WE ARE NOT REPEATING THE MISTAKES OF JAPAN….YET
by ilene - December 21st, 2010 2:44 pm
Pragcap explains why "WE ARE NOT REPEATING THE MISTAKES OF JAPAN….YET".
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
When confronted with a balance sheet recession the math regarding economic growth gets relatively simple – either the government spends in times of below trend private sector spending or the economy contracts. For several years now I have maintained that we are in a balance sheet recession – an unusual recession caused by excessive private sector debt. Although this balance sheet recession created the risk of prolonged weakness I have been quick to dismiss the persistent discussions that compare this to anything close to a second great depression - as I showed in 2009 the comparisons were always ridiculous. The much closer precedent was
Over the last year I have consistently expressed concerns that the USA was going to suffer the same fate as Japan, which consistently scared itself into recession due to austerity measures. At the time, most pundits were comparing us to Greece and attempting to scare us into thinking that the USA was bankrupt, on the verge of hyperinflation and general doom. I wrote several negative articles in 2009 & 2010 berating public officials who said the USA was going bankrupt and that the deficit was at risk of quickly turning us into Greece, Weimar or Zimbabwe. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. The inflationists, defaultistas and other fear mongerers have been wrong in nearly every aspect of their arguments about the US economy.
US government default was never on the table, the bond vigilantes were not just taking a nap and now, with the passage of the most recent stimulus bill it’s likely that we’ve (at least temporarily) sidestepped the economic decline that was likely to accompany a decline in government spending. Richard Koo, however, believes we are repeating the mistakes of our past. In a recent strategy note he said:
“The situation in Europe is no different from that in the US. I therefore have to conclude that the western nations have learned nothing from Japan’s lessons and are likely to repeat its mistakes.”
I have to disagree here. The most important factor impacting economic growth in the prior year…
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DEBT AND DELEVERAGING: A FISHER, MINSKY, KOO APPROACH
by ilene - November 18th, 2010 3:34 pm
DEBT AND DELEVERAGING: A FISHER, MINSKY, KOO APPROACH
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
The following paper by Paul Krugman is an excellent analysis of the current situation in the United States. Professor Krugman accepts Richard Koo’s “balance sheet recession” and draws similar conclusions to Koo – primarily that government must maintain large deficits in order to offset the lack of spending by the private sector. The key component missing in both Krugman and Koo’s argument is the idea that a nation that is sovereign in its own currency cannot default on its “debt”. Nonetheless, the conclusions we all come to are similar – a temporary deficit is not only necessary, but an economic benefit during a balance sheet recession:
“In this paper we have sought to formalize the notion of a deleveraging crisis, in which there is an abrupt downward revision of views about how much debt it is safe for individual agents to have, and in which this revision of views forces highly indebted agents to reduce their spending sharply. Such a sudden shift to deleveraging can, if it is large enough, create major problems of macroeconomic management. For if a slump is to be avoided, someone must spend more to compensate for the fact that debtors are spending less; yet even a zero nominal interest rate may not be low enough to induce the needed spending.
Formalizing this concept integrates several important strands in economic thought. Fisher’s famous idea of debt deflation emerges naturally, while the deleveraging shock can be seen as our version of the increasingly popular notion of a “Minsky moment.” And the process of recovery, which depends on debtors paying down their liabilities, corresponds quite closely to Koo’s notion of a protracted “balance sheet recession.”
