Workers will lose more than $700 million dollars annually under proposed DOL rule [feedly]

Wage Theft Inc running the Department of Labor.....

Workers will lose more than $700 million dollars annually under proposed DOL rule
https://www.epi.org/blog/workers-will-lose-more-than-700-million-dollars-annually-under-proposed-dol-rule/

In October, the Trump administration published a proposed rule regarding tips which, if finalized, will cost workers more than $700 million annually. It is yet another example of the Trump administration using the fine print of a proposal to attempt to push through a change that will transfer large amounts of money from workers to their employers. We also find that as employers ask tipped workers to do more non-tipped work as a result of this rule, employment in non-tipped food service occupations will decline by 5.3% and employment in tipped occupations will increase by 12.2%, resulting in 243,000 jobs shifting from being non-tipped to being tipped. Given that back-of-the-house, non-tipped jobs in restaurants are more likely to be held by people of color while tipped occupations are more likely to be held by white workers, this could reduce job opportunities for people of color.

The background: employers are not allowed to pocket workers' tips—tips must remain with workers. But employers can legally "capture" some of workers' tips by paying tipped workers less in base wages than their other workers. For example, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, but employers can pay tipped workers a "tipped minimum wage" of $2.13 an hour as long as employees' base wage and the tips they receive over the course of a week are the equivalent of at least $7.25 per hour. All but seven states have a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers.

In a system like this, the more non-tipped work that is done by tipped workers earning the sub-minimum wage, the more employers benefit. This is best illustrated with a simple example. Say a restaurant has two workers, one doing tipped work and one doing non-tipped work, who both work 40 hours a week. The tipped worker is paid $2.50 an hour in base wages, but gets $10 an hour in tips on average, for a total of $12.50 an hour in total earnings. The non-tipped worker is paid $7.50 an hour. In this scenario, the restaurant pays their workers a total of ($2.50+$7.50)*40 = $400 per week, and the workers take home a total of ($12.50+$7.50)*40 = $800 (with $400 of that coming from tips).

But suppose the restaurant makes both those workers tipped workers, with each doing half tipped work and half non-tipped work. Then the restaurant pays them both $2.50 an hour, and they will each get $5 an hour in tips on average (since now they each spend half their time on non-tipped work) for a total of $7.50 an hour in total earnings. In this scenario, the restaurant pays out a total of ($2.50+$2.50)*40 = $200 per week, and the workers take home a total of ($7.50 + $7.50)*40 = $600. The restaurant's gain of $200 is the workers' loss of $200, simply by having tipped workers spend time doing non-tipped work.

To limit the amount of tips employers can capture in this way, the Department of Labor has always restricted the amount of time tipped workers can spend doing non-tipped work if the employer is paying the subminimum wage. In particular, the department has said that if an employer pays the subminimum wage, workers can spend at most 20 % of their time doing non-tipped work. This is known as the 80/20 rule: employers can only claim a "tip credit"—i.e., pay tipped workers a base wage less than the regular minimum wage—if tipped staff spend no more than 20 % of their time performing non-tipped functions; at least 80 % of their time must be spent in tip-receiving activities. The protection provided by this rule is critical for tipped worker. For example, in a restaurant, the 80/20 rule prevents employers from expecting servers to spend hours washing dishes at the end of the night, or prepping ingredients for hours before the restaurant opens. Occasionally, a server might play the role of the host, seating guests when a line has formed, or filling salt and pepper shakers when dining service has ended—but such activities cannot take up more than 20 % of their time without employers paying them the full minimum wage, regardless of tips.

The Department of Labor (DOL), under the Trump administration, has proposed to do away with the 80/20 rule. Workers would be left with a toothless protection in which employers would be allowed to take a tip credit "for any amount of time that an employee performs related, non-tipped duties contemporaneously with his or her tipped duties, or for a reasonable time immediately before or after performing the tipped duties" (see page 53957 of the proposed rule).

With no meaningful limit on the amount of time tipped workers may perform non-tipped work, employers could capture more of workers' tips. It is not hard to imagine how employers of tipped workers might exploit this change in the regulation. Consider a restaurant that employs a cleaning service to clean the restaurant each night: vacuuming carpets, dusting, etc. Why continue to pay for such a service, for which the cleaning staff would need to be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, when you could simply require servers to spend an extra hour or two performing such work and only pay them the tipped minimum wage of $2.13 per hour? Or, a restaurant that currently employs three dishwashers at a time might decide they can manage the dish load with only one dedicated dishwasher if they hire a couple extra servers and require all servers to wash dishes periodically over the course of their shifts. Employers could pay servers less than the minimum wage for hours of dishwashing so long as they perform some tipped work right before or after washing dishes.

