Tag: Barron’s

At Barron’s: What’s At Stake in the Labor Market?

(I am now writing a monthly opinion piece for Barron’s. This one was published there in August.)

The labor market is exceptionally tight, at least by the standards of recent history. That matters for monetary policy, but its importance goes beyond inflation, or even material living standards. We are used to a world where workers compete for jobs. A world where businesses compete for workers would look very different.

Today’s 3.5% unemployment rate is lower than any time between 1970 and 2019. While the prime-age employment-population ratio is still shy of its prepandemic level, other measures imply a labor market even hotter than at the height of the late-90s boom. Both the historically high rate of workers quitting their jobs and the nearly two job openings for each unemployed worker suggest that this could be the best time to be looking for a job in most Americans’ working lives.

How long this will continue depends in large part on the Federal Reserve, where the question often comes down to whether inflation expectations are anchored. If businesses and households come to believe that prices will rise rapidly, the argument goes, they will behave in ways that cause prices to rise, validating those beliefs and making it harder to bring inflation back down.

Curiously, there is little discussion of all the other expectations that can also be anchored in different ways, which suggest a very different set of trade-offs.

Businesses that expect growth to be weak, for example, are unlikely to invest in raising capacity—which makes strong growth much harder to achieve. Workers who feel it’s impossible to find a job may stop looking for one, making expectations of weak employment growth self-confirming. Both these expectational shifts played a role in the “lost decade” after the 2007 crash.

Today’s tight labor markets are reshaping expectations in a different direction, which could lead to lasting changes in employment dynamics. As economist Julia Coronado observes, one lesson businesses seem to have learned is that staffing up may be slower and more difficult than in the past. This in turn makes businesses more hesitant to lay off workers, even when demand slackens.

Fewer layoffs, of course, contribute to tighter labor markets—another example of self-confirming expectations. But those new expectations also mean a different kind of employment relationship. A business that expects labor to be cheap and abundant has little reason to invest in recruiting, retaining and training its employees. Conversely, a business that can’t count on quickly hiring workers with whatever skills are needed has to focus more on developing and holding on to the workers it has. These qualitative changes in the organization of work aren’t captured in the aggregate numbers on employment and wages.

To be clear, there is not a labor shortage in any absolute terms. One thing we have clearly learned over the past year is that total employment isn’t just a matter of how many people are willing to work. Back in spring 2021, some economists argued that generous pandemic unemployment assistance was holding back job growth. When some states ended unemployment assistance early, that offered the perfect controlled test of this theory. It was decisively refuted. As the labor economist Arin Dube has shown, employment growth was no faster in the states that ended pandemic unemployment relief earlier than in those that kept it longer.

What is true, though, is that the kinds of jobs people will take may depend on their other options. For the economy as a whole, today’s high rate of movement between jobs is a clear positive. A big reason people can get raises by changing jobs is, presumably, that their new work is more valuable than what they were doing before. But from the point of view of employers, this is a process with winners and losers. Some businesses will adapt, offering higher wages—as many food service and retail giants are already doing—and nonpecuniary benefits such as predictable schedules and pathways for advancement. Tight labor markets will also favor higher-productivity businesses, which can afford to pay higher wages. Those that are wedded to a model that treats labor as cheap and disposable, on the other hand, may struggle or fail.

It isn’t only employers that need to adjust to tight labor markets, of course. There is little doubt that the upsurge of union organizing we’ve seen in recent years owes a great deal to labor market conditions. When jobs are plentiful, the fear of losing yours is less of a deterrent to standing up to the boss. And people who are reasonably confident of at least getting a paycheck may begin to wonder if that is all their employer owes them.

Historically, periods of rapid union growth have followed sustained growth, not depressions and crises. During the 1972 strike at GM’s Lordstown plant—one of the high points of 1970s labor militancy—one union leader explained why the younger workers were so ready to walk off their jobs:

“None of these guys came over from the old country poor and starving, grateful for any job they could get. None of them have been through a depression …They’re just not going to swallow the same kind of treatment their fathers did. That’s a lot of what the strike was about. They want more than just a job for 30 years.”

