Economic Crisis – Page 3 – artdiamondblog.com

Business Cycles Can Be Moderated

Source of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B2) It’s tempting to think of an economic expansion as being like a life span. The older you get, the closer you are to death; a 95-year-old probably has fewer years left to live than a 60-year-old. But this year Glenn D. Rudebusch, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, looked at the evidence from post-World War II United States economic expansions, and did not find that pattern held up at all.
“A long recovery appears no more likely to end than a short one,” Mr. Rudebusch wrote. “Like Peter Pan, recoveries appear to never grow old.”
Expansions don’t die of old age. They die because something specific killed them. It can be a wrong-footed central bank, the popping of a financial bubble or a shock from overseas. But age itself isn’t the problem.
A look around the world also shows plenty of examples of expansions that have lasted a lot longer than either the seven years the current United States expansion has been underway or the longest expansion in American history, from 1991 to 2001.
Britain had a nearly 17-year expansion from the early 1990s until the 2008 global financial crisis. France had a slightly longer expansion that ended in 1992. And the record-holders among advanced economies in modern times, according to the research firm Longview Economics, are the Netherlands, which experienced a nearly 26-year “Dutch miracle” that ended in 2008, and Australia, which has an expansion that began in 1991 and is on track to overtake the Dutch soon for the longest on record.

For the full story, see:
NEIL IRWIN. “Expansion Is Old, Not at Death’s Door.” The New York Times (Fri., OCT. 28, 2016): B1 & B2.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Oct. 27, 2016, and has the title “Will the Next President Face a Recession? Don’t Assume So.”)

Rudebusch’s research, mentioned above, appeared in:
Rudebusch, Glenn D. “Will the Economic Recovery Die of Old Age?” FRBSF Economic Letter # 2016-03 (Feb. 8, 2016): 1-4.

“Politicized Regulatory State” Cuts Hiring and Slows Innovation

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Sclerotic growth is America’s overriding economic problem. From 1950 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 3.5% annually. Since 2000, it has grown at half that rate–1.76%. Even in the years since the bottom of the great recession in 2009, which should have been a time of fast catch-up growth, the economy has only grown at 2%.
. . .
. . . the U.S. economy is simply overrun by an out-of-control and increasingly politicized regulatory state. If it takes years to get the permits to start projects and mountains of paper to hire people, if every step risks a new criminal investigation, people don’t invest, hire or innovate.
. . .
How much more growth is really possible from better policies? To get an idea, see the nearby chart plotting 2014 income per capita for 189 countries against the World Bank’s “Distance to Frontier” ease-of-doing-business measure for the same year. The measure combines individual indicators, including starting a business, dealing with construction permits, protecting minority investors, paying taxes and trading across borders.
. . .
Most of all, the country needs a dramatic legal and regulatory simplification, restoring the rule of law. Middle-aged America is living in a hoarder’s house of a legal system. State and local impediments such as occupational licensing and zoning are also part of the problem.
. . .
There is hope. Washington lawmakers need to bring about a grand bargain, moving the debate from “they’re getting their special deal, I want mine,” to “I’m losing my special deal, so they’d better lose theirs too.”

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN H. COCHRANE. “Ending America’s Slow-Growth Tailspin; The U.S. economy needs a dramatic legal and regulatory simplification.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 3, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 2, 2016.)

Maduro Counts on Marxist Professor to Be Miraculous “Jesus Christ of Economics”

(p. B1) CARACAS, Venezuela–President Nicolás Maduro, hoping for an economic miracle to salvage his country, has placed his trust in an obscure Marxist professor from Spain who holds so much sway the president calls him “the Jesus Christ of economics.”
Alfredo Serrano–a 40-year-old economist whose long hair and beard have also elicited the president’s comparison to Jesus–has become the central economic adviser to Mr. Maduro, according to a number of officials in the ruling United Socialist Party and other government consultants.
. . .
Most international and domestic economists blame Venezuela’s food shortages, which have triggered riots, on price controls and expropriations. Mr. Serrano, though, attributes an “inefficient distribution system in the hands of speculative capitalism,” which he says allows companies to hoard products. He also says foreign and local reactionary forces are waging an economic war against Venezuela.
The adviser has championed urban agriculture in a country where about 40% of fertile land is left fallow by price controls and seed shortages. Mr. Maduro created the Ministry of Urban Agriculture, headed by a 33-year-old member researcher at Mr. Serrano’s think tank, Lorena Freitez. A senior adviser at the think tank, Ricardo Menéndez, heads the planning ministry.
“Serrano is a typical European leftist who came to Latin America to experiment with things no one wants at home: state domination, price controls and fixed exchange rates,” said José Guerra, a Venezuelan opposition lawmaker and former chief economist at the central bank.