The department recognizes that workers will lose out under this change, stating that "tipped workers might lose tipped income by spending more of their time performing duties where they are not earning tips, while still receiving cash wages of less than minimum wage" (see page 53972 of the proposed rule). Tellingly, DOL did not provide an estimate of the amount that workers will lose—even though it is legally required, as a part of the rulemaking process, to assess all quantifiable costs and benefits "to the fullest extent that these can be usefully estimated" (see Cost-Benefit and Other Analysis Requirements in the Rulemaking Process). The department claims they "lack data to quantify this potential reduction in tips." However, EPI easily produced a reasonable estimate using a methodology that is very much in the spirit of estimates the Department of Labor regularly produces; DOL obviously could have produced an estimate. But DOL couldn't both produce a good faith estimate and maintain the fiction that getting rid of the 80/20 rule is about something other than employers being able to capture more of workers' tips, so they opted to ignore this legally required step in the rulemaking process.

Below we describe the methodology for our estimate. The simplicity and reasonableness of this approach underscores that by not producing an estimate, the administration appears to simply be trying to hide its anti-worker agenda by claiming to not be able to quantify results.

Methodology for estimating tips captured by employers

The remainder of this piece describes the methodology for estimating the total pay transferred from workers to employers as a result of this rule described above. To evaluate how this rule change would affect pay, we use data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), restricted to states with a tip credit (i.e., that allow employers to pay a subminimum wage to tipped workers), to estimate how much employers might shift work from traditionally non-tipped to tipped staff. Doing so would allow them to spread out the total pool of tips received over more people for whom employers can pay less than the minimum wage, thereby reducing employers' wage responsibility. We then estimate the change in total earnings that would occur for food service workers if that shift in employment took place.

The CPS is a household survey that asks workers about their base wages (exclusive of tips) and about their tips earned, if any. One problem with the CPS data, however, is that earnings from tips are combined with both overtime pay and earnings from commissions. Researchers refer to the CPS variable that provides the aggregate weekly value of these three sources of earnings (overtime, tips, and commissions) as "OTTC." In order to isolate tips using this variable, we first restrict the sample to hourly workers in tipped occupations, to help ensure that we are not picking up workers who are likely to earn commissions. For hourly workers in these tipped occupations who work less than or equal to 40 hours in a week, we assume that the entire amount of OTTC earnings is tips. For hourly workers in tipped occupations who work more than 40 hours, we must subtract overtime earnings. We calculate overtime earnings for these workers as 1.5 times their straight-time hourly wage times the number of hours they work beyond 40. For these workers, we assume their tipped earnings are equal to OTTC minus these overtime earnings.

Some workers in tipped occupations do not report their tips in the OTTC variable; however, the CPS also asks workers to report their total weekly earnings inclusive of tips, and their base wage exclusive of tips. For those workers in tipped occupations with no reported value in the OTTC variable, but whose total weekly earnings is greater than the sum of their base wage times the hours they worked, we assume the difference is tips.

In other words, for hourly workers in tipped occupations we calculate tips in two ways:

1. For those who report a value for OTTC:

Weekly tips = OTTC for those who work ≤ 40 hours per week, and

Weekly tips = OTTC − [(base wage) × 1.5 × (hours worked − 40)] for those who work > 40 hours per week.

1. For those who do not report a value for OTTC:

Weekly tips = Total weekly earnings inclusive of tips – (base wage x hours worker).

In cases where tips can be calculated both ways, we take the larger of the two values.

Standard economic logic dictates that employers will spread out aggregate tips over as many workers they can—thereby reducing their wage obligations and effectively "capturing" tips. They will shift work from non-tipped to tipped workers until the resulting average wage (combined base wage plus tips) of their tipped workers is at or just above the hourly wage these same workers could get in a non-tipped job. For employers of tipped workers to get and keep the workers they need, tipped workers must earn as much as their "outside option," since, all else being equal (i.e., assuming no important difference in nonwage compensation and working conditions), if these workers could earn more in another job, they would quit and go to that job. But for employers to keep these workers, they do not need to earn any more than they could earn in another job (again, assuming all else is equal), since as long as they are earning what they could earn in another job, it would not be worth it to these workers to quit.

To calculate the "outside option wage," we use regression analysis to determine the wage each worker would likely earn in a non-tipped job. We regress hourly wage (including tips) on controls for age, education, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, marital status, and state, and use the results of that regression to predict what each tipped worker would earn in a non-tipped job. We set a lower bound on predicted hourly wages at the state minimum wage. We refer to the predicted value as the outside option wage—it's the wage a similar worker in a non-tipped job earns. We assume if a worker currently earns less than or equal to their outside option wage, their earnings cannot be reduced because if their earnings are reduced, they will leave their job and take their outside option. However, if a worker currently earns more than their outside option wage, their earnings can be reduced by the amount the worker earns above the outside option wage, since as long as their earnings are not reduced below their outside option wage, they will have no reason to leave. We also assume that if their base wage is greater than the state minimum wage—i.e. if their employer is not taking the tip credit—their earnings will not be reduced, since the 80/20 rule applies only to tipped workers who are paid a subminimum base wage. We calculate new average tips earned as the aggregate tips of all tipped workers minus the aggregate amount, just described, by which their earnings can be reduced, divided by the total number of tipped workers.