One thing that is especially clear from the analysis is the likelihood that policy discussion in the aftermath of a deleveraging shock will be even more confused than usual, at least viewed through the lens of the model. Why? Because the shock pushes us into a world of topsy-turvy, in which saving is a vice, increased productivity can reduce output, and flexible wages increase unemployment. However, expansionary fiscal policy should be effective, in part because the macroeconomic effects of a deleveraging shock are inherently temporary, so the fiscal response need be only temporary as well. And the model suggests that a temporary rise in government spending not only won’t
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Jobs Expand by 151,000, Unemployment Steady at 9.6%; Birth-Death Methodology Changes for the Better; Reflections on the Numbers
by ilene - November 6th, 2010 4:46 pm
Jobs Expand by 151,000, Unemployment Steady at 9.6%; Birth-Death Methodology Changes for the Better; Reflections on the Numbers
Courtesy of Mish
Today the BLS reported jobs expanded by 151,000. This should not be totally unexpected as I noted last night in Gaming the Jobs Report that TrimTabs called for +95,000, ADP +43,000, and Gallup showed a surge in October hiring.
Moreover, recent ISM surveys were stronger than expected. The important question this morning is whether or not this surge is sustainable. I do not think it is, nor does TrimTabs.
Here is the Email alert from TrimTabs once again (sorry, no link).
TrimTabs
Sausalito, CA – November 3, 2010 – TrimTabs Investment Research estimates that the U.S. economy added 95,000 jobs in October, the first monthly increase since May.
“The economy clearly improved in October,” said Madeline Schnapp, Director of Macroeconomic Research at TrimTabs. “Unfortunately, the gains probably aren’t sustainable.”
Multiple indicators suggest the labor market perked up last month. Real-time tax data shows wage and salary growth accelerated, TrimTabs’ proprietary measure of online job postings jumped 5.6%, and initial unemployment claims fell to the lowest level since August 2008.
In a research note, TrimTabs argues that the economy will remain stuck in slow-growth mode. October’s employment increase likely owes to temporary factors such as inventory building. Also, a cheaper dollar boosted exports, and record low mortgage rates spurred refinancing activity.
“Economic growth is likely to stay sluggish because the private sector isn’t able to pick up the slack from waning government stimulus,” Schnapp noted. “State and local government budget crises and the weak housing market will be significant drags on growth for a long time.”
I strongly concur with that last paragraph in red above.
I had a typo in the headline number from TrimTabs yesterday (now corrected). The TrimTabs estimate was +95,000 not +75,000 as I had in the title. No changes were made to the body of my post.
Had I read that properly I would have upped last night’s estimates higher by 20,000. I was very aware today’s report might be on the hot side.
This is what I said …
Anything from +40,000 to +110,000 seems like a reasonable guess. I certainly would not be surprised to see a number in the upper end of that range. Stores are hiring, Black Friday sales are starting 3 weeks early, and ISM reports seemed
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California Cut 37,000 Government Jobs in September; Much More to Come
by ilene - October 24th, 2010 6:49 pm
California Cut 37,000 Government Jobs in September; Much More to Come
Courtesy of Mish
The LA Times reports Government job cuts ravage California
Weighed down by a struggling economy, government agencies in California shed 37,300 workers last month — more jobs than were lost in the private sector — as cities and counties made their biggest payroll cutbacks since at least 1990.
What’s more, analysts see more job cuts ahead as California faces an estimated $10-billion shortfall in the state budget that the next governor must address. Cities and counties, meanwhile, are still struggling with tepid sales and property tax revenue.
Cities across the state have taken stringent measures to balance their budgets, said Eva Spiegel, a spokeswoman with the League of California Cities.
Oakland laid off 80 police officers and delayed pothole repairs. Fullerton laid off 14 police officers and three firefighters, cut library hours and closed restrooms at several parks. Oceanside laid off 28 police officers and three firefighters, closed a swimming pool and a recreation center and eliminated the city Bookmobile.
Overall, the state’s unemployment rate remained stuck at 12.4%, one of the highest in the nation. The state lost a net 63,600 jobs in September. Local governments shed 32,400 jobs, according to the monthly report from the state Employment Development Department released Friday.
Taxable sales plummeted 18.5% in California from 2006 to 2009 and are expected to remain relatively flat this year, according to the National University System Institute for Policy Research in La Jolla.
