August 12, 2014
News apparently travels slowly in the nation’s capital. The New York Times reported on a speech by Stanley Fischer, the vice chair of the Fed, in which he expressed confusion over the causes of the weak recovery.
It would have been helpful to express the views of economists who could have expressed surprise over Fischer’s confusion. When the housing bubble collapsed, there was a massive loss of demand. Spending on residential construction fell back by more than 4.0 percentage points of GDP. With the loss of $8 trillion in housing wealth, consumption fell back by close to 3.0 percentage points of GDP. This created a total gap of 7 percentage points of GDP, which is close to $1.2 trillion in today’s economy.
Residential construction has recovered to some extent, but it is still well below its bubble peaks. Unless we see another bubble, there is no reason to expect construction to get back anywhere near its 2005-2006 share of GDP. Consumption has also recovered to some extent, but without the bubble wealth that drove it, there is no reason to expect it to reach the same share of output as in the bubble years.
Unless Fischer has some very novel theory of the economy, there would have been no reason to expect a more rapid bounce back of the economy than what we saw, especially after the federal government turned to austerity in 2011. It would have been helpful if the NYT had focused on the seeming confusion in Fischer’s thinking.
Addendum:
Having read Fischer’s speech, I think the confusion is more in the reporting than in the speech, which seems largely on the mark on the current state of the economy. The spelling of “Fischer” has also been corrected.
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