Using this estimate of new average tips earned, we can estimate how much employers might shift the composition of employment by reducing the number of non-tipped workers and adding more tipped ones. We assume that the total amount of tips earned remains the same— it is just spread out over more tipped workers (who are now doing more non-tipped work). In particular, we assume that the new number of tipped workers is the number that, when multiplied by the new average tips earned, is equal to the total aggregate tips before the change. We operationalize this by multiplying the sample weights of tipped workers by total aggregate tips divided by the difference between total aggregate tips and the aggregate amount by which earnings can be reduced. We then assume that the number of tipped workers added is offset one-for-one by a reduction in the number of non-tipped workers who have food service occupations. We operationalize this by multiplying the sample weights of non-tipped workers by one minus the ratio of the increase in tipped workers to the original number of non-tipped workers. We find that employment in non-tipped food service occupations will decline by 5.3% and employment in tipped occupations will increase by 12.1%, resulting in 243,000 jobs shifting from being non-tipped to being tipped as a result of this rule. The work that had been done by those non-tipped workers will now be done by tipped workers, with tipped workers spending less time doing work for which they receive tips.

The loss in pay is calculated as the difference between current aggregate food service tips and new aggregate food service tips using the new employment weights just described for tipped and non-tipped workers and the new average wages for tipped workers. We assume average wages for non-tipped workers do not change. We estimate that there will be a transfer of $705 million from workers to employers if this rule is finalized.

Finally, it should be noted that our estimate of the transfer from workers to employers is likely a vast underestimate for three reasons. First, tips are widely known to be substantially underestimated in CPS data, thus it is highly likely that we are underestimating the amount of tips employers would capture as a result of this rule change. For example, we find that 47.6% of workers in tipped occupations do not report receiving tips. Similarly, using revenue data from the full-service restaurant industry and updating the methodology from Table 1 here to 2018, we find that tips in full-service restaurants are $30.5 billion, which is roughly twice the amount of tips reported in food service in the CPS. This means the amount employers will really capture is likely roughly twice as large as our estimate. Second, we only estimated losses in food service. However, about 26.0 % of tips earned in the economy are not earned in restaurants or food service occupations. Combining these two factors together means what employers will really capture may be 2.5 times as large as our estimate. Third, our estimates assume that getting rid of the 80/20 rule will only have an effect if the employer is already taking a tip credit. This ignores the fact that some employers may be incentivized to start using the tip credit if the 80/20 rule is abolished, knowing that without the rule they will be able to capture more tips. Accounting for this factor would increase our estimate further.

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Production, Use and Fate of All Plastics Ever Made [feedly]

Production, Use and Fate of All Plastics Ever Made
A friend of mine with half a lifetime as a sales engineer for the machine tools that make plastics suggests two relatively simple fixes for the growing environmental damage inflicted by unrecycled plastics. ONE: ban non recyclable plastics, with prison sentences for violations [example: most grocery plastics]; TWO Fix criminal penalties for failure to recycle recyclable plastic [example: dudes that dumped tons of medical waste in Long Island Sound].

http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/11/production-use-and-fate-of-all-plastics.html

Production, Use and Fate of All Plastics Ever Made

Back in 2005, the American Film Institute released a list of the 100 most memorable and lasting bits of film dialogue of all time. The first two, for example, were ""Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"
and "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." Number 41 on the list was "Plastics." from the 1967  film The Graduate, which won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman) and Best Actress (Anne Bancroft).

In that movie, the dazed-and-confused soon-to-be college graduate Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, is drifting through a dinner party full of his parents' friends. One of his father's well-meaning and clueless friends named Mr. Maguire, played by Walter Brooke, traps Benjamin into this conversation:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

For those who are thinking about it, Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law have written ""Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made" (Science Advances, July 19, 2017,  3:7, e1700782). They write:

Although the first synthetic plastics, such as Bakelite, appeared in the early 20th century, widespread use of plastics outside of the military did not occur until after World War II. ... plastics' largest market is packaging, an application whose growth was accelerated by a global shift from reusable to single-use containers. As a result, the share of plastics in municipal solid waste (by mass) increased from less than 1% in 1960 to more than 10% by 2005 in middle- and high-income countries. ... By identifying and synthesizing dispersed data on production, use, and end-of-life management of polymer resins, synthetic fibers, and additives, we present the first global analysis of all mass-produced plastics ever manufactured. 

