Populareconomicsblog

Financial FAQs

Reuters.com

There has been too much talk of inflation, as so-called ‘bond vigilantes’ seek to take advantage of the fear that too much pandemic recovery aid will saturate the financial markets, creating runaway inflation and boosting interest rates.

That makes sense when so many dollars are in play, right? Not really.

Who are the so-called bond vigilantes that worry about inflation and bond prices? They are usually the most highly leveraged funds that have been buying assets with borrowed money at the record low interest rates that have prevailed since the pandemic and have pushed up some stock prices to stratospheric levels.

A great example is what happened on Monday to a highly leveraged hedge fund investor, reports MarketWatch:

“U.S. stocks pared losses Monday afternoon despite jitters tied to reports that a large investment fund recently was forced to sell massive holdings ($30B) in stocks, causing prices to tumble. Investors were monitoring news reports that former Tiger Asia manager Bill Hwang’s Archegos Capital Management had unwound big bets late last week after facing margin calls.”

We know that margin calls are lenders requesting investors to sell the underlying assets that were bought on margin when said asset prices have fallen significantly.

So where is the runaway inflation they speak of? The Fed says they want moderate inflation but have the tools to prevent runaway inflation, and will keep a close-to-zero percent short term rate policy through at least 2002.

There is lots of precedence for the Fed holding real interest rates below inflation rates. It helped to finance World War Two, and GW Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. This is when the real cost of money close to zero, with borrowing needs high during such exigencies.

And we are fighting a world war against COVID-19 that is disrupting economies and killing more people than all the other wars.

Another problem with bond vigilantes’ thesis is the root cause of most inflation—higher demand than existing supply. The demand for products and services has not exceeded supply for decades—since globalization and lower trade tariffs have made goods in particular cheaper to produce and more plentiful.

There has been little problem with the supply-side of the equation in recent decades, in other words, unless we have major disruptions such as this pandemic that creates temporary bottlenecks in the delivery of said products.

“Even before the coronavirus crisis, central banks globally were struggling with sluggish inflation, and the pandemic-induced downturn has only made the challenge worse,” said Reuter’s Ann Saphir.

“Too-low inflation is typically a sign of a weak economy. It also tends to drag on interest rates and makes it difficult for central banks to fight recessions with their usual tools that focus on the cost of money.”

That is why several European countries are struggling with what amounts to negative interest rates, such as Denmark where even mortgage interest rates are less than zero.

The above Reuters graph shows that inflation has barely budged (light blue and red lines), even as average hourly earnings are rising at a 5.3 percent clip. One can call this another goldilocks economy with neither too hot nor too cold growth at the moment.

So those most fearful of soaring inflation and borrowing costs are those that are highly leveraged. And we will see that leveraging disappear soon enough as business activity returns to a new normal the Fed is wanting—holding interest rates at or below inflation, stimulating a higher demand for goods and services that stimulates a robust recovery.

Harlan Green © 2021

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Popular Economics Weekly

Washington Post

The Biden administration’s $3 trillion infrastructure plan is next on their agenda to boost economic growth. And it will need a tax raise to pay for it.

“I think a package that consists of investments in people, investments in infrastructure, will help to create good jobs in the American economy,” testified Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in congressional hearings this week, “and changes in the tax structure will help to pay for those programs.”

Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell said there was no problem with any inflationary bulges that might occur with so much spending because it was spending that would boost productivity as well as employment, generating even more growth.

“Our best view is that the effect on inflations will be neither particularly large nor persistent,” said Powell during the same hearings.

The circa $3 trillion infrastructure bill President Biden is proposing should really be treated as if we are fighting another world war, as we treated spending during world War Two. This war to overcome the coronavirus pandemic has killed more people than all prior world wars.

So why even worry about inflation or budget deficits? In fact, rising inflation during WWII created negative real interest rates at the time because the Fed kept rates low to finance the war, just as it is doing now, which really means it is interest-free money (That is, real interest rates less than zero as it was during WWII).

And the infrastructure bill must be a green, environmentally friendly bill because much of it has to mitigate the damage to infrastructure from global warming. Need we be reminded of the recent breakdowns in power grids that can leave millions without water and electricity for days, as demonstrated by the Texas power crisis this year?

The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in a 2008 report said, “New research shows that if present trends continue, the total cost of global warming will be as high as 3.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Four global warming impacts alone—hurricane damage, real estate losses, energy costs, and water costs—will come with a price tag of 1.8 percent of U.S. GDP, or almost $1.9 trillion annually (in today’s dollars) by 2100.”

This means an 80 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gases alone to meet Paris Accord goals, phasing out most uses of fossil fuels and replacing them with electric energy sources such as wind and solar power.

“Mr. Biden’s infrastructure plan will deal with the meat-and-potato issues that Republicans and Democrats agree are an urgent need,” say NYTimes reporters Jim Tankersley and Anni Karney. “It seeks to rebuild roads, bridges, transit, rail and ports, while also improving power grids and increasing the number of electric vehicle charging stations.”

The plan also requires the development of universal broadband, such as 5G networks that China is already building on a grand scale, a major issue in rural communities. Documents suggest it will include nearly $1 trillion in spending on the construction of roads, bridges, rail lines, ports, electric vehicle charging stations, and improvements to the electric grid and other parts of the power sector, according to Tankersley

There is much more to Biden’s infrastructure plan that will be detailed as we get more particulars. Any delays in passing it will only increase the costs from damage caused by the increasing frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, power failures; so much so that even the U.S. Pentagon says climate change has become a national security threat.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has consistently, repeatedly cited climate change as a serious threat to America’s national security in official public documents.