Strikes like Lordstown are rooted not just in conditions at the particular workplace, but also in the ways a prolonged high-pressure economy shifts what workers expect from a job. Significantly, the Lordstown strikers’ demands included a say in the design and organization of the plant, as well as better pay and benefits.

Not everyone would welcome a revived U.S. labor movement, of course, or a move toward German-style co-determination. While some people see unions as a pillar of democracy and counterweight to corporations’ political power, others see them as an illegitimate intrusion on the rights of business owners. Either way, whether organized labor can reverse its decline is a question with consequences that go far beyond next month’s inflation numbers. And it depends a great deal on how long today’s tight labor market lasts.

It might seem utopian to imagine a transformation of the workplace when the headlines are dominated by inflation and recession fears. But the real fantasy is to imagine we could reap the benefits of a high-pressure economy—faster productivity growth, a more equal distribution of income, more resources to solve our most pressing problems—without making any changes to how firms and labor markets are organized.

In his most recent press conference, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said, “we all want to get back to the kind of labor market we had before the pandemic.” Do we really all want that, or could we aim higher? But in any case simply turning back the clock isn’t an option. An economy adapted to slow growth and cheap, abundant workers can’t adjust to tight labor markets without changing in profound ways.

Some may welcome an economy where chronically scarce labor means that businesses are under constant pressure to raise productivity and attract and retain employees. Others may hope for a deep recession to reset expectations about the relative scarcity of workers and jobs. One way or the other, those are the stakes.

 

At Barron’s: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Inflation

(I am now writing a monthly opinion piece for Barron’s. This one was published there in July.)

To listen to economic policy debates today, you would think the U.S. economy has just one problem: inflation. When Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was asked at his last press conference if there was a danger in going too far in the fight against inflation, his answer was unequivocal: “The worst mistake we could make is to fail—it’s not an option. We have to restore price stability…because [it’s] everything, it’s the bedrock of the economy. If you don’t have price stability, the economy’s really not going to work.”

Few would dispute that rising prices are a serious problem. But are they everything?

The exclusive focus on inflation acts like a lens on our view of the economy—sharpening our attention on some parts of the picture, but blurring, distorting, and hiding from view many others.

In the wake of the Great Recession, there was a broadening of macroeconomic debates. Economists and policy makers shifted away from textbook truisms toward a more nuanced and realistic view of the economy. Today, this wide-ranging conversation has given way to panic over rising prices. But the realities that prompted those debates have not gone away.

In the clamor over inflation, we’re losing sight of at least four big macroeconomic questions.

First, does the familiar distinction between supply and demand really make sense at the level of the economy as a whole? In the textbooks, supply means the maximum level of production in the economy, labeled “full employment” or “potential output,” while demand means total spending. The two are supposed to be independent—changes in spending don’t affect how much the economy can produce, and vice versa. This is why we are used to thinking of business cycles and growth as two separate problems.

But in the real world, supply often responds to demand—more spending calls forth more investment and draws people into the labor force. This phenomenon, known by the unlovely name “hysteresis,” was clearly visible in the slowdown of labor force and productivity growth after the Great Recession, and their recovery when demand picked up in the years before the pandemic. The key lesson of this experience—in danger of being forgotten in today’s inflation panic—was that downturns are even more costly than we thought, since they not only imply lost output today but reduced capacity in the future.

Hysteresis is usually discussed at the level of the economy as a whole, but it also exists in individual markets and industries. For example, one reason airfares are high today is that airlines, anticipating a more sustained fall in demand for air travel, offered early retirement to thousands of senior pilots in the early stages of the pandemic. Recruiting and training new pilots is a slow process, one airlines will avoid unless it’s clear that strong demand is here to stay. So while conventional wisdom says that rising prices mean that we have too much spending and have to reduce it, in a world with hysteresis a better solution may be to maintain strong demand, so that supply can rise to meet it. In the textbook, we can restore price stability via lower demand with no long-run costs to growth. But are we sure things work so nicely in the real world?