They look at all the purposes for which plastic is used, and then the periods of time these products are in use, from short-term uses like packaging to long-term uses like construction. They write: 

Global production of resins and fibers increased from 2 Mt in 1950 to 380 Mt in 2015, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.4% (table S1), roughly 2.5 times the CAGR [compound annual growth rate] of the global gross domestic product during that period. The total amount of resins and fibers manufactured from 1950 through 2015 is 7800 Mt. Half of this—3900 Mt—was produced in just the past 13 years. Today, China alone accounts for 28% of global resin and 68% of global PP&A [polyester, polyamide, and acrylic] fiber production ...  

We estimate that 2500 Mt of plastics—or 30% of all plastics ever produced—are currently in use. Between 1950 and 2015, cumulative waste generation of primary and secondary (recycled) plastic waste amounted to 6300 Mt. Of this, approximately 800 Mt (12%) of plastics have been incinerated and 600 Mt (9%) have been recycled, only 10% of which have been recycled more than once. Around 4900 Mt—60% of all plastics ever produced—were discarded and are accumulating in landfills or in the natural environment

Here's a figure showing some their estimates of plastic waste generation and disposal since 1950 and projected up through 2050. The calculations suggest that even with a substantial rise in incineration and recycling of plastic, the cumulative amount of plastic discarded will rise substantially in the next few decades,

As the authors note, we are essentially carrying out an uncontrolled global experiment on how plastic waste may affect the environment:

Plastic waste is now so ubiquitous in the environment that it has been suggested as a geological indicator of the proposed Anthropocene era ... None of the mass-produced plastics biodegrade in any meaningful way; however, sunlight weakens the materials, causing fragmentation into particles known to reach millimeters or micrometers in size. Research into the environmental impacts of these "microplastics" in marine and freshwater environments has accelerated in recent years, but little is known about the impacts of plastic waste in land-based ecosystems. ...

The growth of plastics production in the past 65 years has substantially outpaced any other manufactured material. The same properties that make plastics so versatile in innumerable applications—durability and resistance to degradation—make these materials difficult or impossible for nature to assimilate. Thus, without a well-designed and tailor-made management strategy for end-of-life plastics, humans are conducting a singular uncontrolled experiment on a global scale, in which billions of metric tons of material will accumulate across all major terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems on the planet. The relative advantages and disadvantages of dematerialization, substitution, reuse, material recycling, waste-to-energy, and conversion technologies must be carefully considered to design the best solutions to the environmental challenges posed by the enormous and sustained global growth in plastics production and use.

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Michael Roberts: The fantasy world continues [feedly]

A good rundown on the sluggish world economies by Michael Roberts, a very competent economist, and a "Marxist" -- a squishy term after 150 yrs, however. I do not publish his stuff very much, because his posts tend to be VERY wonky, and his politics are utterly sectarian. Nonetheless, he does not harangue in this one. 

The fantasy world continues
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/the-fantasy-world-continues/

The fantasy world continues.  In the US and Europe, stock market index levels are hitting new all-time highs.  Bond prices are also near all-time highs.  Investment in both stocks and bonds are delivering massive profits for the financial institutions and companies.  Conversely, in the 'real' economy, particularly in the productive sectors of industry and transport, the story is dismal.  The world's auto industry is in serious decline.  Layoffs of workers are on the agenda in most auto companies.  The manufacturing sectors in most major economies are contracting.And as measured by the so-called purchasing managers indexes (PMIs), which are indexes of surveys of company managers about the state and prospects for their companies, even the large service sectors are slowing or stagnant.

The latest estimate of US real GDP growth was published yesterday. In the third quarter of this year (June-September), the US economy expanded in real terms (ie after inflation of prices is deducted) at an annual rate of 2.1%, down from 2.3% in the previous quarter.  Even though this is modest growth historically, the US economy is doing better than any other major economy.  Canada is growing at just 1.6% a year, Japan at just 1.3% a year, the Euro area at 1.2% a year; and the UK at just 1%.  The larger so-called 'emerging economies' like Brazil, South Africa, Russia, Mexico, Turkey and Argentina are growing at no more than 1% a year or are even in recession.  And China and India have recorded their lowest growth rates for decades.  Overall global growth is variously estimated around 2.5% a year, the lowest rate since the Great Recession in 2009.

And slowing capitalist economies can find little escape from weak domestic growth by exporting.  On the contrary, world trade is contracting.  According to data from the CPB World Trade Monitor, in September global trade was down by 1.1 per cent compared to the same month in 2018, marking the fourth consecutive year-on-year contraction and the longest period of falling trade since the financial crisis in 2009.

It's true that unemployment rates in the major economies have plunged to 20-year lows.  That has helped maintain consumer spending to some extent.

But it also means that productivity (measured as output divided by employees) is stagnating because employment growth is matching or even surpassing output growth.  Companies are taking on workers at unchanged wages rather than investing in labour-saving technology to boost productivity.

