Is the Recovery of the Baltic Economies a "Success Story for Austerity"? Lessons for US Fiscal Policy

While EU members along the shores of the Mediterranean struggle with a seemingly endless slump, others who dip their toes in the Baltic are making a strong comeback. As the following chart shows, real GDP growth in the Baltic 3—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—has recently run well above the euro area average. Meanwhile, the Med 4—Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal—continue their downward trajectories. Official forecasts call for their economies to bottom out in 2014, but predictions have been wrong before.



Some readers might object that this chart is misleading, since, to facilitate comparison, it shows output in all of the economies on a scale with 2004 equal to 100. Isn’t it simply the case that the Baltic countries are much poorer, and it is easier to grow from a low base? Besides, what is there to brag about when real GDP in the Baltic 3 hasn’t even gotten back to its pre-crisis peak? >>>Read more

What Should We Do About China's and Japan's Currency Manipulation?

Recently a bi-partisan group of 60 U.S. Senators made headlines with a letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. The letter urged him to add a clause to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement prohibiting currency manipulation. The Senators cited a Peterson Institute study that claimed currency manipulation had cost the United States 5 million jobs. Subsequent discussion of the issue focused on China and Japan as the biggest manipulators. How big is the threat? What should we do about it?

China’s traditional currency manipulation

There is no doubt that China is a currency manipulator in the traditional sense that it treats its exchange rate as an explicit goal of economic policy. It shares this distinction with other countries whose currency regimes are of the “fixed” or “managed float” varieties. We could quibble about which of these categories China belongs to. Its currency regime is less rigidly fixed than, say, the currency boards of Bulgaria and Hong Kong, but less flexible than the managed float of, say, Russia. Either way, as the following map shows, currency manipulators—the light green and blue countries—are clearly in the majority among the world’s economies.



What is at issue, then, is not whether China is a currency manipulator, but rather, how effective its manipulation is and whether and how that manipulation poses a threat to the United States. Over the past three years, I have written a series of posts [1] [2] [3] arguing that China’s currency manipulation has not been highly effective and that the harm done to the United States is often exaggerated. >>>Read more

As We Move into Budget Chaos, Just How Bad is our Fiscal Policy?

Those of us who live in the United States woke Tuesday morning to a “partial government shutdown.” Partial means, roughly speaking, that air traffic controllers go to work but park rangers do not. The shutdown is the result of the failure of Congress to pass a budget—or in lieu of a budget, a continuing resolution—in time for the October 1 start of the 2014 fiscal year.

Even if the shutdown is resolved in the next few days, another round of chaos looms at mid-month, when Congress must authorize an increase in the debt ceiling in order for the government to continue making interest and principal payments on debts that the same Congress previously authorized the government to accumulate.

Many conservative Republicans say that measures like government shutdowns and debt-ceiling freezes are necessary because taxation and government spending are out of control and public debt is rapidly  becoming unsustainable. How much truth is there to those charges? Just how bad, really, is U.S. fiscal policy, and what should be done to fix it? >>>Read more

US GDP Growth Holds at 2.5% in Q2, Corporate Profits at Record High, Key Inflation Index Falls

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released new data today showing that corporate profits reached an all-time nominal high in the second quarter of 2013. Profits before tax rose to 12.53 percent of GDP from 12.22 percent in the previous quarter, as the following chart shows. That was just fractionally short of the all-time high of 12.60 percent reached in the final quarter of 2011. At the same time, the BEA confirmed that GDP grew by 2.5 percent, the same as the August estimate.



Meanwhile, proprietors’ income was flat in Q2. Popular discussions often treat proprietors’ income as a proxy for the income of small business. It includes the current income of unincorporated businesses that have the legal forms of proprietorships, partnerships, and tax-exempt cooperatives. It does not perfectly match up with small firm size because some small firms are incorporated and some proprietorships, partnerships, and cooperatives are large.



Proprietors’ income has lagged behind corporate income in recent decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, the shares of corporate profits and proprietors’ income were roughly the same. Now, corporate profits are half-again greater. The gap between the two hit an all-time high in Q4 2011, when corporate profits reached 168 percent of proprietors’ income. (This earlier post discussed some of the reasons for the increasing disparity between large and small-business profits, including changes over the years in tax and healthcare policy.)

