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Fiscal Cliff, Sequester, Shutdown: What Next?

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The latest showdown in Washington raises a whole host of questions and conjectures about what will come after the agreement struck yesterday by the U.S. Senate. A closer look at the most crucial issues involved is therefore in order.

From Political Farce to Economic Instability

Viewing the federal government shutdown of the past two weeks as political farce may help mitigate the gnawing anxiety over how large a threat it represented to the world economy. In fact, however, this most recent tug-of-war has thrown a new quandary into bold relief: the economy is increasingly at the mercy of politics at its very worst. In other words, our economic future may be shaped by partisan wrangling, even of the most ludicrous variety. This is not just an umpteenth American specialty, either. It is a tendency inherent in the lingering crisis that has bedeviled the advanced economies for over five years now, and it introduces a new kind of risk—unpredictable, uncontrollable risk with the potential to wreak havoc. While the too-big-to-fail syndrome may still look like it can shield us from the disaster scenario—federal government default—we would be well-advised to brace ourselves in this new phase for serial drama over the issue of U.S. sovereign debt and fiscal policy.

Plenty of room for more political strife. 

How much fiscal tightening in 2014? 

When will the downgrade occur?

What rates? What policy from the Fed?

What does it all mean for growth? 

Scenario 2013-2014: The Financial Crisis, Act III…and Epilogue?

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New round of central bank liquidity injections worldwide

  • The U.S. economy can’t do without Fed support
  • The euro area is out of recession, but bank sector and sovereign issues remain
  • The Fed, BoJ, BoE and ECB continue to nurse ailing economies

Continued low interest rates are not enough to dispel emerging risks

  • The momentum driving global trade has been undermined for the foreseeable future
  • China can no longer act as the global engine of growth
  • Foreign exchange rate adjustments appear inevitable

Is inflation, end-point of the financial crisis, around the corner? 

  • New round of liquidity injections, currency crises, geopolitical tension, labor unrest…
  • … Inflation remains the most likely scenario, but the path ahead is unclear

A Fresh Round of Central Bank Action Coming Up in 2014

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If we’re correct in assuming the Federal Reserve is not about to start scaling back its asset purchases, worldwide liquidity injections should hit a new high next year. Whereas the aggregate balance sheet of the four leading central banks showed little change in the first half of 2013, we can expect widespread central bank activism over the next few quarters:

  • At a rate of 85 billion dollars a month, the Fed’s asset purchases should amount to 1.02 trillion dollars a year.
  • The Bank of Japan will be adding anywhere from 600 to 718 billion dollars to its balance sheet as it strives to meet its target of expanding Japan’s monetary base by between 60 and 70 trillion yen a year (making it some 40 percent larger than at the beginning of 2013).
  • The Bank of England will be buying 610 billion dollars’ worth of Gilts in connection with its objective to purchase 375 billion pounds of assets via its Asset Purchase Facility.
  • The ECB’s probable upcoming LTRO is likely, in our estimate, to provide Europe’s banks with between 250 and 500 billion euros, or 350 to 750 billion dollars.

The “Big Four” should thus be injecting a cool 1.6 to 2.5 trillion dollars into the system in annual terms (at a pace of 135 to 208 billion a month). This should continue, if not throughout 2014, then at least through the early part of the year. In the low-case scenario, that would equal 10 percent of American GDP; in the high-case scenario, it would equal almost the entire size of France’s economy in 2012! But whether the ECB follows suit or not, the annual flow of fresh liquidity should return to the highs seen in 2011 and 2012—and for the ECB’s LTROs, could even set a post-2008-crisis record.

How Far Will the Dollar Fall Now?

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Over the past few years, we have been resolutely bearish on the dollar, in contrast to the consensus view. The reasons behind our contrarian outlook are three-fold:

  • We foresee lastingly low GDP growth now that the 2008 crisis has brought an end to the support previously provided by private sector debt—creating a shortfall we estimate at 1.8 percent a year, and pushing U.S. potential output down from its pre-crisis 3.0–3.2 percent range to somewhere between 1.5 and 2 percent today.
  • We expect the Federal Reserve to stick to its unconventional monetary policy for now and the greenback to continue losing ground as a result. To make matters worse, the euro area has opted for a structurally deflationary policy mix to sustain the euro, even if that means undermining European industry.
  • We anticipate an eventual inflationary exit from the 2008 financial crisis—one that will almost certainly affect the United States much sooner than the euro area.

These factors also prompted us to cut our projections for the dollar in June, when we simultaneously lowered our 2014 forecast for the U.S. economy—and thus for long-term Treasury yields as well. Although challenged by developments since the early summer, our bearish dollar outlook seems once again pertinent in the wake of this week’s FOMC meeting.

So just how low might the dollar fall?

 

 

The Fed Plays for Time—Predictably

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“The first increases in short-term rates might not occur until the unemployment rate is considerably below 6.5 percent”!  Ben Bernanke, Sept. 18, 2013

The Fed has dared to act contrary to expectations—and rightly so. This was no easy move, given that since early summer the markets have talked themselves into believing that central bank policy was about to change. Yet the reasoning behind the FOMC decision couldn’t be clearer:

  1. The U.S. economy is still on extremely shaky ground. Growth has yet to pick up; job gains remain mediocre; disposable income is still too low to drive a lasting recovery in consumer spending; and businesses are not investing.
  2. Yields have risen so sharply since the start of the summer that they have come to pose a threat to growth, as demonstrated by the sudden halt to the housing market uptick since the spring.
  3. The lower jobless rate doesn’t reflect improvement in labor market conditions. If anything, it shows that they have continued to get worse. The labor force participation rate is in free-fall—in other words, more and more working-age people are simply dropping out in discouragement.
  4. Fiscal policy is highly restrictive and will remain so—just when implementation of health-care reform prior to year-end is likely to take a large bite out of personal income.

Today’s announcement has major implications

…

The U.S. Economy: Far Too Early to Break Out the Champagne

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That markets are wildly optimistic about the U.S. economy is nothing new. What should draw our attention this time around is that such upbeat sentiment has rarely been harder to square with the numbers. For example, contrary to the dominant narrative:

  • The U.S. economy is doing worse than a few months ago, not better. Growth in industrial output is petering out, productivity has moved into negative territory, and employment data point to backsliding.
  • The economy’s ability to cope with higher interest rates simply can’t be taken for granted. Not only has consumer spending yet to pick up, but the real estate market has been derailed by the rise in interest rates since the start of the year.
  • While a change of course by the Federal Reserve may seem long overdue after five years of unconventional monetary policy, it makes no economic sense. This suggests that the Fed is very much in danger of jumping the gun.

What Pocket Change Can Tell Us About Past -and Future- Inflation

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When you get back from an overseas vacation, you’re often left with a bunch of small foreign coins in your pocket. You typically end up stashing them away in a junk drawer as soon as you get home, and this is precisely what I was in the process of doing after a recent trip to the U.S. when a penny dated 1964 caught my eye. I then looked more closely at the dates on my assorted pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters. I even added my daughter’s coins to the mix. Soon intrigued by this journey back through time, we decided to group the coins by decade. What we found was startling: out of the 107 pennies left from our trip this summer, 3 were from the 1960s, 12 from the 1970s, and 11 from the 1980s. In other words, 24 percent of our lowest denomination coins came from years of double-digit inflation—when the coin mints apparently ran non-stop.

But what about the ensuing decades? Could we see the effects of the subsequent disinflation in our sample, given that our sample is necessarily biased by the lesser erosion in the supply of recently-minted coins? We had 13 coins from the 1990s and 18 from the 2000s. How could we possibly prove that once the time factor is taken into account, this is a much smaller proportion of coins relative to that from the inflationary decades? It seemed a hard circle to square. We were about to give up when we found some coins we had overlooked—our group from 2010 to 2013. There were many more of these, of course: 50 for a period of only 3.5 years—the equivalent of 142 coins per decade!

This shed an entirely new light on our figures. We realized that since we may safely assume the rate of erosion remains pretty much the same from one decade to the next, we can estimate the “erosion-corrected” size of a group of coins from a given decade by “reverse discounting” its actual size by an erosion factor. So we found a pen and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations. First we used an annual erosion rate of 5.5 percent, which was the growth rate of the M1 money supply in the U.S. over the period we were looking at. Next we used an annual erosion rate of 6.7 percent, which was the average annual growth rate of U.S. GDP over the same period. As it turned out, 6.7 percent was closer to what our pocket-change sample suggested.

Theoretically, this gave us a comparable, erosion-corrected total number of coins for each decade. When we restated our results using a base value of 100 for the 1960s batch, we found:

  • The erosion-corrected total peaked in the 1970s, at 234 using the 5.5 percent erosion rate and 209 using the 6.7 percent erosion rate;
  • The total then decreased steadily and hit a low, in the 2000s, of 70 at the 5.5 percent erosion rate and 45 at the 6.7 percent erosion rate;
  • The total rebounded sharply for our very last group of coins, those from 2010–2013, reaching a new high of 318 at the 5.5 percent erosion rate and coming in just below the 1970s value at the 6.7 percent erosion rate.

As you may have guessed, we couldn’t resist plotting our results alongside inflation for the same decades. Unsurprisingly, the curves matched up beautifully.

Pocket Money and Inflation

 

So what’s the moral of the story? Given the pace at which the amount of money in circulation has been growing since 2010, the U.S. appears on track for high inflation once it pulls out of the crisis. And we stand by our prediction even though the process seems to be taking longer than expected. An era of rising prices is already a palpable prospect.