Tag Archives: summers

New Study Says Rising Inequality Is Killing the Economy

by RayIokkidgk Posted on September 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Non-rich people tend to spend 100 percent of their income, or close to it. Rich people don’t. They spend, say, 50 percent of their income and save the rest. This difference is called the “marginal propensity to consume,” and it seems like it might be a problem if income inequality is rising. The problem is that as rich people get a larger share of total income, total consumption goes down. Here’s an example:

The question, of course, is how big the MPC effect is. Several years ago I investigated this and concluded that it really wasn’t very big. It seems like it should be, but it just wasn’t.

Today, however, Larry Summers directs our attention to a new IMF paper that suggests MPC actually does have a big impact. The authors look at two effects. First, as middle-income families fall into lower income groups, they spend less. Second, as a larger share of income goes to the rich, average MPC goes down. Both of these effects reduce total consumption, which in turn acts as a drag on the economy. Here’s the relevant chart:

MPC alone reduces consumption by nearly 2 percent, or roughly $200 billion per year. This is still not a gigantic effect, but it’s noticeable. And when you add in the direct spending effect of income polarization, it’s closer to $400 billion per year. That means we’re losing a lot of consumption—which we need—and gaining a lot of capital—which we don’t. The world is so awash in capital these days that you can (literally) hardly give it away.

Now, the authors use some novel estimating techniques in their paper, which is why they come up with a stronger effect than previous studies. The folks with PhDs will have to fight over whether they’ve done their sums correctly. But if they have, it means that increasing income inequality is a lot more than just a matter of unfairness. It’s also a real drag on economic growth.

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New Study Says Rising Inequality Is Killing the Economy

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How hot will future summers be in your city?

by RochellCullen Posted on July 10, 2014

A little slice of Saudi Arabia right at home

How hot will future summers be in your city?

By

Fancy spending a summer in Kuwait City? That’s what scientists project summers will resemble in Phoenix by the end of the century. And summertime temperatures in Boston are expected to rise 10 degrees by 2100, resembling current mid-year heat in North Miami Beach.

Thanks to this nifty new tool from Climate Central, you can not only find out what temperatures your city is expected to average by 2100 — you can compare that projected weather to current conditions in other metropolises.

The “1,001 Blistering Future Summers” interactive is based on global warming projections that assume the world takes little to no action to slow down climate change. But the nonprofit warns that even if greenhouse gas emissions are substantially reduced, such as through an energy revolution that replaces fossil fuel burning with solar panels and wind turbines, “U.S. cities are already locked into some amount of summer warming through the end of the century.” You might be feeling some of that warming already. Pass the ice cubes!


Source
1001 Blistering Future Summers, Climate Central

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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How hot will future summers be in your city?

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Why Have Investors Given Up on the Real World?

by BettyWhitefoord Posted on January 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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How should we respond to sustained economic weakness? Brad DeLong has a lengthy post today comparing two approaches. To oversimplify, we have Larry Summers on one side, who believes the answer is higher government spending on infrastructure. On the other side is Olivier Blanchard, the IMF’s chief economist, who thinks the answer is higher inflation.

In a nutshell, the argument for higher inflation is simple. Right now, with interest rates at slightly above zero and inflation running a little less than 2 percent, real interest rates are about -1 percent. But that’s too high. Given the weakness of the economy, the market-clearing real interest rate is probably around -3 percent. If inflation were running at 4-5 percent, that’s what we’d have, and the economy would recover more quickly.

There are two arguments opposed to this. The first is that central banks have demonstrated that 2 percent inflation is sustainable. But what about 5 percent? Maybe not. If central banks are willing to let inflation get that high, markets might conclude that they’ll respond with even higher inflation if political considerations demand it. Inflationary expectations will go up, the central bank will respond, and soon we’ll be in an inflationary spiral, just like the 1970s.

The second argument is the one Summers makes: sustained low interest rates are almost certain to lead to asset bubbles. So even if higher inflation works in the short run, it’s a recipe for disaster in the long run.

DeLong draws several conclusions from this. He agrees that higher government spending is a good idea—and so do I. The drop in government spending since 2010 has been unprecedented in recent history (see chart below). He’s ambivalent about a higher inflation target, since he agrees that at some level it risks turning into a spiral. (But he’s not sure what that level is.) And finally, he thinks the real demand-side problem is in residential construction, which has plummeted since the housing bubble burst. This could be addressed with policy changes at the FHFA, which might be a better alternative than higher inflation anyway. I have two observations about all this:

Central bankers seem to think that over the past 30 years they’ve demonstrated credibility in restraining inflation, something they’re loath to give up. That’s why they hate the idea of raising their inflation targets above 2 percent. But it strikes me that they may be wrong: what they’ve really done is demonstrate credibility in following the Taylor Rule, which provides a formula-based target for short-term interest rates. But right now, the Taylor Rule suggests that interest rates should be below zero.1 A higher inflation target that’s in service of rigorously following the Taylor Rule might increase the monetary credibility of central banks, not decrease it. (Or, possibly, have no effect at all on their credibility.)
The Summers view that sustained low interest rates lead to bubbles may be correct. But this is only true if there just flatly aren’t enough good real-world investment opportunities available, which would leave investors with no place to put their money except in risky asset plays. DeLong seems to agree with this. When Ryan Avent asks, “Are we really arguing that there aren’t enough good private investment opportunities in America?” DeLong answers, “Yes. We are.”

