Despite government efforts, a bleak outlook for the U.S. economy
By David Leonhardt 21 September 2008
NEW YORK: The past week, by any standard, has been an extraordinary one for the U.S. economy and its financial system. Merrill Lynch agreed to be bought for a bargain-basement price, while Lehman Brothers simply collapsed.
By the end of the week, the U.S. government was preparing to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in securities that no bank wanted. It appears to be the government’s biggest fiscal intervention since the Great Depression, designed to get the financial markets working again and keep a credit freeze from sending the U.S. economy into a deep recession - which could send shock waves across the globe.
The announcement of the plan changed the mood on Wall Street and sent stocks soaring at the end of the week, both in the United States and abroad. But even if the economy avoids a tailspin, the next couple of years are not likely to feel especially good. It has been a long period of excess, and the hangover could be long, as well. For the near future, the most likely outcome remains slow economic growth, scant income gains for most workers and, for investors, disappointing returns from stocks and real estate. If consumers begin to cut back on their debt-fuelled spending things could get worse.
On Friday morning, the economists at Lehman Brothers sent out their usual weekly roundup of the news, but it came this time with a short, italicized note, explaining that the report would be the final one to appear under the Lehman banner. That bit of understatement preceded some more: “This episode of financial crisis,” Lehman’s economists explained, “appears to be much deeper and more serious than we and most observers thought it likely to be. And it is by no means clear that it is over.”
Yet, historic as last week was, there is something familiar about what is happening. Once again, we are seeing the puncturing of a speculative bubble that was the result of asset prices soaring high above the underlying value of the assets. For as long as markets have existed, bubbles have formed. And whenever one of those bubbles begins to leak, it typically needs years to deflate, causing enormous economic damage as it does.
Only now, for instance, are the bubbles of the past decade and a half, first in the stock market and then in real estate, starting to go away. It is easy to think of the turmoil of the past 13 months as being unconnected to the stock bubble of the 1990s, which appeared to end with the dot-com crash of 2000 and 2001. That crash brought down the overall stock market by more than a third, its worst drop since the 1970s oil crisis. Corporate spending on new equipment then plunged and employment fell for three straight years.
But drastic though it was, the dot-com crash did not actually come close to erasing the excesses of the 1990s. Indeed, by some of the most meaningful measures, Wall Street after the crash looked a lot more like it was in a bubble than a bust.
As late as 2004, financial services companies earned 28.3 percent of corporate America’s total profits, according to Moody’s Economy.com. That was somewhat lower than it had been over the previous few years, but still almost double the financial sector’s average share of profits throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. By 2007, the share had fallen only marginally, to 27.4 percent.
Meanwhile, the share of wages and salaries earned by employees of financial services companies continued to climb and reached a peak last year. Of every dollar paid to the U.S. work force in 2008, almost 10 cents went to people working at investment banks and other finance companies, up from about 6 cents or 7 cents throughout the 1970s and ‘80s.
How did this happen? For one thing, the population of the United States (and most of the industrialized world) was aging and had built up savings. This created greater need for financial services. In addition, the economic rise of Asia - and, in recent years, the increase in oil prices - gave overseas governments more money to invest. Many turned to Wall Street.
Nonetheless, a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to performance and thus unsustainable.
Benjamin Friedman, author of “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the company’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that companies were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders.
“I have the sense that in many of these firms,” Friedman said, “the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity.”
Which might serve as a summary of how the current crisis came to pass. Wall Street traders began to believe that the values they had assigned to all sorts of assets were rational because, well, they had assigned them.
Traders sliced mortgages into so many little pieces that they forgot what they were really trading: contracts based on increasingly shaky loans. As the crisis has spread, other loans have started going bad as well. Hyun Song Shin, an economist at Princeton, estimates that banks have thus far absorbed only about one-third to one-half of the losses they will eventually be required to take.
One of the few pieces of good news is that Wall Street finally seems to be coming to grips with the depth of its problems. You can see that most clearly, perhaps, in stock prices, which have at long last fallen from the stratospheric levels of the past decade.
