Rent Seeking... US Style

"Rent Seeking"- using resources to try to influence governments (legally) to pass laws that assist you financially- leads to economic inefficiency, and ultimately lower economic growth. But rent seeking is common, even in high income economies. It also leads to some strange behaviours. For example, fruit and vegetable producers (who do not receive subsidies) lobby the US government to keep subsidies for producers of other crops as it means that fewer producers switch to producing fruit and vegetables, and therefore reduces the competition that they face! It sounds like a win-win for everyone, EXCEPT the consumer- who ends up paying a higher price for non-subsidised crops- and the taxpayer, who finances the subsidies! See this Marginal Revolution link for more.

US Recession...

Here's some excellent analysis on the US business cycle by James Hamilton. The news is bad.....

Walmart and the Recession....

The US appears to be in recession, but not everyone is suffering. Yesterday we argued that the effects of the recession on China, for example, depend on the kinds of goods and services that China exports to the United States. If these exports are mostly necessities, there will be minimal effects.

Walmart may also buck the trend, as this Slate article suggests.....

China Trade and US Recession...

"If the US experiences a recession, might that not be good for China's exports? After all, China exports low-priced goods, and US households may consume more of these during a recession" - DuOo

You raise a good point. During a recession, consumption of luxury goods falls dramatically, while consumption of necessities may barely change. Thus depending on the kind of goods China is exporting, a US recession may not necessary hurt China's economy. I expect that a US recession will negatively impact on China, for two reasons:

1) There's a difference between low priced goods and necessities. Yes, demand for necessities is relatively resillient during a recession, but necessities are items like food and medicine. These are not the largest part of Chinese exports to the United States. Instead China's exports are mostly made up of consumer goods that, while (relatively) cheap, are not essential consumption items to US households.

2) China's exports are increasingly in the "luxury" and durable goods sector, which are highly vulnerable to the business cycle. There are very few cars, for example, that do not contain some parts that were made in China. An anecdote that I heard recently from a friend in the watch industry is that the mechanisms in nearly all "Swiss" watches are made in China. The watch is still assembled in Switzerland, so that it can still be claimed to be "Swiss" for marketing reasons, but much of the actual manufacturing is now taking place in China.

For these reasons, I expect that a US recession will negatively impact on China.

The US Recession will be Bad....

.... by Martin Feldstein, Harvard Professor and current head of the NBER, the organisation that dates US recessions. See this link on Calculated Risk for more.

Here's an earlier take by me on the US business cycle.

Winners and Losers...

At every stage of the business cycle, there are both winners and losers. The standard example I use is bankruptcy lawyers. They do well when the economy is tanking, but risk requiring their own services when the economy is doing very well! The linked Freakonomics article considers the winners and losers of the housing crisis in the United States.

The Great Moderation

Here's an excellent discussion on the Freakonomics blog on "The Great Moderation," and why the probability of recession in the US may be overstated.

I'm not convinced.... a large housing correction as we are now seeing in the US has always predicted a recession in the past (see this post on the Calculated Risk blog, for example). I don't think the mechanism will be any different this time around.

Yes, the evolution of the economy and improved macroeconomic policy may have resulted in an increased ability of the economy to adjust to a range of different shocks, but that doesn't mean that it can avoid recessions under all circumstances! If the shock is big enough (as the current one appears to be), we'll still get a recession.

The Coming Recession...

According to the Economist, one accurate measure of past recessions is the number of times the news media includes the term "Recession." And guess what's happened to the number of times you can find "Recession" in print in the US lately? See this link for more.

(There's actually a formal name for counting the number of times a particular word appears in print, and using this frequency as an explanatory variable. It's called "Textual Analysis" or "Content Analysis.")

Multipliers...

When there is a shock to the economy, it is generally thought to have a multiplied effect on the economy. Some households enjoy higher income, they spend it, increasing the income for other households, who in turn spend it, and so on. The size of the multiplier is finite because there are leakages: some of the increase in income may be saved, used to pay taxes, or used to buy imports, and is therefore not available as income to others.

How big are these multipliers? Menzie Chinn provides some estimates at Econbrowser.

The dire outlook for the US economy....

Back to my recurring theme of arguing that the US economy is heading for recession (last installment here), both Roubini and a Financial Times columnist argue that things are worse, and the economy is heading for a generalised systematic financial meltdown.

