It will be harder to fight than the last one, says Ryan Avent
JUST SOUTH of Indiana’s border with Michigan lies the city of Elkhart, with a population of just over 50,000. Apart from a small, shop-lined high street near where one river, the Elkhart, flows into another, the St Joseph, the city is mostly shapeless, tree-lined and suburban. Scattered around the outskirts are the factories of several of America’s largest producers of recreational vehicles (RVs). Rows of the finished products rest outside the giant sheds in which they are made.
Modern RVs are impressive, leather-upholstered land yachts fitted with flat-screen televisions and gas fireplaces, the perfect vessels in which to navigate the American continent. The RV business is one of the economy’s most strongly cyclical. Sales of big-ticket items like homes and cars inevitably rise and fall with the business cycle, but RVs are especially susceptible to such swings.It is only once cars and homes have been upgraded that consumers consider splashing out on rolling living quarters. And when financial fear stalks the land, RV-makers have a particularly hard time.
In Elkhart, more than a quarter of people in employment work on RVs. When the global financial crisis in 2007-08 plunged the world economy into its worst downturn since the 1930s, employment in the city’s factories fell by nearly half. The unemployment rate almost quintupled, to 20%. Incomes and population dropped. Elkhart was among the first places President Barack Obama visited after his inauguration in 2009: it exemplified the extraordinary economic challenge facing his administration. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
But are political leaders able and willing to co-operate?
IN THE DARK days of the Great Depression, the balance of economic terror was measured out in movements of gold from one country to another. Physically, though, the gold more or less stayed put. Most central banks kept their gold in the vaults of the Bank of England. Flows were accomplished by placing gold bars on a trolley and wheeling them from one pile to another a few feet away. Told that the economic cataclysm was the product of too much gold on one side of the vault rather than another, Britain’s ambassador to Germany sighed: “This depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous in history.”
Once again, the world is at risk of bumbling into an unnecessarily painful economic mess. If the next global slump takes a turn towards the catastrophic, it will not be because of a dearth of ideas for how to pry an economy out of a rut. Rather it will be because politicians given a long list of ways to pump money into an economy badly in need of it proved unwilling or unable to choose any. Sadly, such an outcome is all too real a possibility. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Toxic politics and constrained central banks could make the next downturn hard to escape
JUST a year ago the world was enjoying a synchronised economic acceleration. In 2017 growth rose in every big advanced economy except Britain, and in most emerging ones. Global trade was surging and America booming; China’s slide into deflation had been quelled; even the euro zone was thriving. In 2018 the story is very different. This week stockmarkets tumbled across the globe as investors worried, for the second time this year, about slowing growth and the effects of tighter American monetary policy. Those fears are well-founded.
The world economy’s problem in 2018 has been uneven momentum. In America President Donald Trump’s tax cuts have helped lift annualised quarterly growth above 4%. Unemployment is at its lowest since 1969. Yet the IMF thinks growth will slow this year in every other big advanced economy. And emerging markets are in trouble.
This divergence between America and the rest means divergent monetary policies, too. The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates eight times since December 2015. The European Central Bank (ECB) is still a long way from its first increase. In Japan rates are negative. China, the principal target of Mr Trump’s trade war, relaxed monetary policy this week in response to a weakening economy. When interest rates rise in America but nowhere else, the dollar strengthens. That makes it harder for emerging markets to repay their dollar debts. A rising greenback has already helped propel Argentina and Turkey into trouble; this week Pakistan asked the IMF for a bail-out. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Brunello Rosa is co-founder and CEO at Rosa & Roubini Associates, and a research associate at the Systemic Risk Centre at the London School of Economics.
Although the global economy has been undergoing a sustained period of synchronized growth, it will inevitably lose steam as unsustainable fiscal policies in the US start to phase out. Come 2020, the stage will be set for another downturn – and, unlike in 2008, governments will lack the policy tools to manage it.
NEW YORK – As we mark the decennial of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, there are still ongoing debates about the causes and consequences of the financial crisis, and whether the lessons needed to prepare for the next one have been absorbed. But looking ahead, the more relevant question is what actually will trigger the next global recession and crisis, and when.
The current global expansion will likely continue into next year, given that the US is running large fiscal deficits, China is pursuing loose fiscal and credit policies, and Europe remains on a recovery path. But by 2020, the conditions will be ripe for a financial crisis, followed by a global recession. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Date: 27-07-2018
Source: The Economist: Free exchange
An inverted yield curve may mean a few things, none of them cheering
AS NAMES for market phenomena go, “inverted yield curve” lacks a certain punch. It is no “death cross” or “vomiting camel”. But what it lacks in panache, the inverted yield curve more than makes up for in predictive potency. Just before each of America’s most recent three recessions the yield curve for government bonds “inverted”, meaning that yields on long-term bonds fell below those on short-term bonds. Economists and stockmarkets seem unconcerned that inversion looms again (see chart). But despite generally strong economic data, there is reason to heed the warning signs flashing across bond markets.
