Dan Gross: When Deficits are a Good Sign
by ilene - July 14th, 2010 3:10 pm
Dan Gross: When Deficits are a Good Sign
Courtesy of Joshua Brown, The Reformed Broker
Dan Gross has been one of the more bullish voices in the econoblogosphere this spring/summer, and his latest piece for Slate is sure to be controversial. In it, he explains how deficits and surpluses show up out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly…
The fiscal 2010 deficit—$1 trillion and counting—is an encouraging sign.
Let me explain. Federal tax revenues are highly leveraged to economic growth and to the performance of markets, corporations, and rich people. This means they can be volatile. When markets and profits boom, capital gains taxes, payroll and income taxes, and corporate income taxes flow like a mighty stream. As a result, it’s not uncommon for tax receipts to rise 6 percent or 7 percent in a year when the economy grows by 3 percent. This volatility works to the downside, too. When the economy contracts and markets crash, capital gains and corporate income tax revenues dry up. For example, corporate income taxes (click here and scroll down to Page 30) fell from $370 billion in fiscal 2007 to $304 billion in fiscal 2008 (down 18 percent), and then plunged to $138 billion in fiscal 2009 (down 55 percent). In fiscal 2009, a period in which the economy shrunk about 2.6 percent, government receipts plummeted 16 percent, from $2.5 trillion to $2.1 trillion. To aggravate matters, some government spending is countercyclical. That means that in good times, when tax receipts are high, less money is spent on stimulus and social welfare benefits. In bad times, when tax receipts are ebbing, more money goes out the door. And that’s why surpluses and deficits can materialize out of nowhere.
He goes on to point out how the deficit for 2009 came in below expectations as a result of asset price refaltion and other factors. Without being a fan of long-term entitlements and debt, he makes an interesting case based on the numbers for a toning down of the deficit-hawk rhetoric.
Source:
The Miracle Deficit Cure? Growth. (Slate)
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China and Germany: The Perils of Vendor Financing
by ilene - February 27th, 2010 12:13 pm
China and Germany: The Perils of Vendor Financing
Courtesy of JOHN RUBINO at Dollar Collapse
In response to Why Would Anyone Buy a Spanish Bond?, reader RAID 3000 pointed out that the U.S. has far more serious problems than Europe (no argument there!) and included a link to LEAP2020, a European site doing great work on this subject. One of its articles contained the following chart:
This got me to wondering if it would be possible to construct a similar chart for China and its main trading partners. (The U.S. would dominate that one.) From there it occurred to me that China and Germany are in more or less the same boat due to their practice of vendor financing. They’ve gone about it differently but the effect has been the same. Consider:
China lends money directly to the U.S. by using the dollars it receives from us to buy Treasury paper. This lowers U.S. interest rates and supports the dollar, which allows us to continue to buy Chinese stuff.
Germany, on the other hand, has lent its credit rating to the whole Euro Zone, allowing countries like Greece and Spain to borrow more and at lower rates than they could have otherwise. The borrowers use some of this money to buy cars, pharmaceuticals, and solar panels from Germany.
Now both China and Germany have discovered that their surpluses were based in part on bad loans to weak borrowers, and that some of the assets they thought they owned are 1) not really theirs or 2) worth way less than face value.
China has a lot of dollars, but can’t unload them without destroying the value of the dollars it retains. It’s trying to move out slowly, scaling back its purchases of U.S. debt and buying gold and oil resources, but it has to walk a fine line because spooking the markets would defeat its purpose. So it’s stuck with big dollar balances for the foreseeable future, while the U.S. is actively destroying the currency’s value.
Germany doesn’t own a lot of Spanish or Greek assets, but is now on the hook for what might end up being hundreds of billions of euros of PIIGS country debt. Which is to say it has to eat some of the loans it made during its vendor financing days.
Either way, those surpluses — and the balance sheets built on…
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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.