According the US Conference Board, globally, growth in output per worker was 1.9 percent in 2018, compared to 2 percent in 2017 and projected to return to 2 percent growth in 2019. The latest estimates extend the downward trend in global labour productivity growth from an average annual rate of 2.9 percent between 2000-2007 to 2.3 percent between 2010-2017. "The long-awaited productivity effects from digital transformation are still too small to see. A productivity recovery is much needed to prevent the economy from slipping towards a substantially slower growth than what has been experienced in recent years."

The Conference Board summarises: "Overall, we have arrived in a world of stagnating growth. While no widespread global recession has occurred in the last decade, global growth has now dropped below its long-term trend of around 2.7 percent. The fact that global GDP growth has not declined even more in recent years is mainly due to solid consumer spending and strong labor markets in most large economies around the world."

The OECD reaches a similar conclusion: "Global trade is stagnating and is dragging down economic activity in almost all major economies.  Policy uncertainty is undermining investment and future jobs and incomes. Risks of even weaker growth remain high, including from an escalation of trade conflicts, geopolitical tensions, the possibility of a sharper-than-expected slowdown in China and climate change."

The reason for low real GDP and productivity growth lies with weak investment in productive sectors compared to investment or speculation in financial assets (what Marx called 'fictitious capital' because stocks and bonds are really just titles of ownership to any profits (dividends) or interest appropriated from productive investment in 'real' capital).  Business investment everywhere is weak.  As a share of GDP, investment in the major economies is some 25-30% lower than before the Great Recession.

Why is business investment so weak?  Well, first it is clear the huge injection of cash/credit by central banks and driving of interest rates down to zero – so-called unconventional monetary policies- has failed to boost investment in productive activities.  In the US, the demand for credit to invest is falling, not rising.

And for that matter, so far, Trump's cutting of corporate taxes, boosting fiscal spending and running higher budget deficits has failed to restore investment.

In the US, capital spending by S&P 500 companies rose in the third quarter by just 0.8%, or a combined $1.38 billion, from the second quarter, according to data from S&P Dow.  But even that modest increase can be chalked up to a few big spenders: Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. alone raised capital spending by $1.9 billion during the quarter. Without them, total spending by the 438 other companies that have reported so far this quarter would have shrunk slightly. And overall spending would have shrunk by 2.2% absent increases from three others: Intel Corp. , Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and NextEra Energy Inc. Together, the five companies increased their capital budgets by $4.7 billion, or 30%, from the second quarter to the third, the SPDJI data show.

The mainstream/Keynesian explanation for low investment was expressed again in a recent blog in the UK Financial Times: "why is fixed investment declining?  One answer, dare we suggest it, is a dearth of demand. With no incremental demand for increased supply, why would a business invest in a new plant, shop or regional headquarters when the returns from buying back shares, or distributing dividends, is both known and higher?"

But this explanation is a tautology at best and wrong at worst.  First, in what area of demand is there a 'dearth'?  Consumer demand and spending is holding up in most major capitalist economies, given fuller employment and even some rise in wages in the last year.  It is investment 'demand' that is floundering.  But to say that investment is weak because investment 'demand' is weak is just a tautology signifying nothing.

The more explanatory answer offered by Keynesian theory then comes forward.  The reason that central bank monetary policies and tax cuts have failed to boost investment "just boils down to risk appetite."  This is the classic 'animal spirits' explanation of Keynes.  Capitalists have just lost 'confidence' in investing in productive activities.  But why? The previous quote above from the FT piece gives it away; "why would a business invest in a new plant, shop or regional headquarters when the returns from buying back shares, or distributing dividends, is both known and higher?" But the returns (profitability) of investing in fictitious capital are higher because the profitability of investing in productive assets is too low. I have explained this ad nauseam in previous posts and papers, along with empirical evidence in support.

In Q3 2019, US corporate profits were down 0.8% from last year while margins (profits per unit of output) remain compressed at 9.7% of GDP – having declined nearly continuously for nearly five years.

But, of course, the failure to recognise or admit the role of profitability in the health of a capitalist economy is common to both mainstream neoclassical and Keynesian theory and arguments.

Low profitability in productive sectors of the most economies has stimulated the switch of profits and cash by companies into financial speculation. The main method used by companies to invest in this fictitious capital has been by buying back their own shares. Indeed, buybacks have become the biggest category of financial asset investment in the US and to some extent in Europe.  US buybacks reached nearly $1trn in 2018.  That's only about 3% of the total market value of US top 500 stocks, but by boosting the price of their own shares, companies have attracted other investors to push stock market indexes to record highs.

But all good things must come to an end. Returns on fictitious capital investment ultimately depend on the earnings that companies report.  And they have been falling in the last two quarters.  So in the latter part of this year, corporate buyback spending started to plunge. According to Goldman Sachs, buyback spending slowed 18% to $161 billion during the second quarter, and the firm anticipates that the slowdown will continue. For 2019, total buybacks will drop 15% to $710 billion, and in 2020 GS sees a further 5% decline to $675 billion. "During full-year 2019, we expect S&P 500 cash spending will decline by 6%, the sharpest annual decline since 2009," the firm says.

