Time to retire Greenspan and Trichet’s pensions

from Dean Baker

The economies of the United States and Europe are seeing their worst downturn since the Great Depression. Tens of millions of people are unemployed or underemployed. This has led to millions losing their homes, their access to health care, and, in some cases, their lives.
Remarkably, the two individuals who bear the greatest responsibility for this disaster, former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan former president of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet, do not appear to be suffering at all for their failure. Both are living comfortably and continue to be sought out for their expertise on economic policy. This should infuriate reasonable people everywhere.

At this point everyone should understand that the economic wreckage destroying tens of millions of lives across the globe was an entirely preventable disaster. In the case of both the United States and Europe unsustainable asset bubbles were allowed to grow to ever more dangerous levels. It was inevitable that the bubbles would burst and when they did the outcome would be a severe downturn from which it would not easy to recover.

Austerity advocates have been wrong about everything

from Dean Baker

Over the last two and a half years governments across Europe have engaged in a cruel social experiment. They began to pursue a policy of austerity even though their economies were still mired in the recession that resulted from the housing bubble’s collapse.

The theory was that reducing government deficits would somehow inspire private investment and increase consumption. Even though laying off public employees and raising taxes would slow demand, the argument was that the confidence inspired by lower deficits would lead to a large increase in demand from the private sector.

This theory has been shown wrong. When firms saw less demand due to the government cutbacks, they didn’t increase investment; instead, they reduced it. And it turns out that smaller government deficits didn’t turn consumers into sudden spendthrifts.

The result has been a surge in unemployment across Europe. The unemployment rate for the euro zone as a whole is over 12 percent. Spain and Greece, the worst hit countries, have unemployment rates of more than 25 percent, with youth unemployment rates over 50 percent. The lost output across Europe is running into the trillions of dollars.

Rarely have countries suffered from so much self-inflicted damage. The recipe for restoring these economies to full employment has been known for more than 70 years: Governments just need to increase demand. 

Reinhart-Rogoff one more time: why the 90 percent never should have been taken seriously

from Dean Baker

As a general rule economists are not very good at economics. This is why almost none of them were able to recognize the $8 trillion housing bubble that sank the economy. (No, this isn’t bragging, it only took simple arithmetic and basic logic.) Most economists are unable to conceptualize anything that someone with more standing in the profession did not already write about.

This is the only reason that the Reinhart-Rogoff 90 percent debt-to-GDP threshold was ever taken seriously to begin with. The point that I have tried to make in the past, apparently with little success, is that debt is an arbitrary number. It is not something that is relatively fixed, like the age composition of the population or the supply of land.

The country’s debt is something that can and often is easily altered through simple steps. In this way the debt-to-GDP ratio can be thought of as something like the color of a house. Suppose Reinhart and Rogoff told us that people who lived in blue houses had 40 percent less income than people who lived in houses painted other colors. Presumably people would be skeptical of the results, but if their finding was really true, then we would probably want to encourage people in blue colored houses to paint them a different color.

In effect, Reinhart and Rogoff were making the same sort of claim about debt and GDP. Let me try to explain this in a way that even an economist can understand it.  

Destroying the lair of the budget-balancing cretins

from Dean Baker

By now almost everyone knows of the famous Excel spreadsheet error by Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. It turns out that the main conclusions from their paper warning of the risks of high public sector debt were driven by miscalculations.

When the data are entered correctly, this hugely influential paper can no longer be used to argue that the United States or other wealthy countries need fear a large growth penalty by running deficits now. There is no obvious reason that governments can’t increase spending on infrastructure, research, education and other services that will both directly improve people’s lives and foster future growth.

With the advocates of austerity on the run this is a great time to pursue the attack. The public should understand that the often expressed concerns about long-term growth, the future, and the well-being of our children are simple fig-leafs for inhumane policies that deny people (a.k.a. the parents of our children) work and redistribute income upward.

