Richmond Fed Interview

The Richmond Fed published a long interview with me in their Econ Focus, shorter pdf (print) version here and longer web version here. Some of the questions:

• Does the 2010 Dodd-Frank regulatory reform act meaningfully address runs on shadow banking?
• So what do you think is the most promising way to meaningfully end “too big to fail”?
• Do you think there’s any reason to believe recessions following financial crises should necessarily be longer and more severe, as Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have famously suggested?
• Many people have asked whether the finance industry has gotten too big. How should we think about that?
• What are your thoughts on quantitative easing (QE) — the Fed’s massive purchases of Treasuries and other assets to push down long-term interest rates — both on its effectiveness and on the fear that it’s going to lead to hyperinflation?
• Both fiscal and monetary policies have been on extreme courses recently. What are your thoughts on how they might affect each other as they move back to normal levels?
• Switching gears to finance specifically, what do you think are some of the big unanswered questions for research?
• You wrote an op-ed on an “alternative maximum tax.” What’s the idea there?
• Can transfers really help the bottom half of the income distribution?
• Which economists have influenced you the most?

You’ll have to click to the interview for answers!

Thanks to Aaron Steelman, Lisa Kenney and especially  Renee Haltom, who helped a lot with the editing. I’m a lot less coherent in person!

Job market doldrums

Three recent views on the dismal labor market pose an interesting contrast.

Alan Blinder wrote a provocative WSJ piece on 6/11, Fiscal Fixes for the Jobless Recovery. A week prviously, 6/5, Ed Lazear wrote about The Hidden Jobless Disaster. And John Taylor has a good short blog post Job Growth–Barely Keeping Pace with Population

All three authors emphasize that the unemployment rate is a poor measure of the labor market. Unemployment counts people who don’t have a job but are actively looking for one. People who give up and leave the labor force don’t count. Employment is a more interesting number, and the employment-population ratio a better summary statistic than the unemployment rate. After all, if unemployment falls because everyone who is looking for a job gives up, I don’t think we’d see that as a good sign.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Ed Lazear made this interesting chart. As he explains,

Every time the unemployment rate changes, analysts and reporters try to determine whether unemployment changed because more people were actually working or because people simply dropped out of the labor market entirely… The employment rate—that is, the employment-to-population ratio—eliminates this issue by going straight to the bottom line, measuring the proportion of potential workers who are actually working.

While the unemployment rate has fallen over the past 3½ years, the employment-to-population ratio has stayed almost constant at about 58.5%, well below the prerecession peak. Jobs are always being created and destroyed, and the net number of jobs over the last 3½ years has increased. But so too has the size of the working-age population. Job growth has been just slightly better than what it takes to keep the employed proportion of the working-age population constant. That’s why jobs still seem so scarce.

The U.S. is not getting back many of the jobs that were lost during the recession. At the present slow pace of job growth, it will require more than a decade to get back to full employment defined by prerecession standards….

Why have so many workers dropped out of the labor force and stopped actively seeking work? Partly this is due to sluggish economic growth. But research by the University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan has suggested that because government benefits are lost when income rises, some people forgo poor jobs in lieu of government benefits—unemployment insurance, food stamps and disability benefits among the most obvious. The disability rolls have grown by 13% and the number receiving food stamps by 39% since 2009.
….

John Taylor makes the point nicely with another graph, which contrasts the labor force participation rate to the BLS’ forecast of what should have happened from demographic effects.

The graph comes from a recent paper Chris Erceg and Andrew Levin.

I part company a bit with Lazear on his conclusions

… the various programs of quantitative easing (and other fiscal and monetary policies) have not been particularly effective at stimulating job growth. Consequently, the Fed may want to reconsider its decision to maintain a loose-money policy until the unemployment rate dips to 6.5%.

If low employment is “structural,” resulting from the worker-side disincentives as well as employer-side disincentives – policy uncertainty, regulatory threats, NLRB, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, EPA, and so on – then the problem isn’t lack of “demand” in the first place. If the problem has nothing to do with the Fed, and if $2 trillion of QE didn’t do anything to help it, why does the solution have anything to do with the Fed?

