May 27, 2010
It was almost a year ago when I predicted that President Obama would eventually announce the need for a “second stimulus”. Once the decision was made to drink the Keynesian Kool-Aid with the implementation of last year’s economic stimulus package, we were faced with the question of how much to drink. As I expected, our President took the half-assed, yet “moderate” approach of limiting the stimulus effort to less than what was admitted as the cost of the TARP program, as well as approving the waste of stimulus funds on “pork” projects, ill-suited to stimulate economic recovery. In that July 9, 2009 piece, I discussed the fact that liberal economist, Paul Krugman, was not alone in claiming that $787 billion would not be an adequate amount to jump-start the economy back to firing on all cylinders. I pointed out that a survey of economists conducted by Bloomberg News in February of 2009 revealed a consensus opinion that an $800 billion stimulus would prove to be inadequate. The February 12, 2009 Bloomberg article by Timothy Homan and Alex Tanzi revealed that:
Even as Obama aims to create 3.5 million jobs with a stimulus plan, economists foresee an unemployment rate exceeding 8 percent through next year.
As we now reach the mid-point of that “next year”, the unemployment rate is at 9.9 percent. Those economists were right. Beyond that, some highly-respected economists, including Robert Shiller, are discussing the risk of our experiencing a “double-dip” recession. As a result, Larry Summers, Director of the President’s National Economic Council, is advocating the passage of a new set of spending measures, referred to as the “second stimulus”. To help offset the expense, the President has asked Congress to grant him powers to cut unnecessary spending, as would be accomplished with a “line item veto”. The Financial Times described the situation this way :
The combined announcements were made amid rising concern that centrist Democrats, or those representing marginal districts, might vote against the spending measures, which include more loans for small businesses, an extension of unemployment insurance and aid to states to prevent hundreds of thousands more teachers from being laid off.
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Taken together, Mr Summers’s speech and Mr Obama’s announcement show an administration walking a fine line between the need to signal strong medium-term fiscal discipline and not jeopardising what they fear may be a fragile recovery.
Because they couldn’t get it right the first time, the President and his administration have placed themselves in the position of seeking piecemeal stimulus measures. If they had done it right, we would probably be enjoying economic recovery and a boost in the ranks of the employed at this point. As a result, this half-assed, piecemeal approach will likely prove more costly than doing it right on the first try. With mid-term elections approaching, deficit hawks have their knives sharpened for anything that can be described as an “entitlement” (unless that entitlement inures to the benefit of a favored Wall Street institution). Harold Meyerson of The Washington Post challenged the logic of the deficit hawks with this argument:
Those who oppose the jobs bills in the House and Senate this week should be compelled to answer some questions, starting with: Absent more stimulus, what do they see as the plausible engine of economic recovery? What effect will laying off as many as 300,000 teachers have on the education of American children? And, more elementally, don’t they know there’s a recession on?
Marshall Auerback of the Roosevelt Institute picked up where Harold Meyerson left off, as this recent posting at the New Deal 2.0 website demonstrates:
In fact, full employment is also the best “financial stability” reform we could implement, because with jobs growth comes higher income growth and a corresponding ability to service debt. That means less write-offs for banks and a correspondingly smaller need to provide government bailouts.
Fiscal austerity, by contrast, won’t cut it. Our elites seem think that you can cut “wasteful government spending” (that is, reduce private demand further) and cut wages and hence private incomes and not expect major multiplier effects to make things significantly worse. Of course, that “wasteful”, “unsustainable” spending never seems to apply to the Department of Defense, where we always seem to be able to appropriate a few billion, whenever necessary. “Affordability” principles never extend to the Pentagon, it appears.
The fact that we are still in the midst of a severe recession (rather than a robust economic recovery as is often claimed) accounts for the rationale asserted by Larry Summers in advocating a second stimulus amounting to approximately $200 billion in spending measures. Here’s how Summers explained the proposal in a May 24 speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:
It has in recent years been essential for the federal deficit to increase as the economy has gone into recession and has been severely constrained by demand.
And I cannot agree with those who suggest that it somehow threatens the future to provide truly temporary, high-bang-for-the-buck jobs and growth measures.
Rather, assuring as rapid a recovery as possible strengthens our future economy, our future prosperity, with many benefits, including a greater ability to manage our debts.