The National League of Cities reported this month that cities across the country were making their sharpest cuts in at least a quarter of a century. Nearly 80% of city finance officers in a survey reported laying off staff, and 87% said their cities were worse off financially this year than last year.
Taxable Sales Down 18%
Those last two paragraphs are the key to understanding one of the things I have been saying, that there is no recovery in sales.
Every month, when retail sales numbers come out, I question them. Here is my article from October 15: Retail Sales Rise More Than Forecast; Once Again I Ask "Really?"
Retail sales may be at their best point in the year, but sales are certainly not within 3% of the all time high [as government data shows]. If they were, tax revenue collection would
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The Long Road to Recovery
by ilene - September 19th, 2010 1:26 pm
The Long Road to Recovery
By David Galland, Managing Editor, The Casey Report
Last week the government released the latest unemployment data. Bloomberg, always ready to roll up the sleeves to help its friends in government (get reelected), was running a headline that “Companies in U.S. Added 67,000 Jobs in August.”
While I haven’t had time to go through the minutiae of the report, I find myself scratching my head at Mr. Market’s rather positive reaction to the report, given the bullet points:
- Manufacturing payrolls declined by 27,000.
- Employment at service-providers fell by 54,000.
- Retailers cut 4,900 workers.
- State and local governments gave walking papers to 10,000 people.
- The federal government cut 111,000 jobs (mostly temporary census workers).
- The number of “underemployed” – people who want full-time work, but have given up and are now working part-time, increased again, from 16.5% to 16.7%.
The fine folks at Chart of the Day just published their take on the numbers. You may see something cheerful in this snapshot, but if so, it eludes me…
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Interestingly, a week ago ADP, a company that does real-time payroll processing for about one in every six U.S. workers, and whose data – because it is based on hard data and not surveying – has tended to be accurate, released its report for August employment. Based on ADP’s data, they had forecasted that the construction industry had actually cut 33,000 jobs in August.
Their data pointed to an overall decline in the work force of 105,000 jobs, worse than the government’s numbers that showed overall unemployment rose by 54,000 – moving the unemployment rate from 9.5% back up to 9.6%.
At all times, but especially ahead of an election as important as November’s, you can count me skeptical in the extreme when it comes to government data. Especially when it flies in the face of the clear trends in motion. Even with the government’s stimulus funds still coursing through the economy, in the second quarter U.S. gross domestic product fell by more than half, to an annualized rate of just 1.6%. Without the government’s supercharged spending, it’s been calculated that actual GDP would have been halved again.
So, where are all these new private-sector jobs coming from?
The construction industry was reported to have hired 19,000 people – a good number of whom, I suspect, are working on government-subsidized projects. At least in this neighborhood –…
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Mort Zuckerman Is Back, Blasting American Socialism; Or How America’s Public Servants Are Now Its Masters
by ilene - September 10th, 2010 1:08 pm
Good article from Zero Hedge making a point I agree with — the conflict between public sector and private sector employees is an artifact of a greater issue – the conflict between the American people and it’s "criminal ruling elite." While government workers came out of the last round a lot better off than the average private sector workers, they are not the source of the core problems in our economic-political system, and focusing on government workers, and Unions, is a distraction from deeper, more pervasive corruptions. – Ilene
Mort Zuckerman Is Back, Blasting American Socialism; Or How America’s Public Servants Are Now Its Masters
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
The man who has rapidly emerged as the most vocal Obama critic, Mort Zuckerman, has just penned his most recent scathing anti-administration missive, this time focusing on the schism in US society between "preferred-status" public and shunned private-sector employees, concluding that "Americans cannot maintain their essential faith in government if there are two Americas, in which the private sector subsidises the disproportionate benefits of this new public sector elite." Is this most recent split in US society being cultivated to take the place of the Wall Street – Main Street dialectic, which even Obama is now forced to realize is a fight he is set to lose (just imagine how anti-Obama Cramer would get if stocks drop by 0.001% during the teleprompter’s next media appearance)? Certainly, in a society that exists simply on the basis of a simple ongoing "us versus them" distraction, while the true crimes continue unabated behind the scenes, this is not an impossible assumption. Here’s a suggestion to Mort and whoever else wishes to peddle more such diversions: how about framing the next conflict where it rightfully belongs: as that between America’s people and its criminal ruling elite?