DeLong has much more to say about all this, and I’m dangerously oversimplifying here. But I’m doing it to make a point. First, I think central banks have a lot of leeway to pursue higher inflation as long as they’re clear about what they’re doing and can credibly say that they’re merely following the same monetary rules they’ve been following for the past three decades. Second, it’s surprising that we haven’t paid more attention to the suggestion that asset bubbles are the result of a (permanent?) condition in which there simply aren’t enough good private investment opportunities. This deserves way more discussion, not just a footnote in a broader essay. If it’s true, surely this is the economic challenge of our day. No matter what else we do, we’re in big trouble if markets simply don’t believe there are enough factories to expand or new companies to invest in. If investors have essentially given up on the real economy, no amount of fiscal or monetary policy will save us.

So why isn’t this getting more discussion?

1Actually, this depends on which version of the Taylor Rule you use. But let’s leave that for another day. For now, it’s enough to say that there’s a conventional version of the Taylor Rule which says real interest rates should be well below zero.

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Why Have Investors Given Up on the Real World?

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Larry Summers, Secular Stagnation, and the Great Investment Drought

by Lubomyr21t Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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This weekend Paul Krugman lavished immense praise on a presentation that Larry Summers gave to the IMF a few days ago, and I’ll confess that I’m a little puzzled by this. Not because it wasn’t a good presentation. It was. But it’s quite short and basically just tosses out an idea without really elaborating on it much. Here’s the idea: we might be in a permanent condition of slow economic growth—i.e., secular stagnation.

The evidence Summers presents is pretty straightforward: during the aughts, we had a huge housing bubble, and yet the economy still performed only listlessly:

Too easy money, too much borrowing, too much perceived wealth. Was there a great boom? Capacity utilization wasn’t under any great pressure. Unemployment wasn’t under any remarkably low level. Inflation was entirely quiescent. So somehow even a great bubble wasn’t enough to produce any excess in aggregate demand.

That’s true enough, and you can argue that this is a new thing. As recently as the late 90s, the dotcom bubble did produce a boom and did push employment to very high levels. That in turn put pressure on employers to offer higher wages, and sure enough, wages went up.

But the housing bubble, despite being even bigger than the dotcom bubble, did no such thing. As Summers says, it didn’t produce high employment; it didn’t push wages up; and it didn’t get the economy running at full capacity. And today, six years after the bubble burst and four years into recovery, with the world’s financial plumbing once again functioning just fine, the economy still isn’t running at high capacity. What’s up?

When I’ve talked about this before, I haven’t framed it as a problem of the natural interest rate going below zero, as Summers does. Instead, I’ve usually framed it as a problem of an investment drought. There simply aren’t enough promising real-world investments available, which means that lots of money is either sitting on the sidelines or else getting diverted into financial rocket science.

Now, in one sense, this is just two ways of saying the same thing: there aren’t enough promising real-world investments at current interest rates. It doesn’t matter that real interest rates are already negative. Reduce them even further, and more investments will look like winners. And yet, if Summers is right and this is a permanent condition,1 we’re still left with a question: what happened to produce a world in which, for an extended period of time, even negative interest rates aren’t low enough to make real-world investments attractive in sufficient quantities to get the economy humming?

The answer matters, because it determines our response. Krugman mentions demographics as one possible answer: slowing population growth means slower economic growth. Another possibility is increased automation: as machines take over more and more work, there are fewer jobs available and less income to spend. There’s also Tyler Cowen’s great stagnation thesis. Or the possibility that increasing income inequality means that the future will have fewer and fewer middle-class buyers to power a consumer economy, and investors know it. Or perhaps, as Jared Bernstein suggests, the culprit is the financialization of America (and the world):

I wonder if the key is “secular,” as in sector, as in sectoral misallocation. Many observers of the US economy have worried about the impact of financialization—the relative growth of the finance sector—on growth. Part of the concern is the bubble machine, and part is the devotion of considerable resources to non-productive activities.

And the misallocation is profound. Who out there thinks financial markets are playing their necessary role of allocating excess savings to their most productive uses? Anyone?

Not me. And yet, I wonder if this is really something that can be blamed on Wall Street? I’m all for reining in the size of the financial sector, but I confess to thinking that there must be something deeper than this that underlies our problem. Wall Street would happily allocate more money to real-world investment opportunities if the demand were there. But it’s not, even with essentially free money. For some reason, the investment community doesn’t believe that expanding production of real-world goods and services to maximum levels will pay off. If Summers is right, this is not a temporary condition that can be solved with monetary policy, it’s a permanent change in the economy. But why? One way or another, the answer has to get back to the real world. That’s where everything starts.

1Something that’s still up in the air. Usually, when bad economic times last long enough, people start to thing they’ll last forever. Ditto for good economic times. It may be that we’re just in an usually bad recession and need more time to pull out. However, the evidence of the aughts really does suggest that something happened to the economy starting around 2000, which means it’s been going on for an awfully long time.

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Larry Summers, Secular Stagnation, and the Great Investment Drought

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