Reinhart and Rogoff are not being straight

from Dean Baker

Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, used their second NYT column in a week, to complain about how they are being treated. Their complaint deserves tears from crocodiles everywhere. They try to present themselves as ivory tower economists who cannot possibly be blamed for the ways in which their work has been used to justify public policy, specifically as a rationale to cut government programs and raise taxes, measures that lead to unemployment in a downturn.

This portrayal is disingenuous in the extreme. Reinhart and Rogoff surely are aware of how their work has been used. They have also encouraged this use in public writings and talks. While it is unfortunate that they have “received hate-filled, even threatening, e-mail messages,” as one who works in the lower-paid corners of policy debates, let me say, welcome to the club.

This column is careful to halfway walk back the main claim of their famous paper, telling us:

Reducing unemployment: Lessons from Germany

from Dean Baker

Many of the pundits are once again celebrating the pick-up of the U.S. economy. Unfortunately this upturn, like prior ones, seems to exist more in their heads than in the data. The big bright spot being highlighted is the 200,000 monthly rate of job creation since October. This only sounds like good news for those who don’t remember that we created 240,000 jobs a month in the same five months last year.

While the economy is not about to slip into recession, there is little reason to think we will see a marked upturn from last year’s 1.7 percent growth rate. In fact, with the end of the payroll tax cut pulling money out of people’s pockets and the sequester leading to layoffs and further cutbacks, we are at least as likely to see the economy slowing as picking up steam.

This is bad news for tens of millions of people who are unemployed, underemployed, or have dropped out of the workforce altogether. There is little prospect that the economy will grow enough to substantially improve their employment prospects any time soon. Nor is there much hope for any policy shift that will provide a boost to the rate of growth. This is why it is a good time to look to Germany. 

Worms, pond scum and economists

from Dean Baker

The effort to blame the awful plight of the young on Social Security and Medicare is picking up steam.

In the last week, there were several pieces in The Washington Post and The New York Times that either implicitly or explicitly blamed older workers and retirees for the bad economic plight facing young people today. There is now a full-court press to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, ostensibly out of a desire to help young workers today and in the future.  

Big bank immunity: When do we crack down on Wall Street?

from Dean Baker

The Wall Street gang must really be partying these days. Profits and bonuses are as high as ever as these super-rich takers were able to use trillions of dollars of below-market government loans to get themselves through the crisis they created. The rest of the country is still struggling with high unemployment, stagnant wages, underwater mortgages and hollowed out retirement accounts, but life is good again on Wall Street.

Their world must have gotten even brighter last week when Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department may have to restrain its prosecutors in dealing with the big banks because it has to consider the possibility that a prosecution could lead to financial instability. Not only can the big banks count on taxpayer bailouts when they need them; it turns out that they can share profits with drug dealers with impunity. (The case immediately at hand involved money laundered for the Mexican drug cartel.) And who says that times are bad? 

Use antitrust policy to break up mammoth banks

from Dean Baker

This week the nation’s chief law enforcement officer told a Senate committee that he was concerned that prosecutions of large banks could endanger the country’s financial system. As a result, the Justice Department may not prosecute cases against these banks that it would bring against ordinary citizens or smaller banks.

The immediate issue at hand was the decision not to prosecute the bank HSBC because of its involvement in laundering money for Mexican drug gangs. Just to be clear, these drug gangs were not just people that sold drugs to willing buyers, they also engage in kidnapping, murder, torture, and a variety of other criminal activities. Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that big banks may be able to share the profits with such outfits with impunity because prosecuting them could lead to financial instability. 

The kids will be rich, unless Peter Peterson’s kids take their money

from Dean Baker

The Wall Street crew has been in high gear trying to convince the public that our children’s well-being is going to be threatened by their parents’ and grandparents’ Social Security. This story would be laughable except that it is endlessly repeated by people in positions of power and responsibility. For this reason it is worth going over the basic numbers yet again so that everyone knows that the people making these assertions are either ignorant or dishonest.

The basic point is that the economy gets more productive through time. This has been true for hundreds of years and no one has any good stories as to why it should not continue to be true long into the future.

Our measures of productivity growth are not very good for the years prior to World War II, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the 65 years since 1947 productivity growth has averaged 2.2 percent annually. There have been periods of more and less rapid growth.