Full Op-Ed below:
America’s public servants are now its masters, first published in the Financial Times
by Mort Zuckerman
There really are two Americas, but they are not captured by the standard class warfare speeches that dramatise the gulf between the rich and the poor. Of the new divisions, one is the gap between employed and unemployed that President Barack Obama seeks to close with yet another $50bn stimulus programme.…
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The Perils of Prediction
by ilene - September 3rd, 2010 4:30 pm
The Perils of Prediction
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds
Nobody knows the future, so the best we can do is strive for an open mind and flexibility in our thinking and responses.
In 1904, the "fact-based" consensus was that rising prosperity would stretch into the future as far as imagination allowed. The prosperity was so widespread that war, it seemed, had been abolished as bad for business.
In 1904, Imperial Tsarist Russia, though suffering from the usual spot of bother now and again, was stable and enduring. In 1904, Great Britain viewed France as its continental rival.
Ten years later, advanced, peaceful, hopeful Europe stumbled into the Great War, and three years into that war Tsarist Russia fell to revolution.
In 1928, permanent prosperity was again the consensus. Two years later, that hope was reduced to ashes.
In 1930, Germany and Japan were economically troubled, as were the other great nations of the world, but neither were seen as threatening. Less than ten years later, the two nations had declared war on the world.
In 1980, fear of a sudden massive Soviet tank attack on West Germany sparked a series of "what if" books and a push for short-range nuclear-armed missiles in Germany--a U.S. plan which galvanized the Western European peace movement.
Ten years later, the Soviet Empire had crumbled into dust and abandoned gulags.
In 1975, scholars and pundits confidently declared that the "cult of Mao" which fueled China’s Culutral Revolution was so entrenched, so pervasive and so central to China’s Communist regime that would outlast Mao the mortal and thus into the next century.
Three years later, Mao was dead and the Gang of Four lost power. Ten years after 1975, when the Cult of Mao was universally viewed as a permanent feature of China, that nation was four years into the state-controlled, limited-capitalist model of engaging the world that created its present-day pre-eminence.
I think you see my point: consensus predictions of what the future holds are generally wrong. The consensus in the U.S. about the world of 2020 is that it won’t be much different from the world of 2010. All the actuarial tables of Social Security run to 2040 and beyond, as if the road ahead will be an extension of the past sixty years of American global dominance and credit-based prosperity.
That alone tells me 2020 will…
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THE DETERIORATING MACRO PICTURE
by ilene - August 31st, 2010 3:59 am
THE DETERIORATING MACRO PICTURE
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
Over the course of the last 18 months I’ve been adhering to a macro view that can best be summed up as follows:
1) The explosion in private
sector debt (excessive housing borrowing, excessive corporate debt, etc) levels would reveal the private sector as unable to sustain positive economic growth, de-leveraging and deflation would ensue.2) Government intervention would help moderately boost aggregate demand, improve bank balance sheets, improve sentiment, boost asset prices but fail to result in sustained economic recovery as private sector balance
sheet recession persists.3) Extremely depressed estimates and corporate cost cutting would improve margins and generate a moderate earnings rebound, but would come under pressure in 2010 as margin expansion failed to continue at the 2009 rate.
4) The end of government intervention in H2 2010 will reveal severe strains in housing and will reveal the private sector as still very weak and unable to sustain economic growth on its own.
The rebound in assets was surprisingly strong and the ability of corporations to sustain bottom line growth has been truly impressive – far better than I expected. However, I am growing increasingly concerned that the market has priced in overly optimistic earnings sustainability – in other words, estimates and expectations have overshot to the upside.
