This morning, I was a guest on WHYY’s Radio Times with Marty Moss Coane. The other panelist was Phill Swagel, and topics covered the stock market, the stimulus, and the state of the economy. One can hear the podcast here: [mp3].
This morning, I was a guest on WHYY’s Radio Times with Marty Moss Coane. The other panelist was Phill Swagel, and topics covered the stock market, the stimulus, and the state of the economy. One can hear the podcast here: [mp3].
Menzie Good point about the right way to think about “uncertainty.” Businesses aren’t sitting on the sidelines because they are worried that Obamacare will lower their healthcare costs (and let’s be clear, for many businesses healthcare costs will go down). Businesses are sitting on the sidelines because of uncertainty about aggregate demand, not regulations. This whole BS story about regulatory uncertainty just doesn’t pass the smell test.
And while Prof Swagel sounded reasonable for most of the interview, I’m afraid that his comments on business uncertainty did come across like John Boehner’s talking points.
I was thrilled to first hear Menzie On NPR. I thought Professor Nell was the last of the Keynesian’s. I was screaming at the radio until Menzie commented exactly as I would have, often taking the works out of my mouth. Dr. Swagel came across as a man who spent 8 years on a PhD, all to find all to find that what he learned and proscribes has failed our nation and is bankrupt in the school of plausible ideas. More Tax cuts, really? Time to pile on more cash to that 2.5 Trillion the corporations are hording. His argument that the stimulus did not work was once again disingenuous and upsetting. How many Keynesian influenced economist were screaming, to small, to much in miss-targeted tax cuts, and not enough focus on job creation. When will Say’s Law come to rest as a failure? Supply Side economics has destroyed a middle class and developed a government that ignores the mass majority.
Great Work Doctor!
New “New School” Admirer!
PS: Marty was no slouch either, she heard Swagels type of fail economics for to long.
Denial is not a river in Egypt. I have also been flummoxed by the ideas offered. When small business survey shows regulatory worry is the same as it always has been but sales worries have tripled – down a little now, which is good – how is that uncertainty about government?
And we now keep hearing that we’ve been pursuing stimulus for a decade, with the finger pointing at tax cuts. What the heck is that supposed to mean? Tax cuts for the rich are the worst form of stimulus because they don’t spend the cash. But in Egypt, sorry America, being fiscally stupid is turned around to prove the people who argued the opposite were wrong. It’s bizzaro.
Saturation Macroeconomics:
There exists a global disparity in debt, ownership of debt, global real estate asset supply, real estate over valuation, western debt dependent consumption and eastern savings,massive trade imbalances dependent on eastern and western huge huge wage differentials, and 50 years of unsustainable corporate and taxpayer entitlements legislated by reelected politicians.
Is there a macroeconomic saturation point in saturation of supply and saturation of debt disparities that produces nonlinear transition periods?
In other words was the recent political intransigence and US debt downgrade merely an epiphoenomena of the global macroeconomic system’s unbalanced and saturated conditions?
Is the equity market following a nonlinear daily trading valuation pattern that confers on the system an equivalency of the laws of physics and the self assembly laws of chemistry and biology?
Wouldn’t it be marvelous even in the system’s collapse to determine that macroeconomic system had the characteristics and properties of a true science?
The financial asset class with the greatest market value and greatest global participation is the US debt instrument.
Observe the weekly composite equity and debt charts.
Equities are in the midst of a nonlinear collapse. US debt instruments
are the recipients of that nonlinear collapse and are in nonlinear growth
going to 150 year low interest rates.
For fifty years western debt expansion has been offset by
asset and wage inflation allowing further debt expansion. While there
are natural saturation limits to this process, the world macroeconomy
with the new Asian labor force participation has reached a
supersaturation point of debt and wage dysequilibrium.
50 years of entitlement promises – most disproportionally benefiting the financial and corporate industries who now go into the asset collapse laden with cash – have reelected Pavlovian politicians.
There is now a defacto consensus among US
(and eurobond) debt holders that austerity is needed to maintain the
quality of US debt. Qualitatively further debt expansion which drives
the real global economy is dead.
The deceleration in global GDP will be nonlinear. France’s quarterly GDP is one of the canaries in the coal mine.
Equities are undergoing exquisitely predictable Lammert quantitative
fractal collapse.
The daily fractal pattern for the first segment of the equity
collapse is 3/8/4 of 6-8/5 days.
Business is worried about regulation and taxes. But the bigger concern is revenues. You could lower the tax rates to zero and get almost no stimulus effect, because there is no need to expand production when sales are below capacity.
Healthcare costs are a big and growing problem for business. Hiring and providing good healthcare is expensive. We need to fund our healthcare from a source that does not increase the cost of employing people. Between healthcare and payroll taxes, foreign labor has a $5 to $10 per hour cost advantage, even if they are paid the same wages.