In addition to data on GDP and its components, the latest BEA report included new estimates of inflation based on the national income accounts. The broadest measure of inflation, the GDP deflator, grew at just a 0.6 percent annual rate in Q2. The deflator for personal consumption expenditures, closely watched by the Fed, actually fell at a 0.1 percent annual rate. Previously the PCE deflator had been estimated to have been unchanged in the quarter.

Overall, the latest report on GDP and its components contained few surprises. Compared with August’s second estimate, today’s third estimate shows the same overall rate of growth of real GDP, at 2.5 percent. Inventory accumulation and the growth of exports were slightly less rapid than previously estimated. Those changes were offset by slightly faster growth of consumer spending and a slightly less rapid decrease in the government’s contribution to GDP.

Follow this link to view or download a classroom-ready slideshow with charts of the latest GDP, profits, and inflation data.

Whatever Became of the Money Multiplier?

If you are teaching or taking an introductory macroeconomics course this fall, you will, at some point, encounter the money multiplier. The multipier posits that there is a stable ratio between M2, the stock of ordinary money in the economy, which consists of currency and bank deposits, and the monetary base, also known as high-powered money, which consists of paper currency issued by the Fed plus reserve balances that commercial banks hold on deposit at the Fed.

Your textbook will go on to explain that the money multiplier gives the Fed great power over the economy. The Fed is able to use open market operations (purchases and sales of government bonds) to control the monetary base. The monetary base, in turn, serves as the raw material from which banks create ordinary money for the rest of us. If the money multiplier has a value of, say, eight, then banks can and will create eight dollars of deposit money for each dollar of high-powered money. Add in the assumption that the quantity of money in circulation powerfully influences investment and consumption spending, and you can see why we obsess so much about quantitative easing, who will win appointment as the Federal Reserve Chair, and every comma in every press release that issues from the stately Eccles building on Constitution Avenue.

There is just one problem. As the following chart shows, something has gone badly wrong with the money multiplier in recent years. For most of the 1990s and 2000s, it was steady as a rock. From 1994 to 2007, the 12-month moving average of the multiplier stayed in a narrow range, between 8.0 and 8.4. Then it fell off a cliff. By July of this year, it had reached a record low of 3.24.



What happened? To answer that question, we need to look a little more closely at the textbook explanation of how the money multiplier is supposed to work, at some features of the banking system that the multiplier model downplays, and finally, at some recent research. >>>Read more

US Working Age Poverty Remains Near Record High in 2012

The Bureau of the Census released data for U.S. poverty rates and family income today. The headline poverty rate for all individuals was essentially unchanged from 2011, at 15 percent. The poverty rate reached an all-time low of 11.3 percent in 2000. Median family income declined from $51,100 to $51,017, a change that is not statistically significant.

One of the most striking trends in recent poverty data has been the rise in poverty among the working-age population. As the following chart shows, when the government first began to publish poverty data, the elderly were the poorest segment of the population, with children in second place. Since that time, poverty rates among the elderly have fallen dramatically, while those of children have changed little. Meanwhile, the poverty rate for working-age individuals (defined as 18 to 65 years) has risen, and has continued to rise during the current economic recovery. It reached 13.7 percent of the population in 2010, and has not showed a statistically significant change from that level since.



One might wonder why working-age poverty would not have decreased as a result of the gradual fall in unemployment rates. Another data series helps explain why it has not.>>>Read more

What Does the U-6 "Broad Unemployment Rate" Really Tell Us?

During the recent deep recession and slow recovery, U-6, an alternative measure of unemployment issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has received increased attention. People often refer to U-6, which includes several groups of workers in addition to the officially unemployed, as the “broad unemployment rate.” No doubt, part of its popularity stems from the simple fact that the broad measure of joblessness makes the employment situation look worse than the standard one, and bad news attracts readers and viewers. Beyond that, thought, just what does U-6 really add to our understanding of labor market conditions?



What U-6 tells us

The main contribution of U-6, as I see it, is to remind us that those whom the BLS defines as unemployed—those who are not working for pay even an hour a week but have looked for work within the last four weeks—are not the only ones who suffer when labor markets are weak. U-6 brings in two groups of people who feel  labor market distress even though they do not fit the official definition of unemployed:>>>Read more