There is nothing particularly magical about the yield curve’s predictive power. Short-term interest rates are overwhelmingly determined by changes in central banks’ overnight policy rates—for example, the federal funds rate in America, which has risen by 1.75 percentage points since December 2015. Long-term rates are less well-behaved. They reflect the average short-term rate over a bond’s lifetime, but also a “term premium”: an extra return for holding a longer-term security.
An inverted yield curve may mean a few things, none of them cheering. Markets may expect future short-term rates to be lower than present ones,presumably because the central bank has chosen to cut rates in response to economic weakness. Or markets may think they need less compensation for holding long-term bonds in the future. That might reflect expectations that inflation will fall, or that appetite will grow for the safety provided in financial storms by long-run government debt. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Many people lost their life savings in the last recession.
New research on the health damage done
Is it worse to suddenly lose your financial nest egg or never to have saved any money at all? This question concerns many of us: A quarter of Americans watched much or all of their life savings evaporate during the last recession, while nearly half of U.S. families have nothing put aside for retirement, according to the Economic Policy Institute and federal data.
Either way, there’s no happy answer. Both scenarios can increase our risk of dying within the next 20 years by more than 50%, a recent study shows.
We’ve long known that a financial shock causes immediate distress. Suit-clad men leaping from buildings were dismal hallmarks of the Great Depression, and soon after a major recession began in 2007, there were notable spikes in clinical depression, substance abuse and suicides. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
The biggest problem facing the United States today is the inevitability of the business cycle. Unemployment Friday reached its lowest rate in seventeen years. “Wages not keeping pace,” warned The New York Times. The “historically long jobs expansion… shows little evidence of slowing,” said The Wall Street Journal.
That’s absurd, of course. Alarm bells may not be ringing. The 2017 tax cut stimulus is still working its way into the system. But with the jobless rate at 3.9 percent, wage growth will accelerate. Bottlenecks will form. Interest expenses will grow. Inflation rates will increase.
Sometime in the next two years or so, some combination of factors will force the Federal Reserve Board’s hand. Interest rates will rise more sharply than expected. A recession will begin, with all the usual adverse consequences for Federal and state budgets. Then, as Warren Buffett likes to say, as the tide goes out, we will discover who’s been swimming naked – politically, that is, not financially. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Getting a fever is no fun. You likely get chills, you sweat, and you’re just generally uncomfortable. You get tired easily and need to rest. But here’s the weird part: Fever isn’t the real problem. It’s a symptom of something else. You must treat whatever that is to relieve the fever.
Economic indicators are similar. Lately I see a lot of talk about the flattening yield curve and speculation it might invert as the economy enters recession. If that happens, the inverted yield curve won’t be the culprit. It will point to another culprit, or combination of them.
This is something I watch carefully because a recession is long overdue, if history means anything. Some argue this time is different. Maybe so, but I’m not inclined to bet on it. Today we’ll explore some reasons why.
Now, on with our fever treatment, which of course, brings up a story.
In late 2006, when the yield curve was last in the process of inverting, I put in a call to then New York Fed’s Dr. Fred Mishkin, who co-authored a seminal report reviewing 20 different indicators as recession forecasting tools. They found only the inverted yield curve had any true significance, and then it was generally a year early. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
New study finds that all types of recessions lead to permanent losses in output and welfare
Economic recessions are typically described as short-term periods of negative economic growth. According to the traditional business cycle view, output moves up and down around its long-term upward trend and after a recession, it recovers to its pre-recession trend. Our new study casts doubt on this traditional view and shows that all types of recessions—including those arising from external shocks and small domestic macroeconomic policy mistakes—lead to permanent losses in output and welfare.
Nearly a decade after the global financial crisis erupted into the Great Recession, the global economy finally appears to be on the verge of strong growth . Until recently, however, economic growth fell below forecasts of a vigorous rebound, as predicted by supporters of the traditional business cycle theory.
Some researchers have explained the sluggish post-crisis growth as driven by demographic trends or other factors specific to the United States. But such explanation ignores the fact that output dynamics after the crisis followed a similar pattern seen in other countries. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Policymakers normally respond to recessions by cutting interest rates, reducing taxes, and boosting transfers to the unemployed and other casualties of the downturn. But, for a combination of economic and political reasons, the US, in particular, is singularly ill-prepared to respond normally.
COPENHAGEN – A sunny day is the best time to check whether the roof is watertight. For economic policymakers, the proverbial sunny day has arrived: with experts forecasting strong growth, now is the best time to check whether we are prepared for the next recession.
The answer, for the United States in particular, is a resounding no. Policymakers normally respond to recessions by cutting interest rates, reducing taxes, and boosting transfers to the unemployed and other casualties of the downturn. But the US is singularly ill-prepared, for a combination of economic and political reasons, to respond normally. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
NEW YORK – As we mark the decennial of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, there are still ongoing debates about the causes and consequences of the financial crisis, and whether the lessons needed to prepare for the next one have been absorbed. But looking ahead, the more relevant question is what actually will trigger the next global recession and crisis, and when.