Anyway, buybacks are an arena dominated by major companies, many of them long-established tech titans. The top 20 buybacks accounted for 51.2% of the total for the 12 months ending in March, S&P Dow Jones Indices states. And more than half of all buybacks are now funded by debt. – "sort of like mortgaging your house to the hilt, then using it to throw a lavish party." But once a recession inevitably arrives, the result may not be pretty for companies with lots of leverage, in no small part due to buybacks.

The market value of tradable U.S. dollar (USD) corporate debt has ballooned to close to $8 trillion – over three times the size it was at the end of 2008. Similarly in Europe, the corporate bond market has tripled to 2.5 trillion euros ($2.8 trillion) since 2008. From 2015-2018, over $800bn of non-financial high grade corporate bonds were issued to fund M&A. This accounted for 29% of all non-financial bond issuance, contributing to credit rating deterioration. And the 'credit quality' of corporate debt is deteriorating with low rated bonds now 61% of non-financial debt, up from 49% in 2011.  And the share of BBB-rated bonds in European investment grade has also risen from 25% to 48%.

And then are what are called zombie companies which earn less than the costs of servicing their existing debt and survive because they are borrowing more. These are mainly small companies.  About 28% of US companies with market cap <$1bn earn less than their interest payments, way up from the period before the crisis and this is with historically low interest rates. Bank of America Merrill Lynch estimates that there are 548 of these zombies in the OECD against a peak of 626 during the financial crash of 2008.

With corporate debt now higher than its peak in scary late-2008, Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan has warned, overly leveraged companies "could amplify the severity of a recession."

Nevertheless, the talk among many mainstream economists is that the worst may be over.  A trade deal between the US and China is imminent. And there are signs that the contraction in the manufacturing sectors of the major economies is beginning to stop.  If so, then any 'spillover' into the more buoyant and larger so-called 'service' sectors may be avoided.  Global economic growth may be at its slowest since the Great Recession; business investment is sluggish at best; productivity growth is falling; and global profits are flat, but employment is still strong in many economies, and wages are even picking up.

So, far from descending into an outright global recession in 2020, there may be just another year of depressed growth in the longest but weakestglobal recovery for capitalism. And the fantasy world may continue.  We shall see.

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Trump Gives U.S. Business the Ukraine Treatment [feedly]

Trump Gives U.S. Business the Ukraine Treatment
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/opinion/trump-apple.html

Text only

The story that has emerged in the impeachment hearings is one of extortion and bribery. Donald Trump withheld crucial aid — aid Ukraine needed to defend itself against Russian aggression — and refused to release it unless Ukraine publicly said it was investigating one of his political rivals. Even Republicans understand this; they just think it's O.K.

And remember, the Ukraine scandal made it into the public eye only because a single whistle-blower set an investigation in motion. I know I'm not alone in wondering how many other comparable scandals haven't come to light.

Nor need these scandals involve foreign governments. What I haven't seen pointed out is that Trump is quietly applying a Ukraine-type extortion-and-bribery strategy to U.S. corporations. Many businesses are being threatened with policies that would hurt their bottom lines — especially, but not only, tariffs on imported goods crucial to their operations. But they are also being offered the possibility of exemptions from these policies.

And the implicit quid pro quo for such exemptions is that corporations support Donald Trump, or at least refrain from criticizing his actions.


Consider, for example, what happened last week, when Trump toured an Apple manufacturing plant together with Tim Cook, Apple's C.E.O. Trump used the occasion to make a political speech, attacking impeachment proceedings and falsely claiming that Nancy Pelosi has "closed Congress." He also asserted that the plant, which has been operating since 2013, had just opened.

And Cook, far from correcting these falsehoods, expressed support, declaring that America has the "strongest economy in the world."


Cook's incentive to play along was obvious. Apple assembles many of its products in China; it's seeking exemptions from Trump's China tariffs. And there's every reason to believe that the allocation of such exemptions is driven by politics, not the national interest.

For example, in 2018 a company owned by Oleg Deripaska — an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, who is supposed to be under U.S. sanctions for activities that include interference in foreign elections — received a waiver from aluminum tariffs. The waiver was withdrawn only after Democrats in Congress noticed it, with the Commerce Department claiming that it had been granted as a result of a "clerical error." Uh-huh.

By the way, if you're wondering why the Trump administration has the power to play favorites, it's because U.S. trade law gives the president a lot of discretion in setting tariffs. The purpose of that discretion was to diminish the power of special interests in Congress, based on the assumption that the president would be better at serving the national interest. But then came Trump.



And tariff policy isn't the only area in which the administration seems to be using its power to punish corporations if they don't show proper political fealty.