US minimum wage: Who decided workers should fall behind?

from Dean Baker

It was encouraging to see President Obama propose an increase in the minimum wage in his State of the Union Address, even if the $9.00 target did not seem especially ambitious. If the $9.00 minimum wage were in effect this year, the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage would still be more than 2.0 percent lower than it had been in the late 1960s. And this proposed target would not even be reached until 2015, when inflation is predicted to lower the value by another 6 percent.

While giving a raise worth more than $3,000 a year to the country’s lowest paid workers is definitely a good thing, it is hard to get too excited about a situation in which these workers will still be earning less than their counterparts did almost 50 years ago.

Fix the Debt and a Wall Street Sales Tax

from Dean Baker

At this point everyone knows about Fix the Debt. It is a collection of corporate CEOs put together by Peter Peterson, the Wall Street private equity mogul. Ostensibly they want to reduce budget deficits and the national debt, but for some reason their attention always seems focused on cutting Social Security and Medicare. While some in this group will allow for minor tax increases, budget cuts are explicitly a priority, with these two programs firmly in their crosshairs.

Given that the stated goal of this group is to reduce budget deficits, it is worth asking why taxes don’t figure more prominently on their agenda. After all, the United States ranks near the bottom of wealthy countries in its tax take as a share of GDP. It is also worth asking why one tax in particular, a financial transactions tax, never seems to get mentioned in anything the group or its members do. 

The housing bubble should not have been hard to see

from Dean Baker

Economists and other policy types are working hard to maintain the absurdity that the housing bubble was hard to see. Hence we have Federal Reserve Board Governor Jeremy Stein pontificating on how the Fed should deal with bubbles and the Post playing along with the gag.

Let’s just run through the basic facts.

Tax games and redistributing income upward

from Dean Baker

The corporate profit share of national income is near a post-World War II high. The share of income of going to the richest one percent is almost at its pre-Depression peak.

These would seem like impressive accomplishments but the process of upward redistribution, from Joe Sixpack to Joe Six Houses, is a never-ending struggle. Toward this end, Louisiana Governor and Republican wunderkind Bobby Jindal has just proposed replacing the state’s income tax with a sales tax.

Sales taxes will generally be more regressive than income taxes for the simple reason that low- and moderate-income people will spend a larger share of their income than upper-income people. That means that the portion of income that wealthy Louisianans save will escape taxation, imposing a larger burden on low- and middle-income families in any revenue neutral shift.

Larry Summers and the Davos Scam

from Dean Baker

Every January the public is treated to tales of the World Economic Forum, a gathering of the world’s rich and a select few who are invited there to educate and/or entertain them. Most of us will never have the honor of getting on the inside, so we must rely on media accounts to give us the picture. It turns out that these accounts might be more informative than intended.

Reuters reported on a talk given by Clinton Treasury Secretary and former Obama National Economic Adviser Larry Summers. According to the Reuters account, Summers said:

In 1993, here’s what the situation was: Capital costs were really high, the trade deficit was really big, and if you looked at a graph of average wages and the productivity of American workers, those two graphs lay on top of each other. So, bringing down the deficit, reducing capital costs, raising investment, spurring productivity growth, was the right and natural central strategy for spurring growth. That was what Bob Rubin advised Bill Clinton, that was the advice Bill Clinton followed, and they were right.

This segment is so striking because it is completely wrong in a very big way.

Falling government spending and inventories push US growth negative in 4th quarter

from Dean Baker

A sharp drop in government spending, heavily concentrated in defense, coupled with a decline in inventories caused GDP to shrink at a 0.1 percent rate in the 4th quarter. Government spending fell at a 6.6 percent annual rate, driven by a 22.2 percent decline in defense spending, subtracting 1.33 percentage points from the growth rate in the quarter. A 40.3 drop in the rate of inventory accumulation reduced growth by another 1.27 percentage points. Without these factors, GDP would have grown at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the quarter.