For the full story, see:
ANATOLY KURMANAEV and MAYELA ARMAS. “Maduro Turns to Spanish Marxist for a Miracle.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Aug. 9, 2016): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 8, 2016, and has the title “Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro Looks to a Marxist Spaniard for an Economic Miracle.”)

Cutting Taxes Helps Economy More than Increasing Government Spending

I believe the “policy missteps” diagnosis is mainly the right one, but quote some comments on the “secular stagnation” diagnosis because I want to document that for easy access for my book project.

(p. 3) Economists, like physicians, sometimes confront a patient with an obvious problem but no obvious diagnosis. That is precisely the situation we face right now.

. . .
Secular stagnation Lawrence H. Summers, former economic adviser to President Obama, has suggested that the problem predates the recent financial crisis. He points to the long-term decline in inflation-adjusted interest rates as evidence of reduced demand for capital to fund investment projects. He cites several reasons for the change, including lower population growth, lower prices for capital goods and the nature of recent innovations, like the replacement of brick-and-mortar stores with retail websites. The result, he says, is secular stagnation — a persistent inability of the economy to generate sufficient demand to maintain full employment.
His solution? More government spending on infrastructure, like roads, bridges and airports. If the government takes advantage of lower interest rates to make the right investments in public capital — admittedly a big if — the policy would promote employment in the short run as projects are being built and make the economy more productive when they are put into use.
. . .
Policy missteps When Barack Obama took office in 2009, the economy was in the midst of the Great Recession. President Obama’s advisers relied on standard Keynesian theory when they proposed a large increase in government spending to energize the economy. The stimulus package was the administration’s first economic policy initiative. As the economy recovered, the administration supported tax increases to shrink the budget deficit.
But even at the time, there were reasons to doubt this approach. A 2002 study of United States fiscal policy by the economists Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti found that “both increases in taxes and increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending.” They noted that this finding is “difficult to reconcile with Keynesian theory.”
Consistent with this, a more recent study of international data by the economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna found that “fiscal stimuli based on tax cuts are more likely to increase growth than those based on spending increases.”

For the full commentary, see:
N. GREGORY MANKIW. “Economic View; One Economic Sickness, Five Diagnoses.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., JUNE 19, 2016): 5.
(Note: ellipses added, bold font in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JUNE 17, 2016.)

A Larry Summers paper on his version of secular stagnation, is:
Summers, Lawrence H. “U.S. Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound.” Business Economics 49, no. 2 (April 2014): 65-73.

The Blanchard and Perotti paper mentioned above, is:
Blanchard, Olivier, and Roberto Perotti. “An Empirical Characterization of the Dynamic Effects of Changes in Government Spending and Taxes on Output.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, no. 4 (Nov. 2002): 1329-68.

The Alesina and Ardagna paper mentioned above, is:
Alesina, Alberto, and Silvia Ardagna. “Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes Versus Spending.” In Tax Policy and the Economy. Volume 24, edited by Jeffrey R. Brown. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2010, pp. 35-68.

Steady-State Stagnation Is Not an Option

Some environmentalists advocate an end to economic growth. Inside economics, and in the broader world, a heated debate has considered whether an economy can long stagnate in a steady-state. The idea that it can, is captured in the circular flow diagram that has been a fixture of many introductory economics textbooks for many decades. I argue that without the dynamism that is achieved by innovative entrepreneurs, long-term stagnation is not an option. Exogenous events, such as earthquakes, will always come along to disturb the steady-state. And when they do, only entrepreneurs can restore the steady-state. If there are no entrepreneurs, there will be decline. If there are entrepreneurs, they will not stop at the steady-state; they will seek progress. The choice is forward or backward. Long-term steady-state stagnation is not an option.

