I have been reporting for months that the indicator we should all be monitoring is Real Gross Private Domestic Investment....Forbes — Pragmatic Economics
I saw a high profile comment to the effect that the business cycle was abolished recently. Since I will be plugging a book on recessions shortly, that represents a risk to my business plans. I do not wish to go through what exactly was said elsewhere (mainly because I did not go through the details of the argument), but just give my spin on the idea. If we stick enough qualifications into how we express ourselves, it is not that controversial an opinion....Bond Economics
Now that new home sales have reached a new cycle high (in June), I'd like to update a couple of graphs in a previous post (most of this from an earlier post).
For the economy, what we should be focused on are single family starts and new home sales. As I noted in Investment and Recessions "New Home Sales appears to be an excellent leading indicator, and currently new home sales (and housing starts) are up solidly year-over-year, and this suggests there is no recession in sight."…
Although new home sales were down towards the end of 2018, the decline wasn't that large historically. As I noted last Fall, I wasn't even on recession watch. Now new home sales are up solidly year-over-year. No worries....Calculated Risk
Inventories are one driver of the business cycle. A common argument is that the movement towards just-in-time inventories has reduced the inventory cycle, and hence reduced the amplitude of the business cycle. Although plausible, it is very difficult to distinguish this from a lessened amplitude of the business cycle causing less swings in inventories. Since inventory growth is part of investment, one could view it as a subset of the argument that investment trends drive the business cycle (in most cases; sufficiently stupid policy can always cause a recession).
(Note: this article is based on some charts and thinking on inventories that is a section in my manuscript on recessions. I am not posting the full text, as I think it has too much background information, and probably needs some serious editing.)Bond Economics
The focus of my upcoming book is on recession forecasting, and not policy responses towards recessions. However, I expect that this is a subject of interest to many of my readers, so I will offer a brief outline of some of the literature.
(Note: this is an unedited first draft of a section from my manuscript book on recessions. For a typical standalone article, it is too long. However, I do not want to spend time stripping out information that should appear in a book. I could have split it into multiple parts, but I did not feel there was a natural splitting point. And yes, I went a bit nuts with footnotes.)….Bond Economics
Real estate -- particularly residential real estate -- is an extremely important factor when discussing recessions in the modern era. To a certain extent, real estate is where economic theory goes to die. One possibility is that the theory was largely developed when the norms in real estate investment were conservative, so attention was moved to the industrial sector. However, the herd tendencies in the housing market may now overwhelm the industrial cycle.
(This article is a set of notes about the housing market. I started laying out my book on recessions, and I realised the need for a chapter on housing investment. I want to lay out some of the ideas that I mulled over while I was losing in a curling tournament down in the United States. The article is somewhat long on assertions, and missing the research to back up those statements. I will be filling the details as I turn to that chapter.)...Bond Economics
The period of low demand and low interest rates during the Great Recession has prompted economists to consider new policies to stabilise the business cycle. The ‘zero lower bound’ on nominal interest rates prevented the use of interest rate reductions to stimulate consumption and investment in many developed economies. Researchers have proposed an alternative policy tool, ‘unconventional’ fiscal policy. This is a commitment to raise consumption taxes in the future (Feldstein 2002, Hall 2011, Correia et al. 2013).
Anticipation of higher consumption taxes can incentivise intertemporal substitution in the same way as traditional monetary policy, by raising the price of future consumption relative to current consumption. Households expecting higher future taxes move consumption to the present, increasing current demand.
But unconventional fiscal policy may not be effective in practice:...vox.eu
The ‘Matching functions’ mentioined in the quote explain unemployment by assuming that finding a job or a worker takes time. And this does explain unemployment – part of it (2%-point?). The rest must be explained by crises and the inability of the market system to create jobs. As is clear from comparing graph 2, short-lived crises cause lower levels of job creation and higher levels of job destruction. Basically, these swings are not even that large. But together they lead to a fast increase in unemployment which take years to overcome. Sargent and Ljundqvist did re-invent the wheel. If they had red Rodbertus, Sismondi, Marx, Owen or Mitchell they would have known.
