Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
A Greater Depression? [feedly]
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/coronavirus-greater-great-depression-by-nouriel-roubini-2020-03
A Greater Depression?
Mar 24, 2020 NOURIEL ROUBINI
With the COVID-19 pandemic still spiraling out of control, the best economic outcome that anyone can hope for is a recession deeper than that following the 2008 financial crisis. But given the flailing policy response so far, the chances of a far worse outcome are increasing by the day.
NEW YORK – The shock to the global economy from COVID-19 has been both faster and more severe than the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) and even the Great Depression. In those two previous episodes, stock markets collapsed by 50% or more, credit markets froze up, massive bankruptcies followed, unemployment rates soared above 10%, and GDP contracted at an annualized rate of 10% or more. But all of this took around three years to play out. In the current crisis, similarly dire macroeconomic and financial outcomes have materialized in three weeks.
Earlier this month, it took just 15 days for the US stock market to plummet into bear territory (a 20% decline from its peak) – the fastest such decline ever. Now, markets are down 35%, credit markets have seized up, and credit spreads (like those for junk bonds) have spiked to 2008 levels. Even mainstream financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley expect US GDP to fall by an annualized rate of 6% in the first quarter, and by 24% to 30% in the second. US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has warned that the unemployment rate could skyrocket to above 20% (twice the peak level during the GFC).
In other words, every component of aggregate demand – consumption, capital spending, exports – is in unprecedented free fall. While most self-serving commentatorshave been anticipating a V-shaped downturn – with output falling sharply for one quarter and then rapidly recovering the next – it should now be clear that the COVID-19 crisis is something else entirely. The contraction that is now underway looks to be neither V- nor U- nor L-shaped (a sharp downturn followed by stagnation). Rather, it looks like an I: a vertical line representing financial markets and the real economy plummeting.
Not even during the Great Depression and World War II did the bulk of economic activity literally shut down, as it has in China, the United States, and Europe today. The best-case scenario would be a downturn that is more severe than the GFC (in terms of reduced cumulative global output) but shorter-lived, allowing for a return to positive growth by the fourth quarter of this year. In that case, markets would start to recover when the light at the end of the tunnel appears.
But the best-case scenario assumes several conditions. First, the US, Europe, and other heavily affected economies would need to roll out widespread COVID-19 testing, tracing, and treatment measures, enforced quarantines, and a full-scale lockdown of the type that China has implemented. And, because it could take 18 months for a vaccine to be developed and produced at scale, antivirals and other therapeutics will need to be deployed on a massive scale.
Second, monetary policymakers – who have already done in less than a month what took them three years to do after the GFC – must continue to throw the kitchen sink of unconventional measures at the crisis. That means zero or negative interest rates; enhanced forward guidance; quantitative easing; and credit easing (the purchase of private assets) to backstop banks, non-banks, money market funds, and even large corporations (commercial paper and corporate bond facilities). The US Federal Reserve has expanded its cross-border swap lines to address the massive dollar liquidity shortage in global markets, but we now need more facilities to encourage banks to lend to illiquid but still-solvent small and medium-size enterprises.
Third, governments need to deploy massive fiscal stimulus, including through "helicopter drops" of direct cash disbursements to households. Given the size of the economic shock, fiscal deficits in advanced economies will need to increase from 2-3% of GDP to around 10% or more. Only central governments have balance sheets large and strong enough to prevent the private sector's collapse.
But these deficit-financed interventions must be fully monetized. If they are financed through standard government debt, interest rates would rise sharply, and the recovery would be smothered in its cradle. Given the circumstances, interventions long proposed by leftists of the Modern Monetary Theory school, including helicopter drops, have become mainstream.
Unfortunately for the best-case scenario, the public-health response in advanced economies has fallen far short of what is needed to contain the pandemic, and the fiscal-policy package currently being debated is neither large nor rapid enough to create the conditions for a timely recovery. As such, the risk of a new Great Depression, worse than the original – a Greater Depression – is rising by the day.
Unless the pandemic is stopped, economies and markets around the world will continue their free fall. But even if the pandemic is more or less contained, overall growth still might not return by the end of 2020. After all, by then, another virus season is very likely to start with new mutations; therapeutic interventions that many are counting on may turn out to be less effective than hoped. So, economies will contract again and markets will crash again.
Moreover, the fiscal response could hit a wall if the monetization of massive deficits starts to produce high inflation, especially if a series of virus-related negative supply shocks reduces potential growth. And many countries simply cannot undertake such borrowing in their own currency. Who will bail out governments, corporations, banks, and households in emerging markets?