At some point, perma-bears like Roubini may overstate their case... and if Roubini doesn't, someone else will. Pessimism is like a commodity: there's a market for pessimistic economic projections. And the markets almost always overshoot. In this case, I'll be surprised if Roubini is not still calling for a worsening recession even once the economy starts to recover.

But, for the record, I think that point is still a long way off....

Housing Prices and Recession...

I keep harping on about the fall in house prices in the US leading to a recession- my last installment was here.

CalculatedRisk have a careful assessment of the argument here, and essentially agree. If you don't have time to read the whole article, this graph illustrates it nicely. Housing values were recently at an all-time high as a percentage of GDP, and so mortgages still are. As house prices start to fall, those mortgages are going to stay at their stratospheric levels, implying that net wealth of households is falling far more dramatically (in percentage terms) than the fall in house prices alone would suggest. And we know the influence of the wealth affect on consumption, and therefore GDP......

Oil, Gold, Exchange Rates, and Inflation....

Does the rapid appreciation of the price of oil and gold signify increased inflation? Here's a careful analysis by James Hamilton on Econbrowser.

What will happen to the USD?

The value of the USD has been falling dramatically against all major currencies. What is the likely future direction? Well, that's the billion dollar question.... literally. If I knew, I would not be writing it here, but would use my information to speculate on the currency! But alas, I'm not sure which way the dollar will move. (As I've argued earlier, part of the reason why we can't predict exchange rates well is the ease with which we can speculate on them). So instead, I'll write a blog entry about it!

I'm not alone. Menzie Chinn provides a very careful survey of academic thinking on the behaviour of exchange rates here, and ends up being about as non-committal as me.

For the record, I think we can predict the exchange rate with a little success. First, high interest rate bearing currencies tend to appreciate relative to low interest rate ones- the motivation for the "carry trade" (see my earlier posts here and here).

Second exchange rates tend to over-correct in the short run, like most other assets- thanks perhaps to "momentum traders" who tend to buy assets that are appreciating simply because they're appreciating, rather than due to underlying fundamental value. So ultimately someone will make a lot of money by buying USD at the bottom of the market. (That person will probably not be me, as we have no way of knowing when we're at the bottom until after the fact!)

And third in the long run, purchasing power parity is an important driver of exchange rates. Based on this, I still consider my earlier position to be reasonable: the USD will have appreciated a long wayt from its current value (and even its value as of 6 months ago) within 5 years.

Good or bad news about the economy?

Just a few days back, the latest employment data for the US was released, and the data was surprisingly good, as this Bloomberg story reports. But how exactly should we interpret a single piece of evidence? The data is volatile, and as a result, there are lots of conflicting pieces of evidence, as Nouriel Roubini discusses here. The rational thing to do is to take moving averages through the data, to drop out some of the volatility (and if we have 12 month moving averages, drop out any distortions caused by seasonal factors or- more likely- poor adjustment for seasonality), and then interpret the smoothed data, as James Hamilton proposes here. The conclusion? The news is not good.

The US dollar de-internationalisation....

The US dollar is the most internationalised of all currencies at the current point in time. But it is loosing ground, especially to the Euro. Psychology plays a role here, and the large depreciation of the USD relative to most other currencies over the last 18 months has not exactly helped the dollar's case. According to this Bloomberg article, the USD is becoming less acceptable in some economies.

US recession round-up....

Some recent posts on the coming US recession....

Here is the insightful Nouriel Roubini taking stock of the dire state of the US economy, and the path it is on to recession.

Here is James Hamilton explaining why the oil price is so high. It's a simple case of supply and demand. We've got lots of the latter, and not quite enough of the former.

In the past, any major rise in oil prices has lead to a recession- no questions asked. Hamilton continues here with why the economy need not be as sensitive to the price of oil as it was in the past, which may be cause for a little optimism.

And his fellow Blogger, Menzie Chinn, continues here with a roundup of recessionary causes, and the historical inability of growing trade to keep the US economy out of recession.

China's Growing Reserves....

"China has accumulated huge USD reserves. How might these affect the US in future?" -Arun

China currently holds official reserves of approximately 1.4billion USD, mostly in USD denominated assets. The source of these growing reserves is official activity in the foreign exchange market, as Beijing seeks to control the value and stability of the Chinese currency. The end result is that the United States government is becoming increasingly in debt to the Mainland Chinese government.

