Recovery Lost: Why the U.S. and Europe Are Back at the Brink
How did the road out of recession lead into a cul-de-sac? And why, all of a sudden, is the world economy falling apart? The answer is all about growth and debt.
Derek Thompson Aug 9 2011, 4:20 PM ET
Is the stock runoff for real?
Are we falling into another recession?
What the heck is going on, anyway?
If you find yourself confused about the market meltdown, you've got company. Dow crashes, like Monday's 600 point plunge, are notorious black boxes. A few thousand investors acting on a hundred indicators rarely reveal a single, shining Truth. But this appears to be more than a one-time crash. The United States and Europe, twin engines of the global economy, are close to falling back into a recession.
What we're seeing is the confluence of two challenges that are both economic and political in nature. There is growth crisis in the United States. There is a debt crisis in Europe. And there isn't a single government that knows how to solve either.
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH THE U.S.? GROWTH.
Why didn't we reach escape velocity? Because the housing crisis never ended.
The first thing to understand is that the past two weeks didn't tell us that the financial crisis is coming back. They told us that the crisis never ended.
If you can remember, July of 2010 was supposed to be the beginning of a "Recovery Summer." But when unemployment lingered above 9 percent for the next few months, we settled for "Jobless Recovery." For a year, that label stuck. Two weeks ago, we learned that gross domestic product grew less than 1% in the first six months of this year, and we downgraded to "Recoveryless Recovery." Now, after the first-ever credit downgrade and a historically terrible week in the stock market, we've all but dropped the word recovery. After Monday's carnage, all talk is of a possible double-dip recession.
What precipitated the sell-off? The answers are printed all over our front pages. Investors saw jobs growing slower than population. They saw yearly GDP growth revised down by two-thirds in a single report, from 2.5% to 0.8%. They saw multinationals and financial companies with record-high profits sitting on their cash, moving offices overseas [ http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-consumers-overseas-20110808,0,6537651.story ], attracting foreign customers -- anything but hiring Americans. And most importantly, they saw a debt ceiling debate that seemed to take place in alternate universe to our growth crisis. A reasonable explanation for the market's collapse is that investors saw an economy too sick to grow and a government too dysfunctional to act on it.
The economy feels sick because we never extracted the poison of the recession. The housing bust still lives with us. The value of the typical home fell by nearly 50% in the last five years. In many cities, values are still falling. This has wiped out the most important source of net worth to most middle income families. We aren't building new homes -- housing starts are down nearly 75% from the peak -- and we're stuck in our old homes -- one fifth of mortgages are in negative equity.
This housing depression creates a negative feedback loop. Families stuck in negative equity homes close their wallets. Businesses react to low revenue by not hiring. High unemployment depresses wages. Low wages delay the purchase of more homes, which would reverse the pernicious cycle. Since pictures often beat words in economics, here's the broad story of our housing bust through graphs:
the bottom line: housing prices are still falling
... the drop is even clearer when tied to median income ...
... new housing projects have fallen by 75% ...
... and residential construction fell by two-thirds ...
... residential investment has suffered a similar fall ...
... and one in five mortgages are in negative equity
real personal spending growth is flat or negative in 2011
But wait. It gets worse. "We've run out of options from government," says Barry Bosworth from the Brookings Institution. "Interest rates are zero. Quantitative easing has had a limited impact on the recovery. There is no prospect of consensus about fiscal policy, which will probably become contractionary over the next year."
In short, we're stuck in a world of no growth and no options.
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH EUROPE? DEBT.
Too much debt, too little growth. That's Europe in a nutshell.
Depressed yet? Let's talk about Europe.
There are five countries dragging down the continent, but you should think of them in two categories. Greece, Portugal and Italy are the profligate sloths. Spain and Ireland are the busted housing kings. All five are facing rising interest rates that could require hundreds of billions of dollars in assistance from the continent's healthy economies.