The second big question is about the labor market. Here the textbook view is that there is a unique level of unemployment that allows wages to grow in line with productivity. When unemployment is lower than this “natural rate,” faster wage growth will be passed on to rising prices, until policy makers take action to force unemployment back up. But in the years before the pandemic, it was becoming clear that this picture is too simplistic. Rising wages don’t have to be passed on to higher prices—they may also come at the expense of profits, or spur faster productivity growth. And not all wages are equally responsive to unemployment. Younger, less-educated, and lower-wage workers are more dependent on tight labor markets to find work and get raises, while the incomes of workers with experience and credentials rise more steadily regardless of macroeconomic conditions. This means that—as Powell has acknowledged—macroeconomic policy has unavoidable distributional consequences.

In his classic essay “Political Aspects of Full Employment,” the great Polish economist Michal Kalecki argued that even if it were economically feasible to eliminate unemployment, this would be unsustainable, since employers’ authority in the workplace depends on “the threat of the sack.” Similar arguments have been made by central bank chiefs such as Alan Greenspan, who suggested that low unemployment was sustainable in the 1990s only because workers had been traumatized by the deep recession of the decade before.

Some would argue that it’s unnecessarily wasteful and cruel to maintain labor discipline and price stability by denying millions of people the chance to do useful work—especially given that, prior to the pandemic, unemployment had fallen well below earlier estimates of the “natural rate” with no sign of accelerating inflation. But if we wish to have a permanent full-employment economy, we need to answer a difficult question: How should we manage distributional conflicts between workers and owners (and among workers), and motivate people to work when they have little to fear from losing their job?

A third set of questions concerns globalization. There are widespread fears that renewed Covid lockdowns in China may limit exports to the U.S. and elsewhere. Seen through the inflation lens, this looks like a source of rising prices and a further argument for monetary tightening. But if we take a step back, we might ask whether it is wise to organize the global economy in such a way that lockdowns in China, a war in Ukraine, or even a factory fire in Japan leave people all over the world unable to meet their basic needs. The deepening of trade and financial links across borders is sometimes presented as a fact of nature. But in reality it reflects policy choices that allowed global production of all kinds of goods—from semiconductors to Christmas decorations and latex gloves—to be concentrated in a handful of locations. In some cases, this concentration is motivated by genuine technical advantages of larger-scale production, in others by the pursuit of low wages. But either way, it reflects a prioritization of cost minimization over flexibility and resiliency. Whatever happens with inflation, this is a trade-off that will have to be revisited in coming years, as climate change makes further disruptions in global supply chains all but inevitable.

Then there is climate change. Here, the inflation lens doesn’t just recolor the picture but practically reverses it. Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that a carbon tax was the key policy tool for addressing climate. An Obama-era economist once quipped that the big question on climate was whether a carbon tax was 80% of the solution, or 100%. A carbon tax would increase the prices of energy, which still mainly comes from fossil fuels, and of travel by private car. As it happens, this is exactly what we have seen: Autos and energy have increased much faster than other prices, to the point that these two categories account for a majority of the excess inflation over the past year. In effect, we’ve seen something like a global carbon tax. But far from welcoming the disproportionate rise in the prices of carbon-intensive goods as a silver lining of inflation, both policy makers and the public see it as an urgent problem to be solved.

To be clear, people are not wrong to be unhappy at the rising cost of cars and energy. In the absence of practical alternatives, these high prices inflict real hardship without necessarily doing much to speed the transition from carbon. One reasonable lesson, then, is that a carbon tax high enough to substantially reduce emissions will be politically intolerable. And indeed, before the pandemic, many economists were already shifting away from a carbon-price-focused approach to climate policy toward an investment-centered approach.

Whether via carbon prices or investment, the only way to reduce carbon emissions is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Yet an increasing swath of the policy conversation is focused on how to encourage more drilling by oil-and-gas companies, not just today but into the indefinite future. As a response to today’s rising energy prices, this is understandable, given the genuine limitations of renewable energy. But how can measures to boost the supply of fossil fuels be consistent with a longer-term program of decarbonization?

None of these questions have easy answers. But the danger of focusing too single-mindedly on inflation is that we may not even try to answer them.

Today’s Inflation Won’t be Solved by the Fed

(This post originally ran as an opinion piece in Barron’s.)

The U.S. today is experiencing inflation. This is not controversial. But what exactly does it mean?