In any case, even if the pandemic and the economic fallout were brought under control, the global economy could still be subject to a number of "white swan" tail risks. With the US presidential election approaching, the COVID-19 crisis will give way to renewed conflicts between the West and at least four revisionist powers: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, all of which are already using asymmetric cyberwarfare to undermine the US from within. The inevitable cyber attacks on the US election process may lead to a contested final result, with charges of "rigging" and the possibility of outright violence and civil disorder.1
Similarly, as I have argued previously, markets are vastly underestimating the risk of a war between the US and Iran this year; the deterioration of Sino-American relations is accelerating as each side blames the other for the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic. The current crisis is likely to accelerate the ongoing balkanization and unraveling of the global economy in the months and years ahead.2
This trifecta of risks – uncontained pandemics, insufficient economic-policy arsenals, and geopolitical white swans – will be enough to tip the global economy into persistent depression and a runaway financial-market meltdown. After the 2008 crash, a forceful (though delayed) response pulled the global economy back from the abyss. We may not be so lucky this time.
Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics at New York University's Stern School of Business and Chairman of Roubini Macro Associates, was Senior Economist for International Affairs in the White House's Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration. He has worked for the International Monetary Fund, the US Federal Reserve, and the World Bank. His website is NourielRoubini.com.
-- via my feedly newsfeed
Monday, March 23, 2020
Dan Little: A course on democracy and intolerance [feedly]
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-course-on-democracy-and-intolerance.html
Here is the course description:
Democracy has been understood as a setting where equal citizens collectively make decisions about law and public policy in an environment of equality, fairness, and mutual respect. Political theorists from Rousseau to JS Mill to Rawls have attempted to define the conditions that make a democratic civil society possible. Today the world's democracies are challenged by powerful political movements based on intolerance and division. How should democratic theory respond to the challenge of hate-based political movements? The course reexamines classic ideas in democratic theory, current sociological research on hate-based populism, and current strategies open to citizens in the twenty-first century to reclaim the values of tolerance and respect in their democratic institutions. The course is intended to provide students with better intellectual resources for understanding the political developments currently transforming societies as diverse as the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, India, and Nigeria.The organizing idea is that democratic theorists have generally conceived of a democracy as a polity in which a sense of civic unity is cultivated that ensures a common commitment to the formal and substantive values of a democratic society -- the equal worth and rights of all citizens, the rule of law, adherence to the constitution, and respect for the institutions of collective decision-making. (Josh Cohen provided an excellent analysis of Rousseau's core philosophical ideas about democracy in Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals; link.) John Rawls captures this idea in Political Liberalism, where he introduces the idea of "political liberalism":
A modern democratic society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines.... Political liberalism assumes that, for political purposes, a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines is the normal result of the exercise of human reason within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional democratic regime. Political liberalism also supposes that a reasonable comprehensive doctrine does not reject the essentials of a democratic regime. (xvi)This formulation is intended to capture the idea that a democracy always embraces groups of people who disagree about important things. These conflicting value frameworks are what he refers to as "comprehensive doctrines of the good", and a liberal democracy is neutral among reasonable comprehensive doctrines.
So what is a "reasonable comprehensive doctrine"? Rawls's conception amounts to precisely this: all such doctrines maintain a commitment to "the essentials of a democratic regime". He refers to comprehensive doctrines that reject these commitments to political justice as irrational and "mad":
Of course, a society may also contain unreasonable and irrational, and even mad, comprehensive doctrines. In their case the problem is to contain them so that they do not undermine the unity and justice of society. (xvi)
The problem that we consider in the course is that democratic societies seem to have evolved in the opposite direction: doctrines that reject the legitimacy of the fundamentals of liberal democracy (respect for the equality of all citizens and respect for the rule of law) -- these doctrines appear to have rapidly gained ground in many democracies in Europe and now the United States. Instead of converging towards a "democratic consensus" where everyone recognizes the legitimacy, equality, and rights of all other citizens, many democracies have developed powerful political movements that reject all these commitments. These are the political movements of division and hate -- or the movements of right-wing populism. Democracy depends fundamentally on the principle of tolerance of points of view different from our own. Does that mean that democracy must be "tolerant of the intolerant", with no effective means of protecting its values and institutions against groups that would subvert its most basic principles?
So how do we take on this set of issues, which involve both political philosophy and the sociology of political mobilization and political psychology?