Greece is the Western world's mascot for fiscal failure. Even with $300 billion in bailout relief, the country is all but certain to default on most, or all, of its debts. Portugal and Italy's troubles are similar but smaller in nature: slow growth and high deficits. Other European countries face crises that resemble our recession on elephant steroids. Ireland's real estate bubble once consumed 25% of its economy, and in 2010 its budget deficit ate a third of GDP. Spain has battled 20 percent unemployment, more than twice our official rate, even after their housing run stopped.
This is another story best told through picture. Since every debt crisis is also a growth crisis, we've put together this second gallery of graphs on Europe's bond yields and unemployment rates:
Unemployment in Major Countries
Greece's GDP
Greece's bond yields
Ireland's GDP
Ireland's bond yields
Portugal's GDP
Portugal's bond yields
Italy's bond yields
Spain's GDP
Spain's bond yields
But wait. It gets worse. Europe is rotting from the outside in. Germany's hot recovery is cooling. French banks face significant exposure to Spain and Italy's troubles. The United Kingdom's experiment in austerity is backfiring. The city of London, which was even more finance-focused than New York City before the crash, is literally burning as austerity and months of negative growth unnerve the city's young unemployed population.
ARE WE DOOMED?
If the U.S. and Europe are at the edge of a cliff today, it is a shorter cliff than in 2007. The good news is that we have less room to fall. The bad news is that nobody expects a soft landing. There will be no more fiscal stimulus. There is less room for monetary stimulus. The only sure antidote to our crises is time.
Europe's fundamental problem is debt in a handful of states. The continent needs to find a way to offer these states access to the broad euro market. If Greece can borrow at closer to the Euro rate rather than the Greek rate, they'll be safer. Three years after Europe's richest government absorbed the risk of private banks, they will have to absorb the risk of smaller governments.
In the U.S., we have all but run out of new ideas. Government is becoming a drag on the economy. Our trade deficit is a huge drain of capital. Washington can't resolve the housing crisis for people who are underwater, and businesses are increasingly looking overseas to invest.
If you're looking for silver linings, best to take the long view. Financial crises can be decade-long affairs, as families, businesses and banks build back to normalcy. But there is every reason to expect full recovery. Unlike Japan, which has lost two decades to a financial bust, we have a young workforce with a steady stream of immigrants and a culture of risk and entrepreneurship. The road out of recession has led us back to the brink of recession. But even in stalled recovery, the United States is the world's leader in education and innovation. In the long run, if you can wait for it, the road leads back to growth.
Second Recession in U.S. Could Be Worse Than First
By CATHERINE RAMPELL Published: August 7, 2011
If the economy falls back into recession, as many economists are now warning, the bloodletting could be a lot more painful than the last time around.
Given the tumult of the Great Recession, this may be hard to believe. But the economy is much weaker than it was at the outset of the last recession in December 2007, with most major measures of economic health — including jobs, incomes, output and industrial production — worse today than they were back then. And growth has been so weak that almost no ground has been recouped, even though a recovery technically started in June 2009.
“It would be disastrous if we entered into a recession at this stage, given that we haven’t yet made up for the last recession,” said Conrad DeQuadros, senior economist at RDQ Economics.
When the last downturn hit, the credit bubble left Americans with lots of fat to cut, but a new one would force families to cut from the bone. Making things worse, policy makers used most of the economic tools at their disposal to combat the last recession, and have few options available.
Anxiety and uncertainty have increased in the last few days after the decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the country’s credit rating and as Europe continues its desperate attempt to stem its debt crisis.
President Obama acknowledged the challenge in his Saturday radio and Internet address, saying the country’s “urgent mission” now was to expand the economy and create jobs. And Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in an interview on CNBC on Sunday that the United States had “a lot of work to do” because of its “long-term and unsustainable fiscal position.”
But he added, “I have enormous confidence in the basic regenerative capacity of the American economy and the American people.”
Still, the numbers are daunting. In the four years since the recession began, the civilian working-age population has grown by about 3 percent. If the economy were healthy, the number of jobs would have grown at least the same amount.