The greater surprise is to hear so much agreement from Alan Blinder:

The Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, with which I am associated, estimates each month what it calls the “jobs gap,” defined as the number of jobs needed to return employment to its prerecession levels and also absorb new entrants to the labor force. The project’s latest jobs-gap estimate is 9.9 million jobs. At a rate of 194,000 a month, it would take almost eight more years to eliminate that gap.

…. policy makers should be running around like their hair is on fire.

Lazear said “a decade."  More suprising agreement on the impotence of monetary policy:

The Federal Reserve has worked overtime to spur job creation, and there is not much more it can do.

As you might imagine, I’m not such a fan of Blinder’s suggested fixes. He starts with traditional simple Keynesian recommendations that  the government should hire people and "spend” more. No need to refight that here. The more interesting recommendations follow as he warms up to his latest clever scheme.

… the basic idea is straightforward: Offer tax breaks to firms that boost their payrolls.

For example, companies might be offered a tax credit equal to 10% of the increase in their wage bills over the previous year. …

Another sort of business tax cut may hold more political promise….Suppose Congress enacted a partial tax holiday that allowed companies to repatriate profits held abroad at some bargain-basement tax rate like 10%. The catch: The maximum amount each company could bring home at that low tax rate would equal the increase in its wage payments as measured by Social Security records.

For example, if XYZ Corporation paid wages covered by Social Security of $1 billion in 2012 and $1.1 billion in 2013, it would be allowed to repatriate $100 million at the superlow tax rate. The reward for boosting its payroll by $100 million would thus be a $25 million tax saving. That looks like a powerful incentive.

…companies could claim the tax benefit only for individual earnings below the Social Security maximum ($113,700 in 2013). No subsidies for raising executive pay.

I find this most interesting at the level of basic philosophy; how we think about economic policy.

There are huge, longstanding, tax and regulatory disincentives to hiring people. Income tax, payroll taxes, health care and other mandates, and NLRB, OSHA, and so on. There are the high marginal taxes to labor implied by social insurance programs, as Mulligan points out.  If we want to increase the incentive for companies to hire people and people to take the jobs, why add another tax break to an obscenely complex tax code, rather than fix some of the existing disincentives? 

Is this really the right way to run a country? When “policy makers” want more employment, they slap on a complex, tax break on top of a mountain of disncentives. Presumably they then will remove this tax break, and pages 536,721 to 621,843 of the tax code describing it, despite the lobbying by large corporations who have figured out how to exploit it for billions of dollars, once the Brookings Institution decides that there is “enough” employment (!), and “policy-makers” no longer need to encourage it? 

How are the existing hundreds of bits of social engineering in the tax code working out? Do we really need more of this?  Isn’t it time to return to a tax code that raises money for the government at minimal distortion?

The contrast between the benevolent “policy-maker” (no dictator ever had such power) and the reality of how the tax code in this country is actually enacted is pretty striking.

I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed in the end by both. They agree that the US economy is about 10 million jobs short. Something big is in the way. Lazear at least mentions some candidates, though many are long-standing. But the stirring conclusion from Lazear is only to continue a loose monetary policy that he says has been ineffective so far, and the conclusion from Blinder is the sort of clever scheme that economists cook up in late-night cocktail parties piling one more quickly-exploitable bit of social engineering on top of a tax code rife with them. Neither recommendation comes close to 10 million jobs, or addressing any sort of clear story why those jobs have vanished.

Debt and growth in 10 minutes

This is a short video from last year. I only just found out it exists. It still seems pretty topical, and (for once) condensed because Lars Hansen really forced me to obey the 10 minute time limit!

There is a better link here from the BFI page here that covers the whole event, but I couldn’t figure out how to embed those.

Fun debt graphs

I was having a bit of fun making graphs for a talk. Are we all fine and debt is no longer a problem? I went back for a closer look at the CBO’s long term budget outlook and The budget and economic outlook 2013 to 2023. All numbers from these sources.