On the other hand, those who recognize the fiscal and growth benefits of strong expansionary policies must also recognize that it is simultaneously desirable to provide confidence that deficits will come down to sustainable levels as recovery is achieved. Such confidence both spurs recovery by reducing capital costs and reduces the risk of financial accidents.
To put the point differently: It is not possible to imagine sound budgets in the absence of economic growth and solid economic performance.
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It is important to recognize that the ultimate consequences of stimulus for indebtedness depend critically on the macroeconomic conditions. When the economy is demand constrained, the impact of a dollar of tax cuts or expansionary investment will be at its highest and the impact on deficits at its lowest.
* * *In areas where the government has a significant opportunity for impact, it would be pennywise and pound foolish not to take advantage of our capacity to encourage near-term job creation. This explains the logic of the Recovery Act’s success and the rationale for taking additional targeted actions to increase confidence in our economic recovery.
Consider the package currently under consideration in Congress to extend unemployment and health benefits to those out of work and support to states to avoid budget cuts as a case in point.
It would be an act of fiscal shortsightedness to break from the longstanding practice of extending these provisions at a moment when sustained economic recovery is so crucial to our medium-term fiscal prospects.
So, here we are at the introduction of the second stimulus plan. Despite the denial by President Obama that he would seek a second stimulus, he has Larry Summers doing just that. Last year, the public and the Congress had the will – not to mention the sense of urgency – to approve such measures. This time around, it might not happen and that would be due to the leadership flaw I observed last year:
President Obama should have done it right the first time. His penchant for compromise — simply for the sake of compromise itself — is bound to bite him in the ass on this issue, as it surely will on health care reform — should he abandon the “public option”. The new President made the mistake of assuming that if he established a reputation for being flexible, his opposition would be flexible in return. The voting public will perceive this as weak leadership. As a result, President Obama will need to re-invent this aspect of his public image before he can even consider presenting a second economic stimulus proposal.
At this point, Obama’s “flexibility” is often viewed by the voting public as a lack of existential authenticity, sincerity or — worse yet — credibility. As a result, I would expect to see more articles like the recent piece by Carol Lee at Politico, entitled, “Obama: Day for ‘partnership’ passed”.
Here comes the makeover!
Your Sleazy Government At Work
May 31, 2010
Although the cartoon above appeared in my local paper, it came to my attention only because Barry Ritholtz posted it on his website, The Big Picture. Congratulations to Jim Morin of The Miami Herald for creating one of those pictures that’s worth well over a thousand words.
Forget about all that oil floating in the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama, Harry Reid and “Countrywide Chris” Dodd are too busy indulging in an orgy of self-congratulation over the Senate’s passage of a so-called “financial reform” bill (S. 3217) to be bothered with “the fishermen’s buzzkill”. Meanwhile, many commentators are expressing their disappointment and disgust at the fact that the banking lobby has succeeded in making sure that the taxpayers will continue to pick up the tab when the banks go broke trading unregulated derivatives.
Matt Taibbi has written a fantastic essay for Rolling Stone, documenting the creepy battle over financial reform in the Senate. The folks at Rolling Stone are sure getting their money’s worth out of Taibbi, after his landmark smackdown of Goldman Sachs and his revealing article exposing the way banks such as JP Morgan Chase fleeced Jefferson County, Alabama. In his latest “must read” essay, Taibbi provides his readers with an understandable discussion of what is wrong with derivatives trading and Wall Street’s efforts to preserve the status quo:
At The New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson de-mystified how both the Senate’s “financial reform” bill and the bill passed by the House require standardized derivatives to be traded on an exchange or a “swap execution facility”. Although these proposals create the illusion of reform – it’s important to keep in mind that old maxim about gambling: “The house always wins.” In this case, the ability to “front-run” the chumps gives the house the power to keep winning:
When one considers what this legislation was intended to address, the dangers posed by failing to extinguish those systemic threats to the economy and what the Senate bill is being claimed to remedy — it’s actually just a huge, sleazy disgrace. Matt Taibbi’s concluding words on the subject underscore the fact that not only do we still need real financial reform, we also need campaign finance reform:
The sleazy antics by the Democrats who undermined financial reform (while pretending to advance it) will not be forgotten by the voters. The real question is whether any independent candidates can step up to oppose the tools of Wall Street, relying on the nickels and dimes from “the little people” to wage a battle against the kleptocracy.
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