(p. 10) SANKHU, Nepal — As the anniversary of Nepal’s devastating earthquake came and went last week, Tilakmananda Bajracharya peered up at the mountainside temple his family has tended for 13 generations, wondering how long it would remain upright.

. . .
Many people here pin their hopes on promises of foreign aid: After the disaster, images of collapsed temples and stoic villagers in a sea of rubble were beamed around the world, and donors came forward with pledges of $4.1 billion in foreign grants and soft loans.
But those promises, so far, have not done much to speed the progress of Nepal’s reconstruction effort. Outside Kathmandu, the capital, many towns and villages remain choked with rubble, as if the earthquake had happened yesterday. The government, hampered by red tape and political turmoil, has only begun to approve projects. Nearly all of the pledged funds remain in the hands of the donors, unused.
The delay is misery for the 770,000 households awaiting a promised subsidy to rebuild their homes. Because a yearly stretch of bad weather begins in June, large-scale rebuilding is unlikely to begin before early 2017, consigning families to a second monsoon season and a second winter in leaky shelters made of zinc sheeting.
. . .
. . . , some visitors who came here to assess the reconstruction expressed shock at how little had been done.
. . .
“It has been a horrible year,” said Anju Shrestha, 36, whose shed stands on a site that once held a three-story brick house.
A neighbor, Kanchhi Shrestha, guessed her age at about 75, based on a major earthquake that occurred two years before she was born. She pulled her skirt up to show feet splotchy with raw sores.
“I will die in this shelter if they do not give me money,” she said. “I have nothing to eat.”
However, she added, it would be inappropriate for a person like her to demand assistance from Nepal’s government.
“We cannot scold the government,” she said. “If the government provides, we will fold our hands and tell them, ‘You are God.’ “

For the full story, see:
ELLEN BARRY. “A Year Later, Nepal Is Trapped in the Shambles of a Devastating Quake.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., May 1, 2016): 10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 30, 2016, and has the title “A Year After Earthquake, Nepal’s Recovery Is Just Beginning.”)

Info Tech Boomed Because It Was Least Regulated Sector

(p. A9) “The regulatory environment has become so onerous in America that it is now easier to start a business in England than in the U.S.,” Mr. Hill says–and he would know.
. . .
In 1973 and only 27 years old, Mr. Hill founded Commerce Bank with one branch in Marlton, N.J. The fledgling company focused on customer service and called itself “America’s most convenient bank.” By the time Mr. Hill left Commerce Bancorp 34 years later, only months before the company announced it would be bought by TD Bank for $8.5 billion, he had grown the business to some 460 branches, with 14,000 employees and combined deposits of about $40 billion.
Now he’s replicating that model in the United Kingdom with Metro Bank, which he founded in 2010. And Mr. Hill says there’s an ocean of difference between doing business in the overregulated U.S. and in the U.K. “When I went to Britain I thought the regulatory environment would be much worse,” he says. “It’s infinitely better there.”
The problem in the U.S. starts with towering federal regulations, such as the voluminous reporting and compliance rules in Dodd-Frank, the financial reform act that recently celebrated its fifth birthday. “Regulators are making it impossible for the medium and small banks to comply with the rules,” he says. “The burdens get so intense that it is destroying the small and medium-size banks in America.”
The result is that Dodd-Frank, a law intended to take on the systemic risk of “too-big-to-fail” banks, is multiplying the problem. “The big banks that are too big to fail are bigger now than ever, but the regulations have trickled down to the smaller banks that didn’t cause the financial crisis” Mr. Hill says. As a result, community banks are disappearing. “When I started my first bank in the 1970s there were 24,000 banks in America,” he says. “There are now 7,000 banks. It may soon be 500 or even fewer.”
But it’s more than Dodd-Frank that leaves him frustrated. “The feds have taken anti-money-laundering rules to the extreme,” Mr. Hill says. “We have to monitor every deposit account every 24 hours. Somebody’s monitoring your account every day.” That’s invasive and expensive.
He laments that the Community Reinvestment Act, a catalyst of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, still hasn’t been repealed. “We are literally required to make loans that we know are going to fail,” he says.
Then there’s the tangle of local regulations that every American small business must cut through. “You don’t need a building permit in Britain. Here [the U.S.] you have to get permits and you have to get inspections,” he says. All that can eat up months and months. “I can build 100 branch banks in Britain before I can get one built in the U.S., thanks to regulators.”
Policy makers and economists in Washington fret about what’s slowing the rate of business startups and entrepreneurial ventures. But Mr. Hill says it’s no wonder, with all this red tape, and it’s no accident that the industry that is really booming, technology, is the one least regulated by government–though the assault against Uber suggests that Silicon Valley might not be immune for long.
. . .
And how much should we be worried about overregulation–or competition from abroad? “Here’s my story in a nutshell and I hope Washington is paying close attention,” Mr. Hill says. “A very successful American business model has been transferred to Britain, where it’s even more successful because it doesn’t have to deal with the same burdens of government.”
He continues: “The politicians keep talking about fairness and helping the little guy. But it’s the little startup businesses that get hurt the most from the heavy hand of excessive government regulation. How is that fair?”