The classic measure of whether the stock market is overvalued is the price/earnings ratio, which divides stock prices by annual corporate earnings. At the height of the bubble, in 2000, companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index were trading at 36 times their average earnings over the previous five years. It was the highest valuation since at least the 1880s, according to the economist Robert Shiller.
By 2004, the ratio had dropped only to about 26, still higher than at any point since the 1930s. At the start of last year, it was still 26. But after the market closed Friday, the ratio was down to roughly 17, which happens to be about its post-World War II average.
Stocks may continue to fall. For one thing, corporate profits could decline, particularly if households begin pulling back on spending. The rapid rise of consumer spending over the past two decades is arguably the third bubble confronting the economy. It has happened thanks in part to a huge increase in debt, which may now be coming to an end, just as Wall Street’s love affair with debt appears to be ending as well.
And even if the economy does better than expected, investors may still turn pessimistic. There can be long periods of over-exuberance, in which investors worry that they are missing the next great thing, followed by crises that make those same investors fear that the world as they know it is coming to an end.
But bubbles inevitably produce insanity, both on the way up and the way down. On Friday, the formerly laissez-faire administration of President George W. Bush, along with the Federal Reserve, announced that the only way to restore sanity was for the government to buy an enormous pile of mortgage-related securities.
A guiding principle of economic policy in recent years has been that nobody is smart enough to diagnose a bubble until it has already deflated. This was one of Alan Greenspan’s mantras during his tenure as the chairman of the Fed. His successor, Ben Bernanke, said much the same thing when he took office in 2006. As they saw it, no matter how high stock prices rose relative to profits, or no matter how high house prices rose relative to rents, regulators deferred to the collective wisdom of the market.
The market is usually right, after all. Even when it isn’t, Greenspan maintained, pricking a bubble before it grew too large could stifle innovation and hurt other parts of the economy. Cleaning up the aftermath of a bubble is easier and less expensive, he argued. We’re living through that cleanup now.
1 comment:
Bubblenomics
Despite government efforts, a bleak outlook for the U.S. economy
By David Leonhardt
21 September 2008
NEW YORK: The past week, by any standard, has been an extraordinary one for the U.S. economy and its financial system. Merrill Lynch agreed to be bought for a bargain-basement price, while Lehman Brothers simply collapsed.
By the end of the week, the U.S. government was preparing to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in securities that no bank wanted. It appears to be the government’s biggest fiscal intervention since the Great Depression, designed to get the financial markets working again and keep a credit freeze from sending the U.S. economy into a deep recession - which could send shock waves across the globe.
The announcement of the plan changed the mood on Wall Street and sent stocks soaring at the end of the week, both in the United States and abroad. But even if the economy avoids a tailspin, the next couple of years are not likely to feel especially good. It has been a long period of excess, and the hangover could be long, as well. For the near future, the most likely outcome remains slow economic growth, scant income gains for most workers and, for investors, disappointing returns from stocks and real estate. If consumers begin to cut back on their debt-fuelled spending things could get worse.
On Friday morning, the economists at Lehman Brothers sent out their usual weekly roundup of the news, but it came this time with a short, italicized note, explaining that the report would be the final one to appear under the Lehman banner. That bit of understatement preceded some more: “This episode of financial crisis,” Lehman’s economists explained, “appears to be much deeper and more serious than we and most observers thought it likely to be. And it is by no means clear that it is over.”
Yet, historic as last week was, there is something familiar about what is happening. Once again, we are seeing the puncturing of a speculative bubble that was the result of asset prices soaring high above the underlying value of the assets. For as long as markets have existed, bubbles have formed. And whenever one of those bubbles begins to leak, it typically needs years to deflate, causing enormous economic damage as it does.
Only now, for instance, are the bubbles of the past decade and a half, first in the stock market and then in real estate, starting to go away. It is easy to think of the turmoil of the past 13 months as being unconnected to the stock bubble of the 1990s, which appeared to end with the dot-com crash of 2000 and 2001. That crash brought down the overall stock market by more than a third, its worst drop since the 1970s oil crisis. Corporate spending on new equipment then plunged and employment fell for three straight years.
