not to raise it.
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