경제학 교실

세월호 10주년을맞아 시사인에서 100명을 인터뷰하고 전자책으로 펴냈습니다.

그 가슴아픈 일을 겪고 난 후에도 우리 사회에서는 여전히 참사가 벌어지고 있습니다.

10년 전 그날을 기억하는 것은 우리의 미래를 전망하는 일이 아닐까요?

http://sewol100.sisain.co.kr/ebook.html

관련 자료 모음
 
 GDP 감소 추정

투자유입 감소

 
브렉시트 이후 영국 경제 더 심각해졌습니다 (조선일보 손진석 기자)
언더스탠딩. 2024. 3.31.
https://youtu.be/IF5jG3ll4AQ?si=yNeUkO2K63jWo3ge  
 
 
영국은 돌아갈래 브렉시트 이전으로...! 
#이슈픽쌤과함께 [이슈픽특강] | KBS 221211 방송
https://youtu.be/sDFdHdzHdXE?si=FbZkcJUudHSm7bqN
 
 
 
 
 

Mar 14th 2024

But there are still pitfalls ahead

Since the end of 2019—a period that includes the covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath—America’s economy has grown by about 8% in real terms (see chart 1). During that same time, the euro area has expanded by only 3%, Japan a piddling 1% and Britain not at all. America is the only big economy that is back to its pre-pandemic growth trend.

On February 26th the National Association for Business Economics published its quarterly survey of professional economists. Three months ago the median forecast was for growth of 1.3% this year; now it is 2.2%, just short of last year’s 2.5% growth. Yet the steady expansion has not stopped inflation from falling: the same economists see it receding to an annual rate of 2.1% by the end of 2024 (using the Fed’s preferred gauge), almost bang on the central bank’s target of 2%.

America’s stockmarkets keep hitting new records. Corporate earnings are set to rise strongly this year. Ordinary folk, too, are growing more optimistic.

How exactly has America done this? One way of looking at its run of strength is to focus on demand. Every element of it—consumption, investment, foreign trade—added to growth last year, and may well do so again this year. Three factors have underpinned this broad-based strength: buffers, fiscal catalysts and diversification.

consumption, investment,

That is because both consumers and businesses have been insulated to some degree from the chill of higher rates. The insulation is partly a product of the giant stimulus doled out by both the Trump and Biden administrations at the height of the pandemic. This marked America out at the time: in 2020 and 2021 its government deficit averaged 14% of gdp. In the euro area the average was 6%. Both directly (handouts) and indirectly (a quicker economic recovery) this support padded Americans’ bank accounts.
Those savings have lasted a surprisingly long time. Researchers with the San Francisco Fed have estimated that households’ excess savings (compared with the pre-pandemic trend) peaked at $2.1trn in August 2021. Early last year they thought this stash would be used up in a matter of months. But after data revisions towards the end of 2023, they concluded that households were sitting on an extra $400bn, enough to last through the first half of this year.

Another layer of insulation has come from fixed-rate lending. Home-buyers, for example, often obtain 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. The average interest on the stock of these is now about 4%, less than before the pandemic and well below the 8% rate on new mortgages last year (see chart 2)

Fiscal policy

Fiscal policy has also added to America’s economic momentum. The government is running a gaping deficit. After narrowing to about 4% in 2022 it was back to 7.5% of gdp last year, a level typically seen only during wars or recessions.

Three big spending packages passed by Congress (on infrastructure, clean tech and semiconductors) are incentivising private firms and state governments to spend lavishly as well. Construction of factories is booming as makers of electric vehicles and semiconductors expand operations in America: altogether, investment in manufacturing added about 0.4 percentage points to gdp growth last year. Investment in infrastructure has been slower to rise but seems to be climbing now, too, with state and local governments piggybacking on federal funding for highways, power grids, airports and more. “These policies are starting to show up in the data. It delays the timing of a cyclical slowdown,” says Satyam Panday of s&p Global, a credit-rating agency.

export

Finally, America, as a big producer of oil and gas, is benefiting from high prices elsewhere without suffering as much from them itself. Natural gas costs about a quarter of what it does in Europe, for example (see chart 3). Last year America became the world’s biggest exporter of the liquefied sort (lng). No wonder that foreign trade added about 0.6 percentage points to America’s growth rate last year.

Supply Side = Production Function

Strong demand is, however, only half the story. Were it not for a similar expansion of supply, all of the spending would have simply translated into more upward pressure on prices. That inflation has instead eased markedly is a sign of growth in America’s productive capacity.

Labor
blue-collar
Start with the labour force. America now has about 158m workers, nearly 4% more than at the end of 2019. In part that is because a higher share of working-age adults are employed. Yet by far the biggest driver of the expanded workforce has been immigration.

white-collar
Student visas have rebounded strongly since the pandemic, with the total last year four times higher than in 2020. That has created a big reservoir of young, educated workers for companies to hire. Looking at data that includes asylum-seekers, Tiffany Wilding of pimco, an investment firm, estimates that about 3m immigrants arrived in America last year, up from 1m in pre-pandemic years.

productivity

Workers in non-farm business were about 2.6% more productive than a year ago, according to official estimates. To be clear, no serious economist thinks such productivity growth is sustainable. Since the end of 2019 labour productivity has grown by 1.6% a year, less than a tenth of a percentage point faster than its pace from 2007 to 2019.
Nonetheless the jump in productivity over the past year is notable. The simplest explanation is that pandemic frictions have disappeared as supply chains have returned to normal, and that this has shown up in the data as an improvement in productivity. Some economists, though, are tempted to conclude that fundamentals may also be changing. One possibility is that increased competition in the labour market is engendering a reallocation of workers to higher-paying firms, which are potentially more productive,

the relative scarcity of workers has also prompted firms to invest in labour-saving technology, at a time when businesses software has been getting better.

It is not all roses.

The labour market is showing a few cracks. Hiring has trended down since early 2022.

Delinquencies on credit cards and auto loans soared last year, rising above pre-pandemic levels, according to the New York Fed.

The finance industry, too, has some obvious vulnerabilities. Commercial property threatens to blow a hole in loan books, a problem that will be particularly acute for smaller lenders. And many banks, big and small, are sitting on hefty paper losses on their bond-holdings because of the rise in interest rates.

how to unwind the rate rises of the past two years. No one knows with any certainty what the perfect interest rate is for the economy—the neutral level which is neither a spur to economic activity nor a drag on it.