For the full interview, see:
STEPHEN MOORE. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; The Demise of the Small American Bank; The man who put the customer first in retail banking says Dodd-Frank is crushing community banks and Britain is now a better bet.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Aug. 1, 2015): A9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date July 31, 2015.)

“China Has Blindly Constructed So Many Homes and Wasted So Much Resources”

(p. C6) In November [2015], President Xi Jinping told a meeting of officials that China must resolve the housing inventory situation and ensure the health of the property sector.
Since then, Meishan, a city of 3.5 million people, has become a showcase for efforts to lure rural dwellers to cities to buy homes as part of so-called destocking efforts to reduce the glut.
. . .
. . ., some analysts and local government officials warn the rural strategy isn’t a cure-all. Banks typically hesitate to extend mortgages to rural migrants, whose homestead land doesn’t typically qualify as collateral.
“Now with bad loans growing in China, banks are reluctant to lend to farmers. Farmers don’t have assets and lending to them is risky,” said Wang Fei, an official at Hubei Province’s department of housing and urban-rural development.
. . .
Housing inventory in the city rose to 22.5 months last April, an alarmingly high level compared with a healthier rate of 12 months or lower. There were also cases where cash-strapped property firms defaulted on their loans, leaving behind unfinished apartments.
Buyers of Purple Cloud Golden World housing project are now stranded after Yang Jinhao, who controlled Sichuan Xinrui Property Development, got involved in a dispute with a shadow lender early last year.
“China has blindly constructed so many homes and wasted so much resources. I can’t stand it!” said Yu Jianmin, a 70-year-old caretaker of the stalled project who said the construction firm he works for is still awaiting payment from Mr. Yang. Mr. Yang couldn’t be reached.

For the full story, see:
ESTHER FUNG. “Discounts Help China Ease Home Glut.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., March 2, 2016): C6.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 1, 2016, and has the title “China Sweetens Home-Ownership Deals for Rural Dwellers.”)

Obama Says Stimulus Worked at Battery Plant Where CEO Remains “Frustrated” at Losses

(p. A12) JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — President Obama on Friday [February 26, 2016] used a visit to a high-technology battery plant in Florida to argue that the hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies he signed into law during his first days in office had bolstered the economy, transformed the nation’s energy sector, and positioned the United States for a strong rebound.
But Mr. Obama’s trip to the Saft America factory here, opened in 2011 with a $95.5 million investment from the Department of Energy, also highlighted the challenges that have tempered the economic recovery and the difficulty that the president has had in claiming credit for it.
. . .
After touring the facility and watching a large robot named Wall-E assembling one of the batteries, the president called the factory “tangible evidence” that his stimulus package had worked and said that the economy was better off for it. “We took an empty swamp and turned it into an engine of innovation,” he said.
That engine, though, has sputtered as it has struggled to start here. Saft, based in Paris, announced last week that it was reducing the factory’s value because it had still not gained profitability in the competitive lithium-ion battery market. Saying he was “frustrated,” the company’s chief executive projected the plant might not be profitable for a few more years.