 Above, I plot the CBO’s long term outlook, in the alternative fiscal scenario (i.e. the one that is even faintly plausible).  As you can see, though they think the deficit gets better for a bit, then the entitlements disaster is still with us.

Of course, this will not happen, the only question is what adjusts.  If bond markets get a whiff that we actually will try these paths, we have a crisis on our hands.

So what can adjust? Revenue is historically about 20% of GDP no matter what tax rates are.  Doubling Federal revenue, while of course states, cities and counties keep taxing us, seems like an unlikely prospect. I’m all for cutting spending, but really, cutting spending in half, and by more than 20 percentage points of GDP? Well, it’s in the Ryan budget, but it’s a lot. So, what else can we do?

Answer: Growth. Tax revenue equals tax rate times income, and income equals todays income times growth. Greater growth makes all the difference.

To illustrate this point, I made a simple calculation. Suppose growth is 1% and then 2% greater than the CBO projects. What effect does that have? To keep it very simple, I assume that spending stays the same, and revenue stays the same fraction of GDP. Thus, I just divide spending/GDP by a 1% and then 2% growth rate (e^(0.01 t)) and we have the new spending as a fraction of the larger GDP.

This is pretty amazing, no? If we just had two percentage points GDP growth greater than the CBO’s forecast (which is a bit above 2% in the out years) the whole budget would be solved without fixing anything.

This thought sent me back to look at the CBO’s economic assumptions,

Uh-oh. The CBO thinks we are going to quickly enter a period of 4% growth, go back to trend, and then start growing smartly. Tax revenue = tax rate x income, that’s a lot of revenue.  The CBO, the Fed, and everyone else (me too for a few years) has been forecasting this bounce back growth just around the corner for a while now. What if it doesn’t happen, and 1.5% growth without catching up to trend is the new normal?

To keep it simple, I redid the above chart now just assuming 1% and 2% less growth than the CBO.

Is that Greece, or Cyprus?

So, the real budget news that could matter has little to do with tax rates or spending. What matters most of all is whether we break out of this sclerotic growth trap.

I found this graph pretty chilling as well: 

Really, what chance do you think there is that defense, nondefense discretionary and other mandatory spending will decrease form 4% of GDP to 2.5-3% of GDP in 10 years?

The net interest line is interesting. That’s a huge rise. Why? Here are the other economic assumptions

You see the strong GDP growth, 4% for several years, in the top left panel. Inflation, bottom left, apparently has nothing to do with deficits, the Phillips Curve is alive and well.

But, the CBO is projecting interest rates to rise sharply in 2016, back to a low-normal 4% 3 month and 5% 5 year rate. This causes the $850 billion a year in interest costs highlighted in the previous graph, about the same numbers I was bandying about in “Monetary Policy with Large Debts” when worrying whether the Fed could actually do that to deficits.

From the deficit view, a Japanese lost decade of low interest rates would keep this from happening (or postpone it). Of course any financial event leading to higher interest rates would increase these interest payments a lot.

Growth in the UK?

I thought European “austerity,” meaning mostly large increases in marginal tax rates on anyone daring  to work, save, invest, start a company or hire people, while spending stays north of 50% of GDP, was a pretty bad idea.

So I was glad to read the tiltle, when a friend sent me a link to the Telegraph, announcing Osborne to unleash raft of policies to kick-start growth. Great, I thought, after trying everything else, the British will finally try the one thing that will work.


The byline was only a bit disappointing

The Government is to reveal a series of major new measures to boost national and regional growth ahead of the Budget to show its “pro-business” strategy is working

Pro-business is usually a code word for protection and subsidy. But there are plenty of worse code words.

And then it all falls apart

The measures will include:

• Billions of pounds of central government funding directed at boosting regional growth and a backing for Michael Heseltine’s plans for new local spending powers;

• The planning go-ahead for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station;

• Support for housebuilders and for first-time buyers trying to get mortgages;

• A push on major infrastructure projects, including the Merseyside Gateway and the “super-sewer” in London, and more government guarantees for such projects;

… The Bank of England could also be given a broader mandate to support growth.