What we’ve seen over the last few years is not terribly complex in my opinion. The housing boom created what was in essence a massively leveraged household sector. The problems were compounded by the leveraging in the financial sector, however, this was merely a symptom of the real underlying problem and not the cause of the financial crisis (despite what Mr. Bernanke continues to say and do to fix the economy).
As the consumer balance sheet imploded the economy imploded with it. This shocked aggregate demand like we haven’t seen in nearly a century. This resulted in collapsing corporate revenues. The decrease in corporate revenues, due to this decline in aggregate demand, resulted in massive cost cutting and defensive posturing by corporations. This exacerbated the problems as job losses further weakened the consumer balance sheet position. Consumers, like, corporations, got defensive and began cutting expenses and paying down liabilities. Sentiment collapsed and we all know what unfolded in 2008.
The government responded by largely targeting the banking sector based on the belief that fixing the banks would fix Main…
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JOBS REPORT: NOT A PRETTY PICTURE
by ilene - August 6th, 2010 12:02 pm
JOBS REPORT: NOT A PRETTY PICTURE
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
It’s becoming more and more clear that the government has failed in its efforts to create a sustainable private sector recovery. The monetarist bank bailout has failed to create the economic
“Private employers added new workers at a weak pace for the third straight month, making it more likely economic growth will slow in the coming months.The Labor Department says companies added a net total of 71,000 jobs in July, far below the roughly 200,000 needed each month to reduce the unemployment
rate. The jobless rate was unchanged at 9.5 percent.Overall, the economy lost a net total of 131,000 jobs last month, as 143,000 temporary census jobs ended.
The department also says businesses hired fewer workers in June than it previously estimated. July’s private sector job gains were revised down to 31,000 from 83,000. May was revised up slightly to show 51,000 net new jobs, from 33,000.”
It would be unwise to overreact to this news, but it’s certainly disheartening for those who are looking for a job or those who are looking for an economic recovery to actually materialize. The duration of this recession in the labor market is truly depressing.
(image via chart of the day)
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Hypocrite Geithner Says Private Sector Must Drive Economy
by ilene - July 26th, 2010 7:30 pm
Hypocrite Geithner Says Private Sector Must Drive Economy
Courtesy of Mish
Like most politicians, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner likes to talk out of both sides of his mouth, generally saying contradictory things in sound bites that may sound reasonable at first glance, but look idiotic upon closer inspection.
For example please consider Private sector must drive economy: Geithner
During an interview on NBC’s "Meet the Press," Geithner also said the government has big plans for reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the housing finance giants that now stand behind most of the mortgages in the U.S. after being bailed out by taxpayers during the 2008 financial crisis.
Geithner said Sunday that he doesn’t expect a double-dip recession, citing encouraging signs in the economy. "The most likely thing is you see an economy that gradually strengthens over the next year or two," he said. Watch Geithner on Meet the Press.
Businesses are still "very cautious" and are trying to get as much productivity from current employees as possible, Geithner explained.
"They are in a very strong financial condition though. I think that’s very promising because there’s a lot of pent-up demand and there’s a lot of capacity still for them to step up and start to invest and hire again," he added. "The government can help but we need to make this transition now to a recovery led by private investment."
There’s a "good case" for the government to support small businesses, the unemployed and help states keep teachers in classrooms, but the transition to growth led by the private sector must happen, Geithner said.
Still, he stressed that the current system of housing finance has to change.
"We’re not going to preserve Fannie and Freddie in anything like their current form. We’re going to have to bring fundamental change to that market," Geithner said.
There’s still a good case for the government preserving some type of guarantee to make sure that people can finance a house even in a very damaging recession, he explained.
"We’re also going to have to take a look at the broad set of policies we put in place to help encourage home ownership and particularly help low income Americans get access to affordable housing," Geithner said. "We’re going to take a very broad look at how best to do that."
No Pent Up Demand
For starters Geithner is wrong about pent…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site