Recently the Pentagon granted the huge Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract for cloud computing (yes, JEDI) to Microsoft, shocking observers who expected it to go to Amazon. Amazon is challenging the decision, claiming that it was punishment for critical reporting in The Washington Post, now owned by Jeff Bezos — a claim that is entirely plausible, given Trump's own repeated declarations that he was going to give Bezos "problems."

Trump officials claim, of course, that the decision process was squeaky-clean, based on expert judgment untainted by any political influence. But seriously, is anything clean in this administration? Are we really supposed to accept on faith that people who are willing to politicize weather forecasts were totally hands-off when it came to awarding a huge, lucrative contract to a company Trump considers an enemy?

When I and others point out the ways in which Trump is using crony capitalism to lock in political advantage, we tend to get two kinds of pushback. First, we're told that we shouldn't feel sympathy for wealthy corporations. Second, we're told that progressive Democrats also criticize some corporations, like Facebook, and have proposed a crackdown on some kinds of corporate behavior. So what's the difference?

Well, these critiques (willfully, one suspects) miss the point. What progressives are proposing are rules for corporate behavior that would apply equally to all companies, not be imposed selectively on corporations depending on their political orientation.

And the trouble with Trump's selective doling out of punishment isn't the harm it inflicts on corporations, it's the incentives this regime creates for political sycophancy. American voters and American democracy, not Apple and Amazon — which are, as it happens, notorious examples of tax avoidance — are the victims we care about.

Put it this way: By using his political power to punish businesses that don't support him while rewarding those that do, Trump is taking us along the same path already followed by countries like Hungary, which remains a democracy on paper but has become a one-party authoritarian state in practice. And we're already much further down that road than many people realize.
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Meet the Leftish Economist With a New Story About Capitalism [feedly]

In many respects, this controversial economist reconciles (at least in economic theory) the socialisms of Lenin in the NEP period, and Deng Chou Peng in the Chinese renaissance  with advanced social democratic ideas of "interventionism" on behalf of innovation by the state in Prof. Mazzucato's work (Wiki ref:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Mazzucato#Awards_and_nominations   ). The focus on the public roles of development and supply side stimulus and investments  is very Schumpeter and Marx like.

Meet the Leftish Economist With a New Story About Capitalism
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/business/mariana-mazzucato.html

Mariana Mazzucato was freezing. Outside, it was a humid late-September day in Manhattan, but inside — in a Columbia University conference space full of scientists, academics and businesspeople advising the United Nations on sustainability — the air conditioning was on full blast.

For a room full of experts discussing the world's most urgent social and environmental problems, this was not just uncomfortable but off-message. Whatever their dress — suit, sari, head scarf — people looked huddled and hunkered down. At a break, Dr. Mazzucato dispatched an assistant to get the A.C. turned off. How will we change anything, she wondered aloud, "if we don't rebel in the everyday?"

Dr. Mazzucato, an economist based at University College London, is trying to change something fundamental: the way society thinks about economic value. While many of her colleagues have been scolding capitalism lately, she has been reimagining its basic premises. Where does growth come from? What is the source of innovation? How can the state and private sector work together to create the dynamic economies we want? She asks questions about capitalism we long ago stopped asking. Her answers might rise to the most difficult challenges of our time.

In two books of modern political economic theory — "The Entrepreneurial State" (2013) and "The Value of Everything" (2018) — Dr. Mazzucato argues against the long-accepted binary of an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state. Citing markets and technologies like the internet, the iPhone and clean energy — all of which were funded at crucial stages by public dollars — she says the state has been an underappreciated driver of growth and innovation. "Personally, I think the left is losing around the world," she said in an interview, "because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of wealth."

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Her message has appealed to an array of American politicians. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a presidential contender, has incorporated Dr. Mazzucato's thinking into several policy rollouts, including one that would use "federal R & D to create domestic jobs and sustainable investments in the future" and another that would authorize the government to receive a return on its investments in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Mazzucato has also consulted with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and her team on the ways a more active industrial policy might catalyze a Green New Deal.

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Senator Warren has incorporated Dr. Mazzucato's thinking into several policy rolloutsCredit...Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Even Republicans have found something to like. In May, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida credited Dr. Mazzucato's work several times in "American Investment in the 21st Century," his proposal to jump-start economic growth. "We need to build an economy that can see past the pressure to understand value-creation in narrow and short-run financial terms," he wrote in the introduction, "and instead envision a future worth investing in for the long-term."

Formally, the United Nations event in September was a meeting of the leadership council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, or S.D.S.N. It's a body of about 90 experts who advise on topics like gender equality, poverty and global warming. Most of the attendees had specific technical expertise — Dr. Mazzucato greeted a contact at one point with, "You're the ocean guy!" — but she offers something both broad and scarce: a compelling new story about how to create a desirable future.