“Climate change is a threat in their eyes because it’s going to degrade their ability to deal with conventional military problems, said Michael Klare in an Vox interview about his new book about the Pentagon’s role in combatting global warming, titled All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. “It’s going to create chaos, violence, mass migrations, pandemics, and state collapse around the world, particularly in vulnerable areas like Africa and the Middle East.”

“It is difficult to put a price tag on many of the costs of climate change: loss of human lives and health, species extinction, loss of unique ecosystems, increased social conflict, and other impacts extend far beyond any monetary measure, says the NRDC report. “But by measuring the economic damage of global warming in the United States, we can begin to understand the magnitude of the challenges we will face if we continue to do nothing to push back against climate change.”

If we can protect ourselves from COVID-19, then we surely can protect ourselves from a warming planet.

Harlan Green © 2021

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Popular Economics Weekly

“Consumer sentiment rose in early March to its highest level in a year due to the growing number of vaccinations as well as the widely anticipated passage of Biden’s relief measures,” said the University of Michigan sentiment survey. “The gains were widespread across all socioeconomic subgroups and all regions, although the largest monthly gains were concentrated among households in the bottom third of the income distribution as well as those aged 55 or older (dark blue and gray lines in graph).” 

Sentiments are soaring because the just passed American Rescue Plan (AMR) will boost benefits of lower and middle income consumers, raising incomes for the poorest 20 percent of families by an average of 20 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center’s analysis, while top earners would see their income rise less than 1 percent in an NPR interview.

NPR

America can pay for the $1.9 trillion tab because it does not substantially raise the cost of the public debt over the long term if we look at the average annual budget deficit to GDP ratio that hasn’t varied substantially since WWII—the major exceptions being the need to finance recoveries from the Great Recession, and now the coronavirus pandemic.

USGov

The cost of financing public debt has averaged little more than 3 percent, historically because economic growth that followed that spending brought the public debt back down to manageable levels, whatever interest rates prevailed at the time.

Financing the $5 trillion in debt that congress has passed since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic should follow the same trajectory. For example, the new $1.9 trillion from the American Rescue will create 7 million new jobs by December, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“Between 1946 and 2019,” says the CBO, “the deficit as a share of GDP has been larger than that only twice. In CBO’s projections, annual deficits relative to the size of the economy generally continue to decline through 2027 before increasing again in the last few years of the projection period, reaching 5.3 percent of GDP in 2030. They exceed their 50-year average of 3.0 percent in each year through 2030.”

Predictions of real GDP growth are soaring since the AMR’s passage. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development projects the U.S. economy will grow by 6.5 percent this year, according to NPR. That’s more than twice the growth rate it was projecting in December — thanks in large part to more robust federal aid.

And employment is already surging, thanks to the prior pandemic aid packages. The February employment report added 465,000 private payroll jobs, with 355,000 of those jobs in leisure and hospitality — restaurants, hotels, casinos, theaters—all in the service sector.

All signs point to a robust recovery, in other words, which is why I don’t see any problem with managing a ‘new’ New Deal spending bill when it benefits so many Americans at a time of our greatest need, the need to recover from a pandemic that has cost more American lives than our combined wars.

Harlan Green © 2021

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Popular Economics Weekly

Calculated Risk

It looks like the 2020’s economy is beginning to roar as retail sales jumped 5.3 percent in January 2021, and 7.4 percent since last January. This is just as President Biden’s approximately $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan wends its way through congress.Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for January 2021, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $568.2 billion, an increase of 5.3 percent from the previous month, and 7.4 percent above January 2020, said the US Census Bureau report.

Pundits and some economists worry that this is too much “untargeted” money sloshing around the economy already beginning to recover, including an additional $1400 per person that will supplement the $600 payments made in January to those making less than $75,000 per person.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman does not think so, he said in a recent Op-ed, because those that need it will spend it immediately, while the less needy will squirrel it away for another rainy day; a good thing given these uncertain times.

And there is little inflation now, as the Consumer Price Index (CPI) retail inflation measure did not increase at all last month and is up just one percent over the past year.

Sales were strong in every category. Department store chains, Internet retailers, electronic stores and home-furnishing outlets all recorded double digit gains in percentage terms.

Bars and restaurants also registered a nearly 7 percent increase in sales after receipts had fallen three months in a row. Cold weather and new business restrictions imposed after a record increase in coronavirus cases, slammed restaurants toward the end of 2020, but states started to lift restrictions early in the new year as the pandemic began to wane again, reports MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash.

“The increase in spending last month was fueled in part by $600 federal stimulus checks for millions of Americans and more generous unemployment benefits. What also helped were loosened state restrictions on business brought on by a sharp decline in coronavirus cases,” said Bartash.

FREDrealpersonalincome

Now is not the time to worry about inflation, in other words. Rising prices increase profits and wages, especially in the recovery stage of this recession. Slow real personal income growth portrayed in this FRED graph has been one reason for slow economic growth since the Great Recession ended some 11 years ago and kept US from spending more on upgrading our deteriorating infrastructure.

Personal income has fluctuated between 2 to 3 percent since then, which is not enough to boost household incomes above the long-term inflation rate. In fact, household income has not risen enough for most Americans to weather such natural disasters as this pandemic, and what is to come with global warming and future geopolitical uncertainty that accompanies a changing climate (droughts, immigration woes, increasing wildfires, hurricanes, etc.)

The Texas freezes from the current Polar Vortex episode that could last through this weekend is but one example. As reported in the LA Times by a Houston reporter, “Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more severe as the climate crisis worsens. And the U.S. power grid is not prepared to handle the hotter heat storms, more frigid cold snaps and stronger hurricanes of a changing planet.”

What better time is there to prepare for such future emergencies?

Harlan Green © 2021

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen