Thoughts from the Great Depression

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

(Eccles, Marriner S. 1951. Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections (New York: Alfred A. Knopf): p. 76



Eccles ran the Fed under Roosevelt

Some people who contributed to creating the preconditions for the Depression developed understood that their greatest contribution would be to get out of the way.

In December 1932, Calvin Coolidge spent an afternoon in idle talk with an old friend. "We are in a new era to which I do not belong," he finally said, "and it would not be possible for me to adjust myself to it. These new ideas call from new men to develop them. That task is not for me who believe in the only kind of government that I know anything about". In another three weeks, Coolidge was dead.

Schlesinger, Arthur. 1957. The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-33 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin): p. 457, internally citing Stoddard, Henry Luther. 1938. It Costs to be President (New York: Harper & Brothers): p. 146.

"Lunatic Scheme" a Qualified Success

by the Sandwichman

In the wake of Friday's dismal employment report, New York Times editor Adam Cohen is channeling the Sandwichman:

One way to reduce the need for layoffs would be to cut back on hours, spreading the available work among more employees. This was an idea that had considerable currency in the Great Depression. In 1933, the Senate passed a “30 Hour Bill” that would have barred from interstate commerce goods made by workers employed more than 30 hours a week. Its sponsor, Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, said the bill would create six million new jobs. It made no sense, he insisted, for some employees to work 70 hours a week "while others are driven into poverty and misery from unemployment."

But didn't they try this in France and wasn't it a fiasco -- a "lunatic scheme" that brought "seven years of rising unemployment, economic stagnation, and general malaise"?



Well, no. The 35-hour policy was a "qualified success." But you wouldn't have known that from reading the English speaking press. Sandwichpal Anders Hayden tells the story:

France’s 35-hour workweek is one of the boldest progressive reforms in recent years. Drawing on existing survey and economic data, supplemented by interviews with French informants, this article examines the 35-hour week’s evolution and impacts. Although commonly dismissed as economically uncompetitive, the policy package succeeded in avoiding significant labor-cost increases for business. Most 35-hour employees cite quality-of-life improvements despite the fact that wage moderation, greater variability in schedules, and intensification of work negatively impacted some—mostly lower-paid and less-skilled—workers. Taking into account employment gains, the initiative can be considered a qualified success in meeting its main aims.

Sandwich man!

The New York Times
November 21, 2008

Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press
Caption: "Paul Nawrocki of Beacon, N.Y., wore a signboard this week in Midtown Manhattan advertising his need for a full-time job with benefits. He said he has been looking for work for nine months."

See also: Business Week.

New Radio Interview

I just had a wonderful time talking with Kris Welch about the economic crisis for the second half of her hour long show on KPFA. She is such an enthusiastic host that she brings out the best in her guests.

http://aud1.kpfa.org/data/20081205-Fri1200.mp3

Sandwichman's KEYNESIAN Stimulus Plan

by the Sandwichman

The concept of the Sandwichman's stimulus plan is extremely simple: a basic income guarantee of $145.68 a week combined with a voluntary annual cap on hours of work at 1,600 hours. The rationale for this approach is that this is not your grandfather's depression. The nature of work has changed. It is not feasible to continue treating the environment as if it was an economic "externality". Historical evidence and real economic theory (as opposed to textbook lore) support the strategy outlined in the Sandwichman plan.

The Sandwichman plan would create an estimated 12.5 million jobs! Yes, but is is Keynesian?

Although the total cost of the stimulus plan is indeterminate, a maximum is easily calculated at $1 trillion for an annual payments of $5,827.20 to 200 million non-retirement age adults. As the payments themselves will be taxable income, the actual outlays are reduced by, say 15 percent. But even that amount would be reduced again by the fact that some of the payments will act as replacement for current income support payments such as welfare, unemployment insurance, disability pensions and so on. The $5,827.20 amount comes from basing the figure on the median wage ($18.21) times eight hours for 40 weeks (assuming 10 current statutory holidays and two week vacation).

Part-time workers and low-wage earners would get an income boost from the median wage supplement. Similarly, it is proposed that other income support payments should not be reduced by the full amount of the basic income guarantee.

Furthermore, because the hours cap will be voluntary, a portion of the total will be clawed back as the result of higher-income earners choosing to work longer hours. The cap on annual hours of work will provide for a deduction of $18.21 for each hour worked beyond 1,600 a year. Some flexibility could be added by a provision enabling banking of, say, a maximum of 200 hours a year for up to seven years. In such cases the clawed-back amount could be reserved in a registered sabbatical saving account.

The 1,600 hour cap is based on an assumed four-day, 32-hour work week, with two weeks annual vacation. But those 40 freed days could be taken in a block as extra vacation time.

Job creation in the Sandwichman plan results from the massive volume of hours of work "released" back into the labor market through the reduction of the annual hours of work. The raw numbers (from the 2007 American Community Survey) are mind-boggling. There are somewhere around 240 billion hours worked a year in the U.S. Obviously, not all of those hours can be spread around. But according to Bosch (2000) "most studies" find an employment result in the range of 25 to 70 percent of the "arithmetically possible effect."

The Sandwichman, however, is skeptical about the job creating potential of overly long work weeks. In the ACS survey, some people reported working 99 hours a week or more. I don't consider such statistical noise as productive work that can be parceled up into three pieces. To get around that problem, I've marked down to 2400 hours all current annual hours in excess of that amount. That reduces the "arithmetically possible effect" of the stimulus plan to a mere 31,000,000 jobs!

Assuming Bosch's estimate of 25 to 70 percent of that effect, that suggests somewhere between 6.5 million and 18 million jobs, with 12.5 the happy medium between those two figures.

How Large of a Keynesian Multiplier Do You Want?

David Tufte is not happy with some claim that the multiplier can be as high as 5:

UB suggests that it has a multiplier of 5. If they did, this would be like the goose that laid the golden egg. My gosh, all they'd have to do is appropriate $140B to UB, and they could pay for the whole $700 Federal bailout ... A more telling multiplier is the economic impact divided by the whole UB budget of $832M, to get a multiplier of 1.8. I think that seems a lot more reasonable than 5 to 1.

A multiplier of 1.8? That is what Dani Rodrik comes up with if we keep our international markets open but:

The size of this multiplier depends in turn on three things in particular, the marginal propensity to consume (c), the marginal tax rate (t), and the marginal propensity to import (m). If c=0.8, t=0.2, and m=0.2, the Keynesian multiplier is 1.8 (=1/(1-c(1-t)+m)). A $1 trillion fiscal stimulus would increase GDP by $1.8 trillion. Now suppose that we had a way to raise the multiplier by more than half, from 1.8 to 2.8. The same fiscal stimulus would now produce an increase in GDP of $2.8 trillion--quite a difference. Nice deal if you can get it. In fact you can. It is pretty easy to increase the multiplier; just raise import tariffs by enough so that the marginal propensity to import out of income is reduced substantially (to zero if you want the multiplier to go all the way to 2.8). Yes, yes, import protection is inefficient and not a very neighborly thing to do--but should we really care if the alternative is significantly lower growth and higher unemployment? More to the point, will Obama and his advisers care?

Maybe SUNY-Buffalo has figured out a way to make sure that its extra spending does not leak out into the surrounding communities – which would mean a multiplier larger than what David Tufte considers reasonable!

The world-wide web of misinformation

So I give a test that asks students something about Ricardian equivalence, which we had studied using two-period framework a la Fisher. We had looked in particular at the difference between the effects on the interest rate of changes in deficit-financed tax cuts (zero) and deficit-financed government spending increases (positive). Well a certain false sentence kept popping up in several exams - say 10%. I immediately suspected the web, and sure enough, in the Wikipedia article on Ricardian equivalence, I read:

Ricardian equivalence states that a deficit-financed increase in government spending will not lead to an increase in aggregate demand. If consumers are 'Ricardian' they will save more now to compensate for the higher taxes they expect to face in the future, as the government has to pay back its debts. The increased government spending is exactly offset by decreased consumption on the part of the public, so aggregate demand does not change.

This is not just wrong, it is flagrantly wrong. I'm sure everyone has their favorite examples of Wikipedia falsehoods, so I'm not saying anything new here. File under: The Wisdom of Crowds: NOT!

A Bleak Employment Situation

BLS reports the bad news:

Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. November's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 403,000 in September and 320,000 in October, as revised. Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November ... In November, the labor force participation rate declined by 0.3 percentage point to 65.8 percent. Total employment continued to decline, and the employment-population ratio fell to 61.4 percent.

The household survey showed an employment decline of 673,000. BLS also notes:

Over the month, the number of persons who worked part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) continued to increase, reaching 7.3 million. The number of such workers rose by 2.8 million over the past 12 months. This category includes persons who would like to work full time but were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find full-time jobs.

The rise in the unemployment rate sounds bad but the situation is actually worse as the fall in the labor force participation (LFP) rate masked the effect on employment relative to the population (EP). Our graph shows the two series ever since January 1999 to give some context as to how the labor market is faring today as opposed to almost 10 years ago. The need for some sort of aggregate demand stimulus could not be more clear.

Big 3 Automobile Woes and Union Wages

Kendra Marr and Steven Mufson blame the UAW:

Over the past three decades, they have lost ground to more agile foreign rivals that favored smaller cars built by non-unionized labor at lower wages.

Really? So what are the wages for the foreign rivals? They don’t tell us. Last night – Rachel Maddow did - $25 an hour. Oh, but UAW wages are $70 – right? No, try $28 an hour. Hat tip Dean Baker who adds:

Actually, many of these cars were built in unionized factories in Japan, South Korea, and Germany. Unions didn't keep foreign manufacturers from producing high-quality popular cars in these countries. Even when these companies set up shop in the U.S. they have been able to work well with unions. Toyota operated a plant in California where the workers were represented by the UAW for decades (it may still be open). There may have been problems with the way the Big Three management dealt with unions, but other car companies have been able to operate very effectively with a unionized workforce.

We will likely learn in a few hours that more workers have lost their jobs. And yet incompetent writers for the Washington Post still have theirs?

Dead Keynes Blogging

by the Sandwichman

The Sandwichman is still wondering how economists make up their guesses about how $x billion dollars of fiscal stimulus (AKA "deficit spending") will create y million jobs.

Yves Smith says they find them on the back of an envelope. Greg Mankiw says econometrics doesn't always confirm the predictions of textbook Keynesian models. Martin Wolf mentions something about how "deficits aimed at sustaining demand will be piled on top of the fiscal costs of rescuing banking systems bankrupted in the rush to finance excess spending by uncreditworthy households via securitised lending against overpriced houses." Don't you love that house-that-Jack-built volute?

Whew! It can be easy to forget that the issue here is unemployment. As Paul Krugman notes, the US employment report comes out tomorrow, Friday. "The economy is falling fast. We’ll see what tomorrow’s employment report says, but we could well be losing jobs at a rate of 450,000 or 500,000 a month."

Coming Soon: The Sandwichman Stimulus Plan. I'll show you my back of the envelope calculations.

A Golden Oldie: Invest in People

Now that stimulus is just around the corner, we are hearing more discussion of what form it should take. There is a general desire to prop up state budgets, so that legislatures are not forced to cut spending on services in the middle of a slump—a good idea. There is also an interest in putting money into roads and bridges, usually referred to as our “crumbling infrastructure”—another good idea. Here I want to broach a third.



The ranks of the unemployed are increasing by as much as half a million a month. Even if we can stop the plunge, we are in for a long, slow season, and the need for structural change in the economy guarantees that large numbers of us are going to have a rough time getting our working lives back on track. The silver lining to this very dark cloud is that it gives us an opportunity to take time out, to go back to school to get new skills, perspectives and perhaps even life goals. Already applications are up at two- and four-year colleges around the country. Meanwhile, however, the credit crunch is making it hard for prospective students to find loans, funding cutbacks are driving rapid tuition increases, and higher education is being starved for the resources it needs to continue at the same level of service, much less the increased level needed to meet the demand.

So the solution is clear: the third big piece of the coming stimulus, overlapping somewhat with revenue sharing, should be a commitment to education—to turn the tragedy of unemployment into the promise of a new beginning. Our universities, community colleges and other institutions have a model that is intrinsically scalable; give them more money and very quickly they will be able to create more seats in more classrooms, with little or no reduction in quality. There is a vast body of economic research that shows that this is one of the most productive investments we can make as a society, one that will bring returns to us as individuals and as a country long after the immediate crisis has passed.

One nice twist to this idea is that it could be accompanied by introducing a new system of tuition financing that works on both the individual and macroeconomic levels. It goes like this: students take out loans from a government agency, but instead of paying back the precise amount they borrowed, they agree to a modest tax surcharge on their earning for several years after they graduate. If they end up with high-paying jobs, they pay back more into the student loan system. If they end up with lower-paying jobs, they pay less. The overall terms, the percent of the surcharge and the number of years, are set so that, over all the graduates combined, the money borrowed is equal to the money returned. This is a progressive approach that scales the financial contribution of those who benefit from college to their ability to pay, and it reduces the pressure on borrowers to take the most lucrative jobs rather than the ones that appeal to their interests and ideals. (More schoolteachers and fewer bond traders would be a small but positive benefit of this approach.) I don’t know who first came up with this idea, but I associate it with the late, great Ben Harrison.

From a macro point of view, instituting this reform at the same time fiscal deficits are being jacked up to pay for the immediate expansion of education sends a strong signal that those deficits are temporary. They will help pull us out of the slump, but over the longer term we are putting in place a mechanism to more fully finance tomorrow’s students. The US Treasury is currently able to borrow as much as it wants at a near-zero interest rate, but this will not last forever. At some point skepticism about the fate of the dollar will start to mount, and it will be necessary to demonstrate that fiscal policy is sustainable. Reforming tuition finance is not everything, but every $50 billion or so helps.

Mark Sanford, John McCain, and Herbert Hoover

Rich Miller and Matt Benjamin report that one of John McCain’s economic advisors during the campaign is now calling for $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus over the next two years:

economists from across the political spectrum are raising the ante on how much the government should lay out. Some are now calling for at least a $1 trillion boost. Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University professor who was an adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner who served in President Bill Clinton’s White House, are among those who say President- elect Barack Obama should push for a package of that size. “They need a stimulus of $500-to-$600 billion a year for at least two years to counter what is going to be a collapse in consumption,” said Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

Mark Sanford on the other hand wants fiscal restraint:

South Carolina's Gov. Sanford is resisting the urge to propose or accept raising taxes. Faced with a shortfall, Gov. Sanford reconvened the state Legislature in October, and it made $488 million in targeted budget cuts. Gov. Sanford, unlike most of his colleagues, speaks out against any federal bailouts, including a fiscal stimulus bill that is likely to include state aid. "When times go south you cut spending," Gov. Sanford said. "That's what families do, that's what businesses do, and I don't think the government should be exempt from that process."

Publius calls this Sanford-nomics:

This is of course dead wrong -- and confuses microeconomics with macro, as any student of Econ 101 could tell you. The micro-considerations of an individual family or business has nothing much to do with what governments need to do to get the larger economy moving again. (Or just go read someone who actually knows what he's talking about - Krugman). Even worse, it's often affirmatively harmful to adopt microeconomic solutions to macroeconomic problems. Hoover: Ain't that the truth ... One larger point here is that, while "rising stars" like Sanford and Jindal may be individually compelling, they must operate within a Republican Party that has enthusiastically embraced ignorance on a whole host of subjects, economics included. The issue is whether they can escape these constraints.

Despite the fact that Kenneth Rogoff tried to advise John McCain during the campaign – McCain also called for reductions in government spending. Go figure.

Is it true that foreigners finance American debt? - Update 2

The inexplicably high relative value of the US dollar, in the context of a badly-managed domestic economy that is now in recession - prompts the question as to why the demand for this currency worldwide is so large. Who is actually purchasing the US Dollar and why?

Are foreigners denied other currency options under the weight of US dollar hegemony? Perhaps many of these foreigners are not 'foreign' at all but merely the international subsidiary branches of US corporations. A Hong Kong based economist Enzio von Pfeil makes the point that many politicians and trade theorists still apply "the thinking and measurement of trade balances that was developed 500 years ago in Italy." He says that this is innapropriate in a world now vastly changed and where giant Western multinational corporate conglomerates dominate cross-border international exchange.


A huge portion of international trade could be more accurately described as NON-MARKET/NON-TRADE. Intra-corporate 'trade' between branches of the same (mostly US) transnational corporations. “In North America trade associated with U.S. parent multinationals or their foreign affiliates accounted for 54 percent of U.S. exports of goods and 36 percent of imports. Forty percent of trade between the US and Canada in 1998 was intra-corporate. “Forty percent of the US-Europe trade is between parent firms and their affiliates, and in respect of Japan and Europe, it is 55 per cent; with regard to US-Japan trade, it is 80 %.”[2]

Enzio von Pfeil logically asks: “What is meant by "foreign ownership?...Are we talking about "pure" foreigners, or also about U.S. citizens as well as MNCs with overseas financial vehicles? He points to problems with the official Treasury records that detail the owners of US 'foreign' debt - "there appear to be no data available on how much U.S. Treasury debt is held by U.S. MNCs . What, he says, do U.S. MNCs do with at least a portion of all of that money they are making in their fabulously successful overseas operations? Optically, there is an extremely good "fit" Between the overseas investments of U.S. MNCs and "foreign" ownership of America's federal debt. This suggests that plenty of U.S. government debt is held legally by American MNCs in legitimate foreign tax havens.” [1]

International trade (and global intra-corporate transactions) is dominated by the use of a single currency - US dollars.

"...At present, approximately two thirds of world trade is conducted in dollars and two thirds of central banks' currency reserves are held in the American currency which remains the sole currency used by international institutions[3] The US provides the world - but mostly itself- with these dollars by buying goods (such as oil and other commodities), and services produced by US corporations in foreign countries. Since the US does not have a corresponding need for foreign currency, it sells far fewer goods and services in return...." [3]

Clearly, the privileged position of the US, in terms of its relative lack of need to earn foreign currencies, is a large contributer to an ongoing over-valuation of its currency. But the huge global shadow financial system must surely have an even greater impact.