But drastic though it was, the dot-com crash did not actually come close to erasing the excesses of the 1990s. Indeed, by some of the most meaningful measures, Wall Street after the crash looked a lot more like it was in a bubble than a bust.
As late as 2004, financial services companies earned 28.3 percent of corporate America’s total profits, according to Moody’s Economy.com. That was somewhat lower than it had been over the previous few years, but still almost double the financial sector’s average share of profits throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. By 2007, the share had fallen only marginally, to 27.4 percent.
Meanwhile, the share of wages and salaries earned by employees of financial services companies continued to climb and reached a peak last year. Of every dollar paid to the U.S. work force in 2008, almost 10 cents went to people working at investment banks and other finance companies, up from about 6 cents or 7 cents throughout the 1970s and ‘80s.
How did this happen? For one thing, the population of the United States (and most of the industrialized world) was aging and had built up savings. This created greater need for financial services. In addition, the economic rise of Asia - and, in recent years, the increase in oil prices - gave overseas governments more money to invest. Many turned to Wall Street.
Nonetheless, a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to performance and thus unsustainable.
Benjamin Friedman, author of “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the company’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that companies were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders.
“I have the sense that in many of these firms,” Friedman said, “the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity.”
Which might serve as a summary of how the current crisis came to pass. Wall Street traders began to believe that the values they had assigned to all sorts of assets were rational because, well, they had assigned them.
Traders sliced mortgages into so many little pieces that they forgot what they were really trading: contracts based on increasingly shaky loans. As the crisis has spread, other loans have started going bad as well. Hyun Song Shin, an economist at Princeton, estimates that banks have thus far absorbed only about one-third to one-half of the losses they will eventually be required to take.
One of the few pieces of good news is that Wall Street finally seems to be coming to grips with the depth of its problems. You can see that most clearly, perhaps, in stock prices, which have at long last fallen from the stratospheric levels of the past decade.
The classic measure of whether the stock market is overvalued is the price/earnings ratio, which divides stock prices by annual corporate earnings. At the height of the bubble, in 2000, companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index were trading at 36 times their average earnings over the previous five years. It was the highest valuation since at least the 1880s, according to the economist Robert Shiller.
By 2004, the ratio had dropped only to about 26, still higher than at any point since the 1930s. At the start of last year, it was still 26. But after the market closed Friday, the ratio was down to roughly 17, which happens to be about its post-World War II average.
Stocks may continue to fall. For one thing, corporate profits could decline, particularly if households begin pulling back on spending. The rapid rise of consumer spending over the past two decades is arguably the third bubble confronting the economy. It has happened thanks in part to a huge increase in debt, which may now be coming to an end, just as Wall Street’s love affair with debt appears to be ending as well.
And even if the economy does better than expected, investors may still turn pessimistic. There can be long periods of over-exuberance, in which investors worry that they are missing the next great thing, followed by crises that make those same investors fear that the world as they know it is coming to an end.
But bubbles inevitably produce insanity, both on the way up and the way down. On Friday, the formerly laissez-faire administration of President George W. Bush, along with the Federal Reserve, announced that the only way to restore sanity was for the government to buy an enormous pile of mortgage-related securities.
A guiding principle of economic policy in recent years has been that nobody is smart enough to diagnose a bubble until it has already deflated. This was one of Alan Greenspan’s mantras during his tenure as the chairman of the Fed. His successor, Ben Bernanke, said much the same thing when he took office in 2006. As they saw it, no matter how high stock prices rose relative to profits, or no matter how high house prices rose relative to rents, regulators deferred to the collective wisdom of the market.
The market is usually right, after all. Even when it isn’t, Greenspan maintained, pricking a bubble before it grew too large could stifle innovation and hurt other parts of the economy. Cleaning up the aftermath of a bubble is easier and less expensive, he argued. We’re living through that cleanup now.
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