Instead, the number of jobs has shrunk. Today the economy has 5 percent fewer jobs — or 6.8 million — than it had before the last recession began. The unemployment rate was 5 percent then, compared with 9.1 percent today.
Even those Americans who are working are generally working less; the typical private sector worker has a shorter workweek today than four years ago.
Employers shed all the extra work shifts and weak or extraneous employees that they could during the last recession. As shown by unusually strong productivity gains, companies are now squeezing as much work as they can from their newly “lean and mean” work forces. Should a recession return, it is not clear how many additional workers businesses could lay off and still manage to function.
With fewer jobs and fewer hours logged, there is less income for households to spend, creating a huge obstacle for a consumer-driven economy.
Adjusted for inflation, personal income is down 4 percent, not counting payments from the government for things like unemployment benefits. Income levels are low, and moving in the wrong direction: private wage and salary income actually fell in June, the last month for which data was available.
Consumer spending, along with housing, usually drives a recovery. But with incomes so weak, spending is only barely where it was when the recession began. If the economy were healthy, total consumer spending would be higher because of population growth.
And with construction nearly nonexistent and home prices down 24 percent since December 2007, the country does not have a buffer in housing to fall back on.
Of all the major economic indicators, industrial production — as tracked [ http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/ ] by the Federal Reserve — is by far the worst off. The Fed’s index of this activity is nearly 8 percent below its level in December 2007.
Likewise, and perhaps most worrisome, is the track record for the country’s overall output. According to newly revised data from the Commerce Department, the economy is smaller today than it was when the recession began, despite (or rather, because of) the feeble growth in the last couple of years.
If the economy were healthy, it would be much bigger than it was four years ago. Economists refer to the difference between where the economy is and where it could be if it met its full potential as the “output gap.” Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, has estimated [ http://www.economonitor.com/blog/2011/08/tales-from-the-gdp-revisions/ ] that the economy was about 7 percent smaller than its potential at the beginning of this year.
Unlike during the first downturn, there would be few policy remedies available if the economy were to revert back into recession.
Interest rates cannot be pushed down further — they are already at zero. The Fed has already flooded the financial markets with money by buying billions in mortgage securities and Treasury bonds, and economists do not even agree on whether those purchases substantially helped the economy. So the Fed may not see much upside to going through another politically controversial round of buying.
“There are only so many times the Fed can pull this same rabbit out of its hat,” said Torsten Slok, the chief international economist at Deutsche Bank.
Congress had some room — financially and politically — to engage in fiscal stimulus during the last recession.
But at the end of 2007, the federal debt was 64.4 percent of the economy. Today, it is estimated at around 100 percent of gross domestic product, a share not seen since the aftermath of World War II, and there is little chance of lawmakers reaching consensus on additional stimulus that would increase the debt.
“There is no approachable precedent, at least in the postwar era, for what happens when an economy with 9 percent unemployment falls back into recession,” said Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight. “The one precedent you might consider is 1937, when there was also a premature withdrawal of fiscal stimulus, and the economy fell into another recession more painful than the first.”
There is at least one factor, though, that could make a second downturn feel milder than the first: corporate profits. Corporate profits are at record highs and, adjusted for inflation, were 22 percent greater in the first quarter of this year than they were in the last quarter of 2007.
Nervous about the future of the economy, corporations are reluctant to make big investments like hiring. As a result, they are sitting on a lot of cash.
While this may not be much comfort to the nation’s 13.9 million unemployed workers, it may be to their employed counterparts.
“In the financial crisis, when markets were freezing up, the first response was, ‘I’ve got to get some cash,’ ” said Neal Soss, the chief economist at Credit Suisse. “The fastest way to get cash is to not have a weekly payroll, so that’s why we saw such big layoffs.”
Corporate cash reserves today, he said, could act as a buffer to layoffs if demand drops.
“There are arguments that another recession would be worse, and there are arguments in the other direction,” Mr. Soss said. “We just don’t know at this juncture. But ultimately it’s a question you don’t want to know the answer to.”