When we look at trade deficits, rather than financial deficits, the UK and US do not fare well and these nationas are also the homes of the largest transnational corporations. Clearly the governments of these two countries have actively encouraged this paradigm of trade imbalance in the first instance. They have heavily subisided their corporations on an ongoing basis, given generous grants for them to extend their operations in other nations and their artificially high exchange rates have allowed these large MNCs to accumulate foreign productive assets relatively cheaply in other countries.[4] Essentially it is corporate imperialism by another name.

Finally, there's the third world debt crisis. One created by the deliberately lax lending policies of large US (and London) banks [5]. Euromarket 'cowboy' salesmen from Citibank and others pushed unaffordable loans onto the leaders of 'developing' nations and the consequent debt repayments have acted as a heavy tax on every household within their borders. A tax that had to be paid (again) in overvalued US dollars [6]. This debt, as such, has been used as an instrument of exploitation and control and its repayment continues to perpetuate and worsen global currency and trade imbalances.

[1] Trade myth five : foreigners finance America by Enzio von Pfeil, Hong Kong.
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1482&Itemid=469&limit=1&limitstart=1
Also see: http://k.daum.net/qna/view.html?qid=3gnR7

[2] It's NOT international trade. Don't be fooled. Brenda Rosser. Thursday, July 24, 2008
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2008/07/its-not-international-trade-dont-be.html

[3] 'Petrodollar or Petroeuro? A new source of global conflict.' By Cóilín Nunan. Accessed on 8th August 2008. http://www.feasta.org/documents/review2/nunan.htm

[4] Now that these same corporations are caught in a recession with high levels of debt are we now seeing a taxpayer-funded bailout of these same multinational corporations?

[5] And those London banks also involved in Euromarket lending.

[6] Witness Paul Volker’s raising of US interest rates to usury levels in October 1979 to maintain US dollar hegemony when the currency came under attack the year before. The most alarming result was that much of the third world debt ‘sold’ by large US banks became permanently unpayable.

Where I Was Wrong About The Current Economic Crisis

There seem to be lots of econoblogsters confessing their sins of bad forecasting out there. I will do so also, perhaps especially because I have been parading around the econoblogosphere bragging about having called the housing bubble, the derivatives mess, and that the whole thing would lead to a recession, without having called the latter too early as some who are now being widely praised did. My error was to think that the crash of the housing bubble would lead to a long-awaited crash of the dollar, given that perhaps the most extreme of deep imbalances in the world economy is the massive US current account deficit that has led to the US becoming by far the largest net foreign debtor in world history. I thought the housing and derivatives crashes would catastrophically crash the dollar. I was wrong.

Instead we had that old bizarre phenomenon of the dollar as the ultimate "safe haven," with US Treasury securities being the ultimate safe haven within the safe haven, even as measurable risk spreads on such securities have widened noticeably in this crisis (heck, nothing is safe). So, instead of the dollar crashing, it has risen noticeably in the last few months, from a low of around 1.6 to the euro to around 1.26 today, or thereabouts. And 90-day Treasury bills are yielding an astoundingly low one basis point, which is effectively negative in nominal terms, given purchase fees, and while looking like a nasty liquidity trap, does not at all indicate any problems for the US Treasury in borrowing money, despite our massive foreign indebtedness and dependence on the kindness of strange foreigners, especially the Chinese, to fund our forthcoming fiscal stimulus.

Jonah Goldberg’s Stimulus Proposal – Temporary Tax Cuts

If you want your kids to learn economics, do not send them to the National Review school of economics:

But rather than blow money on a lavish reenactment of the New Deal, or continue bailing out undeserving corporations, why not really think outside the box? Rep. Louie Gohmert (R., Texas) suggests an across-the-board reprieve on paying 2008 income taxes. This would leave an extra $1.2 trillion in the hands of Americans, who are the best stewards of their own money.

I guess Mr. Goldberg never heard of the Ando-Modigliani life-cycle model of consumption or Milton Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis. These models would predict that much of this tax rebate would be saved and not consumed. Hey, wasn’t that the explanation for why Bush’s version of this did so poorly as far as stimulating aggregate demand?

Update: I emailed Mr. Goldberg a link to this post and he was not particulary amused. His retort?

Heaven forbid Americans save their money, which usually amounts to putting it in the market, 401ks

That confirms it - he has no idea that the issue at hand is insufficiency of aggregate demand yet he deems himself qualified to write a post on this topic. Go figure!