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Article Artículo

Wage-Price Inflation and the Way Things Work In Economics

There's an old saying in economics that it doesn't matter if what you say is right, what matters is if the right person says it. I was reminded of this line when I read Matt O'Brien's Wonkblog post on the success of the Fed in allowing the unemployment rate to fall below the nearly universally accepted measure of the NAIRU, without having any notable acceleration of inflation. 

This is a great history that should be tattooed on the forehead of everyone involved in the current debate on how low the unemployment rate can go without kicking off a wage price spiral. Back in the mid-1990s all right thinking economists thought that the NAIRU was in the neighborhood of 6.0 percent. This meant that if the unemployment rate was below 6.0 percent the inflation rate would begin to increase. And, it would keep increasing as long as the unemployment rate stayed below 6.0 percent.

While there was some difference on the precise number (the usual range went from 5.6 percent to 6.4 percent), there was almost no dispute on the basic point. As O'Brien notes, even Janet Yellen adhered to this view, expressing concerns in 1996 that if the Fed didn't raise interest rates inflation would be a big problem. (Paul Krugman also expressed a similar view at the time.)

Thanks to the eccentricities of Alan Greenspan, the Fed did not raise interest rates. Instead it allowed the unemployment to continue to fall. It fell below 5.0 percent in 1997, it crossed 4.5 in 1998, and reached 4.0 percent as a year-round average. And inflation remained tame. The result was that millions of people had jobs who would not have otherwise. Tens of millions of workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution saw substantial real wage gains for the first time in a quarter century.

And, for the folks fixated on budget deficits, we saw a large surplus for the first time in decades. As much as the Clintonites like to boast of their great surpluses, the reality is that the budget would have remained in deficit if Clinton's Fed appointees (Janet Yellen and Lawrence Meyer) had gotten their way. It is only because the Fed allowed the unemployment rate to fall far lower than these folks thought wise that the budget shifted from deficit to surplus. (In 1996 the Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit of $240 billion [2.5 percent of GDP] for 2000. In fact, we ran a surplus of roughly the same amount. According to CBO, the legislative changes over this four year period went a small amount in the wrong direction.)

Anyhow, all of this should be a good reminder that the whole of the economics profession can be completely wrong on the most important issues affecting the economy. But that isn't why I brought you here today.

Dean Baker / October 09, 2014

Article Artículo

Bolivia

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Bolivia's Economy Under Evo in 10 Graphs

On October 12, Bolivians will go to the polls to choose their next president for a five-year term. Recent polling suggests that the incumbent, Evo Morales, will obtain a decisive first-round victory over his closest opponent, Samuel Doria Medina. Below are ten graphs on economic and social developments since Evo’s election in 2005 that help explain the strong support for his re-election.

 

      1. Economic Growth: Bolivia has grown much faster over the last 8 years under President Evo Morales than in any period over the past three-and-a-half decades.

Source: International Monetary Fund.

Jake Johnston and Stephan Lefebvre / October 08, 2014

Article Artículo

If Only the Washington Post Could Get Its Hand on the Social Security Trustees Report

It might help editorial page editor Fred Hiatt understand how the budget works. He is appalled because "reactionary defenders" of Social Security think that seniors should be able to get the benefits they paid for. (I wonder if it's reactionary to think that Peter Peterson type billionaires should be able to get the interest on the government bonds that they paid for.)

Anyhow, the basis for Hiatt's fury is that John Podesta, now a top advisor to President Obama, is boasting about entitlements having been brought under control. To Hiatt this is outrageous.

"Federal debt has reached 74 percent of the economy’s annual output (GDP), 'a higher percentage than at any point in U.S. history except a brief period around World War II,' the CBO says, 'and almost twice the percentage at the end of 2008.' With no change in policy, that percentage will hold steady or decline a bit for a couple of years and then start rising again, to a dangerous 78 percent by 2024 and an insupportable 106 percent by 2039."

Yep, the debt is much higher today than in 2008, so what? Millions of people lost their jobs due to the collapse of the economy. The deficits of the last six years created demand that would not otherwise have been there. It led to more growth and put people back to work. To those in the real world, people losing their jobs and losing their homes, would be the big story. This means kids growing up with unemployed parents and maybe hustling from house to house or even living on the street. But hey, Fred Hiatt wants us to worry about the deficit in 2039.

Just to be clear, the gloom and doom story is all Hiatt's not CBO's, although some readers may be confused by the presentation. There is no obvious negative consequence to a debt to GDP ratio of 74 percent, although readers can get that Fred Hiatt doesn't like it. Nor is there any obvious negative consequence to a debt to GDP of 78 percent by 2024, even if Fred Hiatt calls it "dangerous."

And the assertion that a debt to GDP ratio of 106 percent is insupportable is just Fred Hiatt's invention. There are many countries that have much higher debt to GDP ratios today (Japan's is more than twice as high) and continue to pay very low interest rates on long-term debt. In other words, Fred Hiatt is just like the little kid who who is worried about the monster under his bed when the lights are turned off. Undoubtedly it is very real to him, but when you turn on the lights you can see there is nothing there.

Dean Baker / October 06, 2014

Article Artículo

Defending Economics from Robert Samuelson – See Addendum on China and the Dollar

I am not usually inclined to defend the economics profession, but Robert Samuelson brings out my defensive impulse in his discussion of Financial Time columnist Martin Wolf's new book (which I have not read). Before getting to the main matter at hand, it's worth making a couple of other points.

First, Samuelson tells us that Wolf's explanation of the financial crisis goes via the way of the U.S. trade deficit:

"The trade-surplus countries couldn’t spend all their export earnings, so they plowed the excesses into dollar investments (prominently: U.S. Treasury bonds) and euro securities. This flood of money reduced interest rates. The resulting easy credit induced dubious lending, led by housing mortgages."

This is partly right and partly wrong. (I don't know if the problem is in Wolf's book or Samuels' retelling.) The wrong part is the claim that the trade surplus countries couldn't spend all their export earnings. This makes no sense on its face. They have no need to spend their export earnings. If they have dollars that they don't want they just dump the dollars. It's just like if someone who has shares of a stock they don't want. They dump the stock.

What happened in this period is that foreign central banks bought the dollars from their exporters and then used the money to buy up U.S. government bonds. This was a conscious decision to prop up the value of the dollar against their currencies. This was done to preserve their export advantages.

If they had just sat back and let the market clear, the dollar would have fallen and the U.S. trade deficit would have shrunk. This is all pretty much econ 101 stuff that Wolf should have gotten straight (perhaps he did).

The part that is completely right is that the gap in demand created by the trade deficit (our spending was creating demand in Europe and China, not the United States) created a huge hole in demand that could be filled by the housing bubble. If we had something closer to balanced trade back in the middle of the last decade then the buildup of a housing bubble would have almost certainly led to higher interest rates and higher inflation. This would have choked off the bubble before it grew too large. So in this sense, Wolf is 100 percent on the money in blaming the bubble on the trade deficit.

Dean Baker / October 06, 2014