For the full story, see:
JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS. “Obama Praises Stimulus at Battery Plant.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 27, 2016): A12.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 26, 2016, and has the title “Obama Points to Florida Factory as Evidence That Stimulus Worked.”)

Bernanke’s “Astonishing” Admission that He Tried, and Failed, to Save Lehman

(p. B1) It is astonishing to hear a former Federal Reserve chairman acknowledge that he may have misled the public as part of an agreement with another senior government official about one of the most crucial moments in recent financial history — and that he now questions whether he should have “been more forthcoming.” But that is what Ben S. Bernanke says in his new memoir, “The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath.”
That crucial moment? The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Mr. Bernanke, in perhaps the most candid explanation of Lehman’s 2008 collapse, writes that he and Henry M. Paulson, then the treasury secretary, purposely obfuscated when asked about Lehman’s demise early on, allowing a narrative to develop that the government had purposely let the firm fail.
“In congressional testimony immediately after Lehman’s collapse, Paulson and I were deliberately quite vague when discussing whether we could have saved Lehman,” Mr. Bernanke writes. “But we had agreed in advance to be vague because we were intensely concerned that acknowledging our inability to save Lehman would hurt market confidence and increase pressure on other vulnerable firms.”
. . .
(p. B4) He writes that it was simply impossible to save Lehman, pointing to the nearly $200 billion of losses that Lehman’s creditors have since suffered. No one has come forward on the record, nor has any contemporaneous document been produced in the past seven years that said the government had found a way to save the company and specifically chose not to do so for political reasons, a point Mr. Bernanke alludes to in his book. “I do not want the notion that Lehman’s failure could have been avoided, and that its failure was consequently a policy choice, to become the received wisdom, for the simple reason that it is not true,” he writes. “We did everything we could think of to avoid it.”

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “In Bernanke’s Memoir, a Candid Look at Lehman.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 6, 2015): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 5, 2015, and has the title “In Ben Bernanke’s Memoir, a Candid Look at Lehman Brothers’ Collapse.”)

The Bernanke memoir is:
Bernanke, Ben S. The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015.

China “on a Treadmill to Hell”

(p. B1) DAVOS, Switzerland — At the World Economic Forum here, chief executives and investors are blaming China for a slump in global markets.
Fears about the country’s downshift, as its official growth slowed to a quarter-century low, have dominated high-level discussions, both during public debates and in smaller, private meetings.
The financier George Soros said at a dinner on Wednesday night [January 20, 2016] that a “hard landing is practically unavoidable,” adding that China is the root of the current financial crisis.
. . .
(p. B6) Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard economist who has long warned of a potential financial crisis in China, remained skeptical [that the Chinese government will reform its policies]. “There is a big propaganda push to say everything is good, everything is fine.”
Earlier in the week he told attendees at the forum that China’s large accumulation of government debt would one day be a shock to a financial system that “amplifies shocks.”
Others with bearish views on China have kept their claws out. Jim S. Chanos, who once said China was “on a treadmill to hell,” said he remained deeply concerned. His hedge fund, Kynikos Associates, estimated that China’s nominal gross domestic growth in 2015 was 5 percent compared with 15 percent just five years earlier.
“China’s debt problems still lie ahead of it,” Mr. Chanos said on Thursday, referring to concerns about the extent to which China’s seeming economic growth is actually fueled by borrowing.
As for Mr. Soros, he told an audience at the Panorama Restaurant in the Seehof Hotel in Davos this year that the Chinese had waited too long to properly address the transition of its growth model. Asked by a Bloomberg reporter if there was a risk of repeating 2008, Mr. Soros said the market was in a similar time of financial crisis.
“But the source of the disequilibrium is different,” Mr. Soros said, adding that in 2008, the main cause was the United States subprime crisis. “Now,” he said, “the root cause is basically China.”

For the full story, see:
ALEXANDRA STEVENSON. “Fears About China’s Economy Fester at Davos.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 23, 2016): B1 & B6.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date and phrase, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 22, 2016.)