'Investor of first resort'

Originally from Italy — her family left when she was 5 — Dr. Mazzucato is the daughter of a Princeton nuclear physicist and a stay-at-home mother who couldn't speak English when she moved to the United States. She got her Ph.D. in 1999 from the New School for Social Research and began working on "The Entrepreneurial State" after the 2008 financial crisis. Governments across Europe began to institute austerity policies in the name of fostering innovation — a rationale she found not only dubious but economically destructive.

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"There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional theory has fomented it or not contested it — there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies."

Dr. Mazzucato takes issue with many of the tenets of the neoclassical economic theory taught in most academic departments: its assumption that the forces of supply and demand lead to market equilibrium, its equation of price with value and — perhaps most of all — its relegation of the state to the investor of last resort, tasked with fixing market failure. She has originated and popularized the description of the state as an "investor of first resort," envisioning new markets and providing long-term, or "patient," capital at early stages of development.

In important ways, Dr. Mazzucato's work resembles that of a literary critic or rhetorician as much as an economist. She has written of waging what the historian Tony Judt called a "discursive battle," and scrutinizes descriptive terms — words like "fix" or "spend" as opposed to "create" and "invest" — that have been used to undermine the state's appeal as a dynamic economic actor. "If we continue to depict the state as only a facilitator and administrator, and tell it to stop dreaming," she writes, "in the end that is what we get."

As a charismatic figure in a contentious field that does not generate many stars — she was recently profiled in Wired magazine's United Kingdom edition — Dr. Mazzucato has her critics. She is a regular guest on nightly news shows in Britain, where she is pitted against proponents of Brexit or skeptics of a market-savvy state.

Alberto Mingardi, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and director general of Istituto Bruno Leoni, a free-market think tank, has repeatedly criticized Dr. Mazzucato for, in his view, cherry-picking her case studies, underestimating economic trade-offs and defining industrial policy too broadly. In January, in an academic piece written with one of his Cato colleagues, Terence Kealey, he called her "the world's greatest exponent today of public prodigality."

Her ideas, though, are finding a receptive audience around the world. In the United Kingdom, Dr. Mazzucato's work has influenced Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, and Theresa May, a former Prime Minister, and she has counseled the Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon on designing and putting in place a national investment bank. She also advises government entities in Germany, South Africa and elsewhere. "In getting my hands dirty," she said, "I learn and I bring it back to the theory."

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The leader of Britain's Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has been influenced by the work of Dr. Mazzucato.Credit...Phil Noble/Reuters

The 'Mission Muse'

During a break at the United Nations gathering, Dr. Mazzucato escaped the air conditioning to confer with two colleagues in Italian on a patio. Tall, with a muscular physique, she wore a brightly colored glass necklace that has become something of a trademark on the economics circuit. Having traveled to five countries in eight days, she was fighting off a cough.

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"In theory, I'm the 'Mission Muse,'" she joked, lapsing into English. Her signature reference is to the original mission to the moon — a state-spurred technological revolution consisting of hundreds of individual feeder projects, many of them collaborations between the public and private sectors. Some were successes, some failures, but the sum of them contributed to economic growth and explosive innovation.

Dr. Mazzucato's platform is more complex — and for some, controversial — than simply encouraging government investment, however. She has written that governments and state-backed investment entities should "socialize both the risks and rewards." She has suggested the state obtain a return on public investments through royalties or equity stakes, or by including conditions on reinvestment — for example, a mandate to limit share buybacks.

Emphasizing to policymakers not only the importance of investment, but also the direction of that investment — "What are we investing in?" she often asks — Dr. Mazzucato has influenced the way American politicians speak about the state's potential as an economic engine. In her vision, governments would do what so many traditional economists have long told them to avoid: create and shape new markets, embrace uncertainty and take big risks.

Inside the conference, the news was uniformly bleak. Pavel Kabat, the chief scientist of the World Meteorological Organization, lamented the breaking of global temperature records and said that countries would have to triple their current Paris-accord commitments by 2030 to have any hope of staying below a critical warming threshold. A panel on land use and food waste noted that nine species account for two-thirds of the world's crop production, a dangerous lack of agricultural diversity. All the experts appeared dismayed by what Jeffrey Sachs, the S.D.S.N.'s director, described as the "crude nationalism" and "aggressive anti-globalization" ascendant around the world.

"We absolutely need to change both the narrative, but also the theory and the practice on the ground," Dr. Mazzucato told the crowd when she spoke on the final expert panel of the day. "What does it mean, actually, to create markets where you create the demand, and really start directing the investment and the innovation in ways that can help us achieve these goals?"

Earlier in the day, she pointed at an announcement on her laptop. She had been nominated for the first Not the Nobel Prize, a commendation intended to promote "fresh economic thinking." "Governments have woken up to the fact the mainstream way of thinking isn't helping them," she said, explaining her appeal to politicians and policymakers. A few days later, she won.

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