The course begins by immersing the students in some of the values that define democracy.We begin with John Stuart Mill's short but influential 1859 book, On Liberty. Mill postulates the equal worth and liberties of all citizens, and argues that a good democracy involves rule by the majority while scrupulously protecting the equal rights and freedoms of all citizens. (Notice the close agreement between this theory and the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which we also read.) We then consider the theory of a liberal society put forward by John Rawls in Political Liberalism, where Rawls argues that a democracy depends fundamentally upon a culture of respect for the equal worth and equal rights and liberties of all citizens. This implies that perhaps democracy cannot survive in the absence of such a culture.
This is the positive theory of democracy, as several centuries of philosophers have developed it.
Next we turn to the challenges these theories face in the contemporary world: the rise of hate-based populism in Europe and the United States, and the rising prevalence of racism, bigotry, and violence in many countries. And this is not just a Western problem — think of India, the world's largest democracy, and the governing party's inculcation of hate and violence against Muslims. Anti-semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and white supremacy are on the rise. The Front Nationale in France, the Alternative for Germany, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands are all examples of political parties that have developed mass followings with appeals based on racism and division, and similar parties exist in most other European countries. And white supremacist organizations in the United States make the same appeals in our country as well.
The hard question for us is this: can our liberal democracies find ways of coping with intolerance and hate? Can we reassert the values of civility and mutual respect in ways that build a greater consensus around the values of democracy? Does a democracy have the ability to defend itself against parties who reject the moral premises of democracy?
The assigned readings in the course include several excellent and thought-provoking books from philosophy, sociology, and political theory. We begin with Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser's book Populism: A Very Short Introduction, which gives an excellent short overview of the phenomenon of rightwing populism in Europe and the United States, along with a good discussion of the challenge of defining the concept of populism.
We then turn to two weeks on McAdam and Kloos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America, along with a survey report from the Southern Poverty Law Center on the spread of racist and hate-based organizations in the United States. McAdam and Kloos provide an analysis of the evolution of the mainstream "conservative" political party since the Nixon presidency, and document through survey data and other evidence from empirical political science the rapid increase in racial antagonism in the party's platforms and behavior when in office (link, link). They offer a convincing demonstration of the racism that underlies the activism of the Tea Party.
The next readings are Justin Gest's The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (link) and Kathleen Blee's edited volume The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (link). These books provide an ethnographical perspective on the appeal of right-wing extremism in western democracies, deriving from rapid economic change (deindustrialization) and demographic change (immigration and the rising percentage of populations of color in both Britain and the US). Blee's volume sheds much light on the role of gender in political mobilization by the right across the spectrum, with substantially more women involved in extremists groups in the US than in Europe.
Next we turn to both longstanding and current strategies by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India to manage politics through antagonism against India's Muslims. Paul Brass's book The Production Of Hindu-Muslim Violence In Contemporary India is the primary source (link), and several good pieces of journalism about the current violence in India against Muslims help to fill in the details of the current situation (link, link, link).
The course ends with a consideration of Robert Putnam's volume Better Together: Restoring the American Community, which makes the case for civic engagement and civic unity -- but in a voice that appears a decade behind events when it comes to the virulence of hate-based activism.
This is a course that is entirely organized around an intensive and engaged student experience. Each session involves lively discussion and student presentations (which have been excellent), and the course aims at helping the students develop their own ideas and judgments. We all learn through open, honest, and respectful dialogue, and every session is engaging and valuable. Most importantly, we have all come to see that these issues of democracy, equality, and intolerance and bigotry are an enormous challenge for all of us in the twenty-first century that we must solve.
(For the first session students are asked to view several relevant videos on YouTube:
John Rawls Lecture 1, Modern Political Philosophy
Hate Rising: White Supremacy in America
Robert Putnam on Immigration and Diversity
Cas Mudde on Right-wing Populism
These videos set the stage for many of the topics raised throughout the course.)
-- via my feedly newsfeed
A few Comments on Weekly and Continued Unemployment Claims [feedly]
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2020/03/a-few-comments-on-weekly-and-continued.html
On Thursday, the Department of Labor will release Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims. The consensus is initial claims will increase to 750,000, but that is way too low.
Based on early reporting from various states, initial weekly claims will probably be several million this week.
The all time high for initial weekly unemployment claims, Seasonally Adjusted, was 695,000 in Oct 82. The high during the great recession was 665,000 in Mar 09.