In the textbook, inflation is a rise in all prices together, caused by an excessive increase in the money supply. But when we measure it, inflation is just a rise in the average price of goods and services. That average might reflect a uniform rise in prices due to excessive money creation. Or, as today, it might instead be the result of big rises in the prices of a few items, for their own reasons.

Over the past year, prices have risen by 7.5%, far above the usual 2% target set by the Federal Reserve. But 70% of that 5.5 points of excess inflation has come from two categories that make up just 15% of the consumption basket: energy (2 points) and new and used cars (1.9 points). Used cars alone make up barely 4% of the consumption basket, but accounted for a third of the excess inflation.

Some commentators have argued that inflation is just a matter of too much money. If that were true, it’s hard to see why so much of it would be flowing to cars. (And before you say cheap financing: Rates on auto loans were lower through most of the 2010s.)

In recent months, vehicle and energy prices have begun to stabilize, while food and housing prices have picked up. These price increases hit family budgets harder. A car purchase can usually be put off, but not rent or groceries. But this is still a story about specific sectors following their own dynamics.

Energy prices are global, and their periodic rise and fall depends mostly on the politics of oil-producing regions (as we are being reminded today). As recently as the summer of 2014, gas prices were higher than they are now, before falling precipitously. No doubt they will fall again, but in the short run there is not much to do about them—though it may be possible to shield people from their impact. In the longer run, decarbonization will leave us less vulnerable to the gyrations of the oil market.

As for vehicles, it’s no mystery why prices soared. Early in the pandemic, automakers expected a long period of depressed demand, and cut back production plans. When the economy bounced back rapidly, automakers found themselves short of key inputs, especially semiconductors. Combine this with a pandemic-induced shift in demand from services to goods, and you have a formula for rapid price increases. The effect was strongest for used cars, whose supply is essentially fixed in the short run.

Housing has made a smaller contribution so far—0.6 of the 5.5 points of excess inflation—but given the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures them, housing prices are likely to rise sharply over the coming year. This is a problem. But, it was also a big problem before the pandemic, when rents were rising by nearly 4% annually. Housing affordability is a serious issue in the U.S. But if the question is why inflation is higher today than in 2018 or 2019, housing is not the answer.

Finally, there are food prices, which have contributed about 0.7 points to excess inflation over the past year, and more in recent months. Food prices, like energy prices, are famously volatile; there’s a reason they are both excluded from the Fed’s measure of “core” inflation. They’re also an area where market power may be playing a major role, given the high concentration in food processing. Monopolies may be reluctant to fully exploit their power in normal times; price increases elsewhere in the economy give them a chance to widen their margins.

The great majority of the excess inflation over the past year has come from these four areas. Other sectors—including labor-intensive services where prices have historically risen more quickly—have contributed little or nothing.

The point is not that these price increases don’t matter. Food, housing and energy are necessities of life. People are naturally unhappy when they have to pay more for them. The point is that current price rises are not symptoms of economy-wide overheating.

Some of these prices, like autos, will come back down on their own as supply-chain kinks work themselves out. Others, like housing, will not, and call for a policy response. But that response is not raising interest rates, which would only make the problem worse. The main reason why housing costs are rising is that the U.S. does not build enough of it, especially in the expensive metro areas where employment opportunities are concentrated. Construction is one of the most interest-sensitive sectors of the economy. Rate hikes will cause supply to fall further short of demand.

Some might say that the Fed still controls the overall level of spending in the economy. If people spent less on used cars, wouldn’t they spend more on something else? This ignores the existence of balance sheets. Households hold cash, and finance many purchases—including cars—with debt. Lower used-car prices wouldn’t mean higher prices elsewhere, but higher household savings and less debt.

An inability to build housing where people want to live, dependence on fossil fuels, fragile supply chains and the monopolization of key industries: These are all serious economic problems. But they are not monetary-policy problems. Looking at them through the lens of a textbook story of inflation will not get us any closer to solving them.

 

At Barron’s: There Are No Maestros

(A week ago, I had an opinion piece in Barron’s, which I am belatedly posting here. I talk a bit more about this topic in the following post.)