Fun fact: the neoclassical ‘DSGE’ model of Bokan e.a. distinguishes a class of bankers, a class of entrepreneurs (let’s call them ‘capitalists’, as they own all the capital) and a class of households which have nothing else to sell than their labour… The model knows a ‘positive wage mark-up’ but change this into a ‘wage mark down’ (for instance caused by ‘monpsonie’ on the labor market, i.e. by strong labor market power of employers, and it’s starting to look pretty Marxist, too.Real-World Economics Review Blog
I am resuming work on pondering the business cycle, and just wanted to give some initial comments about the notion of productivity. This article just describes some basic concepts taken from a generic post-Keynesian perspective (plus some of my own views, which may or may not be eccentric). As work progresses on my book, I should address the neo-classical approach, as well as empirical results.Bond Economics
One of the problems with many theoretical approaches to the business cycle is that there is an implicit bias towards a manufacturing economy. The modelling of business sector decision making for manufacturing is quite different than for the service sector. This matters, as the developed economies are increasingly services-driven (figure above). For consumer-facing service industries, output is largely demand-driven. This fits much better with the post-Keynesian approach.
This article is discussing a bit of a theoretical puzzle that came up when I was thinking about the next large instalment of business cycle articles. (Once again, my next project after the breakeven inflation analysis book is one on business cycles.) Rather than mess up that discussion with a long digression, I have broken this out into a small stand-alone article. I am not going to argue that what I am discussing is extremely deep, as it is possible to work around. However, we need to keep it in mind when discussing the varying approaches to business cycle analysis.Bond Economics
One often encounters assertions that recessions are the result of an excess demand for money (or some variant), based on various equilibrium arguments. Although one could superficially interpret recessions in such a fashion, the issue is that this interpretation does not help analyse the business cycle. In other words, it is a non-falsifiable statement that offers no useful information. In my view, discussions involving "money" or "safe assets" provide us an example regarding the limited usefulness of mainstream economic theory for business cycle analysis.Bond Economics
The key for me, as readers of this blog know, is what is happening to the profitability of capital in the major economies. If profitability is rising, then corporate investment and economic growth will follow – but also vice versa. But if profitability and profits are falling, debt accumulated will become a major burden. Eventually the zombies will start to go bankrupt, spreading across sectors and a slump will ensue. Financial prices will quickly collapse toward the real value of their underlying productive assets.Michael Roberts Blog
Indeed, according to Goldman Sachs economists, the prices of financial assets (bonds and stocks) are currently at their highest against actual earnings since 1900!
What the OECD and IMF reports show is that if there is a downturn in profitability, the next slump will be severe, given that private debt (both corporate and household) has not been ‘deleveraged’ in the last nine years – indeed on the contrary.…
The big picture then is this: a global economy into its ninth year of the business cycle that is starting to gain momentum with the US flirting with 3% growth and 4% unemployment with richly priced asset markets but a flattening yield curve.
We’ve seen this picture before.…
In retrospect, one could argue that the Fed’s late interest rate hike campaign was a policy error – that the Fed should have seen the flattening yield curve as a canary in the coal mine and resisted raising its policy rates despite any concern about elevated asset prices.
I think this is the Fed’s real conundrum this late in a business cycle. If the economy is running solidly and leading economic indicators are bullish, the Fed is hard-pressed to not raise rates in an environment in which headline unemployment is low and falling, asset prices are rich, and lending standards have loosened — even if the yield curve is flattening. Aren’t they supposed to take the punch bowl away?
I don’t have the answer to that question. Time and again, late in the cycle, the Fed has indeed taken the punch bowl away. And the result was recession and financial crisis.
That’s exactly why this is the most dangerous period in the business cycle.Credit Writedowns
The real question is the medium to longer term. Over the medium-term, it is still an unanswered question whether we are near the end of this business cycle or just at the tail end of a mid-cycle pause.Credit Writedowns
All of these models are based on a parable of equilibrium based on Wicksell’s Rocking Horse model. We now know this to be mathematically false, so why don’t we just replace it?
His famous quote from 1918“If you hit a rocking horse with a stick, the movement of the horse will be very different from the stick. The hits are the cause of the movement, but the system’s own equilibrium laws condition the form of movement”Wicksells model was one of damped equilibrium. In nature equilibrium is a state of rest, so a pendulum for example will eventually stopped swinging. So the only way to make the rocking horse rock is to hit it with a stick.
To get away from models where change is generated by philosogen and chaloric we have to abandon the assumption that what drives cycles is outside the model. To get a rocking horse to rick requires energy, and how much it swings depends on its centre of mass. The economy is much more like a powered rocking horse where its centre of gravity is subject to rare but violent shifts to new equilibria.