In thinking about the effects of this growing reserves mounting, the are two possibilities that I would focus on. First, in principle, China could seek to use these holdings of debt to try to influence US policy positions. For example, suppose the United States were to increase protectionism by imposing punitive tariffs on China's exports. China could threaten to throw the foreign exchange market and the fixed income market in the United States into disarray by dumping huge quantities of USD assets on the world market.

I do not think that this is a likely outcome. Such a threat would not be in China's best interests. The very threat of wholesale selling would significantly drive down the value of a significant part of the Chinese government's balance sheet, imposing real costs on China. The only reason for making such a threat would be in the hope that the US would alter its behaviour so that China would never need to carry through with the threat. But the United States would never be willing to be seen to bow to Chinese pressure, as the political cost domestically would be too great. So a threat to sell is neither credible nor optimal for China.

The second effect of the growing debt mountain is that in the longer term, the United States is like any other debtor, and China like any other creditor. Future income in the United States will flow in increasing amounts to creditors in China and elsewhere, at the expense of future prosperity of US citizens. However, I want to be careful not to overstate this: even if all of China's reserves were in USD, at current US Tbill rates of about 5%, this amounts to a flow of $70Billion USD per year- or just 0.5% of current US GDP.

How will the USD depreciation affect the US economy?

"What is the benefit of a depreciating USD? In particular, will it reduce interest in investing in US assets, as they will offer a lower return? And does it make the US better off?" - Catherine

I have already discussed the effects of the exchange rate on the current account elsewhere- see in particular this post. A lower exchange rate results in exports being relatively cheap and imports relatively expensive, and so tends to directly improve the current account balance.

On the capital account, the effects are less clear. First consider the static case: what is the effect of a low value of the USD on demand for USD denominated assets? To be precise, consider an asset that offers a fixed stream of future income payments, such as a US government bond. A lower exchange rate decreases the exchange-rate adjusted return on the bond, but it also decreases the exchange-rate adjusted price by the same percent amount, so the real returns to foreign asset holders should be independent of the exchange rate.

More importantly, the capital account is influenced by the dynamics of the exchange rate, particularly its expected future path. For example, if we expect the value of the USD to continue to weaken, then we have less incentive to buy USD-denominated assets, as we would then suffer a capital loss when the exchange rate falls. This may be self-fulfilling: the USD is expected to depreciate, so investors do not wish to hold USD assets, so the demand for USD falls, so the USD depreciates, as expected.

This self-fulfilling path has limits, however. We know that in the long run, the exchange rate tends to over-correct. Thus the further it falls, the more likely it is to increase in the coming years, making the purchasing of USD assets more inviting. Thus USD assets will eventually find buying support as investors start to believe that the USD is more likely to appreciate rather than depreciate. I'm not saying that we're at the point yet: any exchange rate investment decisions are risky, especially in the short run.

Regarding your final question, an exchange rate depreciation does not make the US better off. Yes, it helps the US economy to adjust to shocks (in this case a negative wealth shock), but it also makes USD asset holders and income earners worse off. They can no longer afford the same quantity of foreign-sourced consumption goods. In that sense, a currency depreciation makes Americans worse off.

Oct. 19 1987: Could it happen again?

Oct. 19 1987 remains the largest one-day correction in world equity markets. The DJIA lost 22.6%, and the S&P 500 20.4%. Closer to home, the drop in the HSI lagged that in New York due to the time difference. But drop it did, from 3362.40 at close on Oct. 19 to 2241.70 at close on Oct. 26- a staggering 33.3% drop. (For the data, see here. This NYT story explains the lack of data for the intervening days: the market had already dropped 11.1% on Oct. 19, ahead of the US melt-down, and was closed for the following four trading days as a result).

Could such a melt-down happen again? Nouriel Roubini of NYU and Roubini Global Economics draws the parallels between 1987 and 2007 here.

My take: yes, there are some strong parallels, and a major melt-down is certainly possible. But timing any such melt-down is extremely difficult. It could happen tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, or even next decade.

Housing wealth shock... US version

When the property bubble in Hong Kong burst, average Hong Kong apartment prices fell about 66% according to the official index between the peak (October 1997) and trough (July 2003) (for a graph, click here). The result of this was a long-term recession, deflation, and general economic malaise.

The United States is now epxeriencing a bursting property bubble. Few expect the correction to be as large as that experienced in Hong Kong, and to date prices have only dropped a few percentage points. But this may be just the beginning- see this news clip on YouTube for more. Expect a similar consequence for the US economy as HK's.

Thanks to Calculated Risk for the link.