…billions of pounds of central government funds should be made directly available to the regions and cities such as Birmingham…

Lord Heseltine’s report made far-reaching recommendations for stimulating economic growth. The Government will unveil plans enabling Local Enterprise Partnerships and businesses to bid regionally for money that is now allocated centrally.

It’s not all bad. Allowing a nuclear power plant to operate is nice, and some plans to lower corporate taxes a bit. But the blossoming of free enterprise in the land of Adam Smith, alas, this is not. Keynes still rules.  

GMO Salmon

Source: http://www.aquabounty.com

This weekend’s New York Times brought the interesting story of AquaBounty’s genetically modified salmon, which are genetically engineered to grow twice as fast as normal Salmon. A few choice bits:

“In 1993, the company approached the Food and Drug Administration about selling a genetically modified salmon that grew faster than normal fish. In 1995, AquaBounty formally applied for approval. Last month, more than 17 years later, the public comment period…was finally supposed to conclude. But the F.D.A. has extended the deadline…

Appropriately, it has been subjected to rigorous reviews… scientists, including the F.D.A.’s experts, have concluded that the fish is just as safe to eat as conventional salmon and that, raised in isolated tanks, it poses little risk to wild populations.

Why the delay?

… some suspect that political considerations have played a role in drawing the approval process out to tortuous lengths. Many of the members of Congress who oppose the modified fish represent states with strong salmon industries. And some nonprofit groups seem to be opposing the modified salmon reflexively, as part of an agenda to oppose all animal biotechnology, regardless of its safety or potential benefits.

Even the White House might be playing politics with the salmon. “The delay, sources within the government say, came after meetings with the White House, which was debating the political implications of approving the GM salmon, a move likely to infuriate a portion of its base.”

namely,

anti-biotech groups, which traffic in scare tactics rather than science…

This story brings three thoughts to mind.

1. So who is "anti-science?” I can’t resist. There were a lot of potshots at Republicans for being anti-science, some well-deserved. But “science” is abundantly clear here. “Science” is indeed wrong at times, but if we want policy based on “science,” the safety of GMO foods is about as good as it gets. There’s plenty of magical thinking on both left and right, it turns out.

2.  $10,000 dollars invested in the stock market in 1993 is worth $50,000 today ($31,477 after inflation)  yes, even after the crash. It was already worth $37,600 ($32,700 after inflation) in 1999.  Remember, AcquaBounty hasn’t sold a single fish. The cost of 20 years delay is enormous, amounting to a huge tax disincentive.

3. We need growth. Where does growth come from? Modern growth theory is abundantly clear. New ideas, new processes, new businesses that raise productivity. Like a new idea that lets us double the growth rate of farmed salmon. And, yes, lower profits of current salmon fishermen, much to the relief of wild salmon.

GMO foods are, potentially, a huge game changer. Once every 50 years or so, we bump up against a Malthusian limit, and a new idea frees us again. Fixing airborne nitrogen. Green revolution. Now, GMO foods. GMO plants are being bred to use less fertilizer and insecticide, i.e. to be better for the environment, as well as to cure vitamin A deficiency, produce less waste, and so on. No, dear Greenpeace, organic farming is not the answer, unless we use a lot more land for agriculture, starve out half the people, or believe in magic.  (It’s too bad organizations like this suffer such mission creep. I would happily support their efforts on behalf of endangered species.)

Or maybe not. The lesson of industrial policy is that academic bloggers are just as bad as government bureaucrats in finding the next game changer. But there are hundreds of similar game-changers underway. Read any popular science magazine. Will we let the winners bear fruit?

Why do countries and civilizations fail? When interests vested in the status quo or magical thinking stop that process.  A long decay precedes the crises. I am reminded of the famous failures, such as the Chinese Emperor’s ban on long-range shipping, at a time when Chinese ships were way better than Portugese.

Update: A very nice article by Henry Miller on GM foods, titled “Anti-Genetic Engineering Activism: Why the Bastards Never Quit.” Henry is obviously much more knowledgeable than I am.