The previous record will be obliterated this week due to the sudden economic stop.
The extremely high level of claims will probably continue for several weeks. But it will be important to track Continued Claims too - since many of these people won't be returning to work for some time.
Click on graph for larger image.Here is a graph of continued claims since 1967.
If we look at Hurricane Katrina in 2005, weekly claims jumped up immediately, and then declined fairly quickly back to normal levels - but continued claims stayed high for a few months (since it took some time for people in New Orleans and along the Gulf coast to return to work).
This pandemic sudden stop is like Hurricane Katrina for unemployment claims, but all across the country.
This week initial claims will skyrocket, and the following week continued claims will follow.
At the worst of the Great Recession, continued claims peaked at 6.635 million, but then steadily declined. Over the next few weeks, continued claims will increase rapidly, and then will likely stay at that high level until the crisis abates.
-- via my feedly newsfeed
Bernstein & Baker: Yes, this is an emergency. No, that doesn’t justify a $500 billion Trump/Mnuchin slush fund. [feedly]
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/yes-this-is-an-emergency-no-that-doesnt-justify-a-500-billion-trump-mnuchin-slush-fund/
While the indicators are lagging, the U.S. economy is in a recession that will very likely be extremely deep. It's likely that real GDP falls at double-digit pace in the quarter that begins next month and the unemployment rate more than doubles. If that sounds implausible, history shows that in sharp downturns, the unemployment rate takes the elevator up and the stairs down.
To their credit, after a slow start Congress appears to have grasped this urgency and is working around the clock on what may turn out to be the largest stimulus package in our history, with a price tag of $1-2 trillion, or 5-10 percent of GDP (the Recovery Act was $800 billion over two years, roughly 2 percent of GDP). Given that fighting the virus essentially calls for putting the U.S. economy in deep freeze for an unknown period, we vigorously support going big.
But even as Congress must speed toward completion and passage of this legislation, there is time to avoid wasting resources, and there is one, large part of the bill—$500 billion, according to the Washington Post—that threatens to create a "slush fund" for businesses with virtually no oversight, no benefits for workers, and far too much discretion for President Trump to dole out goodies to himself and his cronies.
The lending mechanism in question allocates $500 billion to backstop (i.e., repayment is guaranteed by the government) private-sector loans to the tune of $50 billion to airlines, $8 billion for cargo carriers, $17 billion for businesses "critical to national security," and $425 billion for businesses, states, and cities.
To be clear, there's nothing wrong and a lot right with providing resources of these magnitudes for businesses. The bill also proposes $350 billion for small business with a smart, built-in incentive to help workers: if employers use a portion of the loan to maintain their payrolls, that portion is forgiven.
But the $500 billion carries no such incentives (there is a requirement that CEO can't raise their pay over last year's level, but that could mean just "restricting" a CEO to a $15 million paycheck, an extremely mild condition). Nor does there appear to be adequate oversight or "underwriting," the process by which banks determine credit worthiness, leading Sen. Warren to tweet that it "sounds like Trump hotel properties like Mar-a-Largo could receive huge bags of cash – and then fire their workers – if Steve Mnuchin decides to do a solid for his boss with taxpayer dollars."
We know for a fact that Democrats want to complete this stimulus package as quickly as possible to get money out the door to people and small businesses that are a few paychecks away from personal despair and possible failure or bankruptcy. But the bill won't pass without the support of Democrats in both chambers (the stimulus will require 60 votes in the Senate).
Yes, time is of the essence, but Democrats must use their leverage to remove this Trump/Mnuchin slush fund while they quickly negotiate the attaching of pro-worker conditionality to it. The main thing for this moment is to get the help to families (direct cash) and small businesses out the door.
There is no obvious reason that we can't do something similar for larger firms by making loans available for purposes of meeting their payrolls.* If the airlines and other especially hard hit businesses need additional assistance to get through the crisis, we can work through a well-designed package that ensures both that shareholders and top executives share the pain and that President Trump can't use the money to help himself and his friends.
But let's train our water hoses on where the immediate fire is—low, moderate income households and small businesses with a week or two of cash reserves and little access to credit markets. No question, this is an emergency, but that doesn't excuse opportunistic, potentially wasteful spending with no oversight. We have important work to do, none of which includes setting up a half-a-trillion-dollar slush fund.
