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
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
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.…
Over the weekend, DB's credit strategist Aleksandar Kocic discussed what Minsky Dynamics for the "New Normal" look like based on a matrix that charted the various progressions of Leverage vs Volatility, with four possible end states. However, since that graphic explanation proved too problematic for some, another Deutsche macro analyst, Alan Ruskin, released a far simpler representation of the current (and historical) Minsky cycle, which compartmentalizes the world's various assets in their 7 discrete states along the Minsky cycle (as defined in Charles Kindelberger's ‘Manias, Panics and Crashes – A History of Financial Crises’). These start with the 1) macro shock ‘displacement’, move to 2) ‘healthy expansion’, to 3) ‘leveraged driven gains’, to 4) ‘euphoria’, 5) ‘insider profit-taking’, 6) ‘liquidation and panic’ and onward and downward to 7) ‘revulsion and discredit.’Zero Hedge
Where are we now?
There are three different kinds of cycles, as helpfully laid out in an exemplary textbook I’m familiar with. One is the policy cycle, as described by Ritholtz. Yes, that one is flashing a steady green. The second is the investment/profit cycle, whose theoretical basis goes back to Marx, includes Samuelson’s accelerator model, and is driven by the interaction of business costs (including wages), demand, and new investment. The key indicator there is of course profit (and expected profit), and there are no clouds on that horizon at the moment. The third is the financial cycle [described by Hyman Minsky], of which 2008 was the most recent example. Instability of that sort results from credit growth that props up asset prices rather than increasing revenues or from mismatches between liabilities and revenues. In theory it’s possible to see this kind of trouble in advance, although the actual record is spotty. If we are in for a crunch within the coming year it will probably come from financial forces.Econospeak
The way to read the debt-per-dollar ratio is this: It goes up until there is a big economic problem, it goes down while that problem is being solved, and it goes up again after the problem is solved...Art demonstrates good use of math in econ.
If only they would use the accelerated repayment of debt as their main tool for fighting inflation, we could have that permanent quasi-boom.What is the basic principle for fiscal policy on which MMT is based? Accommodate saving desire through functional finance so that private debt doesn't accumulate, leading to financial instability and economic contraction.
...interest rates are not determined by some invisible natural force; they are set by people. Central banks pin down the short end of the yield curve, while financial-market participants price longer-dated yields based on how they expect monetary policy to respond to future inflation and growth, taking into account associated risks. Observed real interest rates are measured by deducting expected inflation from these nominal rates.
Thus, at any given point in time, interest rates reflect the interplay between the central bank’s reaction function and private-sector beliefs. By identifying the evolution of real interest rates with saving and investment fundamentals, the implicit assumption is that the central bank and financial markets can roughly track the evolution of the equilibrium real rate over time.
But this is by no means straightforward. For central banks, measuring the equilibrium interest rate – an abstract concept that cannot be observed – is a formidable challenge....
Moreover, central banks’ policy frameworks may be incomplete. By focusing largely on short-term inflation and output stabilization, monetary policy may not pay sufficient attention to financial developments. Given that the financial cycle is much more drawn out than the business cycle, typical policy horizons may not allow the authorities to account adequately for the impact of their decisions on future economic outcomes....
With financial-market participants as much in the dark as central banks, things can go badly wrong. And so they have....
Monetary policy cannot overcome structural impediments to growth. But the actions that central banks take today can affect real macroeconomic developments in the long term, primarily through their impact on the financial cycle.Minsky.
Simon Nixon: "the most important contribution to the debate is an essay by Claudio Borio, deputy head of the monetary and economics department at the Bank for International Settlements, published last moth and titled: “The Financial Cycle and Macroeconomics: What have we learned?”Lars P. Syll's Blog
"In Mr. Borio’s view, the 'New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium' model used by most mainstream forecasters is flawed because it assumes the financial system is frictionless: Its role is simply to allocate resources and therefore can be ignored. Although many economists now accept these assumptions are wrong, efforts to modify their models amount to little more than tinkering. What is needed is a return to out-of-fashion insights influential before World War II and kept alive since by maverick economists such as Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger that recognized the central importance of the financial cycle."