Pulling out these extraordinary factors, the GDP data were largely in line with prior quarters. Consumption grew at a 2.2 percent annual rate, driven mostly by 13.9 percent growth in durable goods purchases, primarily cars. This number was inflated due to the effects of Sandy, which destroyed many cars, forcing people to buy new ones. Growth in this category will be substantially weaker and possibly negative in the next quarter. On the other side, housing and utilities subtracted 0.47 percentage points from growth in the quarter. This is likely a global warming effect with warmer than normal weather leading to less use of heating in the quarter. (There was a comparable falloff in the 4th quarter of 2011 when we also had unusually warm weather.)

Timothy Geithner saved Wall Street, not the economy

from Dean Baker

The accolades for Timothy Geithner came on so thick and heavy in the last week that it’s necessary for those of us in the reality-based community to bring the discussion back to earth. The basic facts of the matter are very straightforward. Timothy Geithner and the bailout he helped engineer saved the Wall Street banks. He did not save the economy.

We can’t know exactly what would have happened if we did not have the TARP in October of 2008. We do know there was a major effort at the time to exaggerate the dangers to the financial system in order to pressure Congress to pass the TARP.

For example, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernacke highlighted the claim that the commercial paper market was shutting down. Since most major companies finance their ongoing operations by issuing commercial paper, this raised the threat of a full-fledged economic collapse because even healthy companies would not be able to get the cash needed to pay their bills.

What Bernanke neglected to mention was that he personally had the ability to sustain the commercial paper market through direct lending from the Fed. He opted to go this route by announcing the creation of a Fed special lending facility to support the commercial paper market the weekend after Congress voted to approve the TARP.

Aaron Swartz, financial fraud, and the Justice Department

from Dean Baker

Many people have been asking about the Justice Department’s priorities in the wake of the suicide of computer whiz and political activist Aaron Swartz. As has been widely reported, the Justice Department was pressing charges that carried several decades of prison time against Swartz. He was caught hacking M.I.T.’s computer system in an apparent effort to make large amounts of academic research freely available to the public.

The Justice Department’s determination to commit substantial time and resources to prosecuting Swartz presents a striking contrast to its see-no-evil attitude when it comes to financial fraud by the Wall Street banks. People should recognize that this is not just a rhetorical point. It is clear that the Justice Department opted to not pursue the sort of investigations that could have landed many high-level people at places like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup behind bars.  

Timothy Geithner: modern day Metternich

from Dean Baker

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s departure from the Obama Administration invites comparisons with Klemens von Metternich. Metternich was the foreign minister of the Austrian Empire who engineered the restoration of the old order and the suppression of democracy across Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. This was an impressive diplomatic feat given the popular contempt for Europe’s monarchical regimes. In the same vein, protecting Wall Street from the financial and economic havoc they brought upon themselves and the country was an enormous accomplishment.

Just to remind everyone, during his tenure as head of the New York Fed and then Treasury Secretary, most, if not all, of the major Wall Street banks would have collapsed if the government had not intervened to save them. This process began with the collapse of Bear Stearns, which was bought up by J.P. Morgan in a deal involving huge subsidies from the Fed. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, a second major investment bank, started a run on the three remaining investment banks that would have led to the collapse of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs if the Fed, FDIC, and Treasury did not take extraordinary measures to save them.  

Will Japan lead the path away from the fiscal cliff?

from Dean Baker

An event that has received far too little attention in the United States was the election of a new prime minister in Japan. Last month the people of Japan voted overwhelmingly to throw out the governing party and to support the return of the Liberal Democrats headed by Shinzo Abe.

Electing Liberal Democrats is not new in Japan; they have held power for most of the period since World War II. Even putting in Abe as prime minister is not new. He had earlier served a brief stint in this position from 2006-2007. Abe is a well-connected party boss who has worked his way to the top ranks of the party in the same way as other party leaders.

What is new is Abe’s stated agenda. Abe wants to get Japan off its two-decade-long path of near stagnation, promising a policy of vigorous stimulus. There are two main parts to this policy. First, he promises to embark on another round of infrastructure spending, with the goal being the direct creation of tens of thousands of jobs.