*Technical note: Supporters of this part of the bill argue that because the liquidity for the $500 billion is provided by the Federal Reserve (though one of the "lending facilities" the Fed's been setting up), it cannot include the same forgiveness feature for maintaining payroll that's part of small business loan package. The reason given is that the under the Fed's charter, this would invoke credit risk the Fed cannot undertake. We do not find this at all convincing. First, as with all such lending programs, the Treasury must backstop the Fed's credit risk. Once they do so, given that the fiscal authorities guarantee the full loan, it is unclear to us why the forgiveness feature is problematic. Other conditions, such as no buybacks, dividends, any payroll maintenance, or even just some oversight should not invoke Fed risk and are thus no-brainers in this context.
-- via my feedly newsfeed
Peter R. Orszag: Social Distancing Makes Sense Only With Extraordinary Fiscal Stimulus
Social Distancing Makes Sense Only With Extraordinary Fiscal Stimulus
Governments' economic measures to address Covid-19 need to be much bigger.
Across the world, as governments take their first economic stimulus measures to address the Covid-19 crisis, debate is intensifying over the right form and size of that assistance. But this discussion hasn't yet come to grips with five fundamental realities:
Governments around the world are awakening to these truths, and beginning to debate how to assist businesses suffering from the downturn. The U.K. is considering making grants to companies for up to 80% percent of salary, capped at 2,500 pounds ($2,900) a month; offering loans to small and medium-sized businesses; and taking equity stakes in airlines and other companies. Denmark has put forward a program to subsidize 75% of payroll for companies facing a need to cut jobs by 30% or more. France is considering equity injections and loan guarantees.
The economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have proposed that governments simply pay companies to cushion the shock: "In the context of this pandemic, we need a new form of social insurance, one that directly targets and works through businesses," they wrote earlier this month. "The most direct way to provide this insurance is to have the government act as a buyer of last resort. If the government fully replaces the demand that evaporates, each business can keep paying its workers and maintain its capital stock, as if it was operating under business as usual."
And Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times has suggested a universal loan program, with a zero interest rate and extended repayment terms.
One thing is clear about stimulus measures in this crisis: Bigger is better. To my mind, the least-worst option is a large and comprehensive program of loans to businesses, as Sorkin has proposed, which could be extended quarterly and limited in the first instance to a share of 2019 revenue. 1 It should work according to these four principles:
The specific design features of this program are matters for debate (including whether the banks should bear some share of the risks), and the right approach undoubtedly will vary from country to country. But the basic realities are the same everywhere: It makes no sense to impose social distancing without socializing the costs. And if we want to avoid irreversible economic damage, we can't afford to wait.
Some have suggested simply delaying payments rather than injecting liquidity into companies. Delaying payment for taxes and perhaps certain mortgages and rental payments is wise, but a broader payment halt across companies offers only the mirage of a solution. It would push the problem into the future, but comes with the significant cost of building up arrears that will ultimately come due. In addition, delaying payments to any entity other than the government merely shifts the cash-flow problem somewhere else — it doesn't eliminate even the short-run problems from the collapse in demand.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Sunday, March 22, 2020
Bloomberg: China Expands Medical Aid to Africa With First Ethiopia Shipment [feedly]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-22/china-expands-medical-aid-to-africa-with-first-ethiopia-shipment
We're tracking the latest on the coronavirus outbreak and the global response. Sign up here for our daily newsletter on what you need to know.
China's mass deployment of medical aid to fight the coronavirus reached Africa as Ethiopia received its first shipment of supplies, including protective gear and test kits, for distribution across the continent from billionaire Jack Ma.
The Horn of Africa nation received 5.4 million face masks, more than 1 million testing kits, 40,000 items of protective clothing and 60,000 sets of face shields, China's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Jack Ma's foundation said in a statement Sunday. More medical supplies are expected over the next few weeks.
"Getting these donations to all 54 African countries, with diverse geographic conditions and different levels of infrastructure, is a great logistical and transportation challenge," the foundation said. "We are working around the clock to make the delivery as fast as possible."
Ethiopia's Health Ministry will coordinate the distribution together with the national carrier, Ethiopian Airlines, and with support from the World Food Programme and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said separately. Abiy announced a week ago he'd struck a deal with Ma.
Read more about China's mass deployment of medical aid to Europe here
Although the spread of the virus has been relatively slow in Africa, the number of people who tested positive have climbed to about 1,000 in more than 40 countries.
Still, the consequences of pandemic will be "catastrophic due to the continent's weak health care systems, including inadequate surveillance and laboratory capacity, scarcity of public health human resources, and limited financial means," said Abiy.
-- via my feedly newsfeed