In today’s often acrimonious economic debates, one of the few common grounds is reverence for the Fed. Consider Jay Powell: First nominated to the Fed’s board of governors by President Obama, he was elevated to FOMC chair by Trump and renominated by Biden His predecessors Bernanke, Greenspan and Volcker were similarly first appointed by a president from one party, then reappointed by a president from the other. Politics stops at Maiden Lane.

There are disagreements about what the Fed should be doing — tightening policy to rein in inflation, or holding back to allow for a faster recovery. But few doubt that it’s the Fed’s job to make the choice, and that once they do, they can carry it out.

Perhaps, though, we should take a step back and ask if the Fed is really all-powerful. You might like to see inflation come down; I’d like to see stronger labor markets. But can the Fed give either of us what we want?

During the so-called Great Moderation, it was easy to have faith in the Fed. In the US, as in most rich countries, governments had largely turned over the job of macroeconomic management to independent central banks, and were enjoying an era of stable growth with low inflation. Magazine covers could, without irony, feature the Fed chair as  “Pope Greenspan and His College of Cardinals,” or (when the waters got choppier) the central figure in the “committee to save the world.”

Respectable opinion of the 1990s and 2000s was captured in a speech by Christina Romer (soon to be Obama’s chief economist), declaring that “the Federal Reserve, is directly responsible for the low inflation and the virtual disappearance of the business cycle in the last 25 years. …The story of stabilization policy of the last quarter century is one of amazing success.”

Romer delivered those words in late 2007. At almost exactly that moment, the US was entering its then-deepest recession since World War II.

The housing bubble and financial crisis raised some doubts about whether that success had been so amazing after all. The subsequent decade of slow growth and high unemployment, in the face of a Fed Funds rate of zero and multiple rounds of QE, should have raised more. Evidently the old medicine was no longer working – or perhaps had never worked as well as we thought.

In truth, there were always reasons for doubt.

One is that, as Milton Friedman famously observed, monetary policy acts with long and variable lags. A common  estimate is that the peak impact of monetary policy changes comes 18 to 24 months later, which is cripplingly slow for managing business cycles. Many people – including at the Fed – believe that today’s inflation is the transitory result of the pandemic. When the main effects of today’s tightening are felt two years from now, how confident are we that inflation will still be too high?

More fundamentally, there’s the question of what links monetary policy to inflation in the first place. Prices are, after all, set by private businesses; if they think it makes sense to raise prices, the Fed has no mind-control ray to convince them otherwise.

In the textbook story, changes in the Federal funds rate are passed through to other interest rates. A higher cost of borrowing discourages investment spending, reducing demand, employment and wages, which in turn puts downward pressure on prices. This was always a bit roundabout; today, it’s not clear that critical links in the chain function at all.

Business investment is financed with long-term debt; the average maturity of a corporate bond is about 13 years. But long rates don’t seem particularly responsive to the Federal funds rate. Between Fall 2015 and Spring 2019, for example, the Fed raised its policy rate by 2.5 points. Over this same period, the 10-year Treasury rate was essentially unchanged, and corporate bond yields actually fell. Earlier episodes show a similar non-response of long rates to Fed actions.

Nor is it obvious that business investment is particularly sensitive to interest rates, even long ones. One recent survey of the literature by Fed economists finds that hurdle rates for new investment “exhibit no apparent relation to market interest rates.”

Former Fed chair Ben Bernanke puzzled over “the black box” of monetary policy transmission. If it doesn’t move interest rates on the long-term debt that businesses mostly issue, and if even longer rates have no detectable effect on investment, how exactly is monetary policy affecting demand and inflation? It was a good question, to which no one has offered a very good answer.

To be sure, no one would claim that the Fed is powerless. Raise rates enough, and borrowers unable to roll over their loans will face default; as asset values fall and balance sheets weaken, households will have no choice but to drastically curtail consumption.

But being able to sink a ship is not the same as being able to steer it. The fact that the Fed can, if it tries hard enough, trigger a recession, does not mean that it can maintain steady growth. Perhaps it’s time to admit that there are no central banking “maestros” who know the secret of maintaining full employment and price stability. Balancing these critical social objectives requires a variety of tools, not just a single interest rate. And it is, for better or worse, the responsibility of our elected governments.