Articles Monetary Policy and Rational Asset Price Bubbles (pp. 721-52) Jordi Galí Fiscal Stimulus in a Monetary Union: Evidence from US Regions (pp. 753-92) Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson Trade Adjustment and Productivity in Large Crises (pp. 793-831) Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman Do Prices and Attributes Explain International Differences in Food Purchases? (pp. 832-67) Pierre Dubois , Rachel Griffith and Aviv Nevo The Economics of Predation: What Drives Pricing When There Is Learning-by-Doing? (pp. 868-97) David Besanko , Ulrich Doraszelski and Yaroslav Kryukov Strategic Interaction and Networks (pp. 898-930) Yann Bramoullé , Rachel Kranton and Martin D'Amours How University Endowments Respond to Financial Market Shocks: Evidence and Implications (pp. 931-62) Jeffrey R. Brown , Stephen G. Dimmock , Jun-Koo Kang and Scott J. Weisbenner Shorter Papers When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South (pp. 963-90) Richard Hornbeck and Suresh Naidu School Choice, School Quality, and Postsecondary Attainment (pp. 991-1013) David J. Deming , Justine S. Hastings , Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger Do Employers Use Unemployment as a Sorting Criterion When Hiring? Evidence from a Field Experiment (pp. 1014-39) Stefan Eriksson and Dan-Olof Rooth Risk and Precautionary Saving in Two-Person Households (pp. 1040-46) Patricia Apps , Yuri Andrienko and Ray Rees Does Money Illusion Matter? Comment (pp. 1047-62) Luba Petersen and Abel Winn Does Money Illusion Matter? Reply (pp. 1063-71) Ernst Fehr and Jean-Robert Tyran The Dynamic Behavior of the Real Exchange Rate in Sticky Price Models: Comment (pp. 1072-89) Jens Iversen and Ulf Sderstrm
Articles Collateral Crises (pp. 343-78) Gary Gorton and Guillermo Ordoez A Macroeconomic Model with a Financial Sector (pp. 379-421) Markus K. Brunnermeier and Yuliy Sannikov Finance and Misallocation: Evidence from Plant-Level Data (pp. 422-58) Virgiliu Midrigan and Daniel Yi Xu Tracing Value-Added and Double Counting in Gross Exports (pp. 459-94) Robert Koopman , Zhi Wang and Shang-Jin Wei Market Size, Competition, and the Product Mix of Exporters (pp. 495-536) Thierry Mayer , Marc J. Melitz and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano Do Consumers Respond to Marginal or Average Price? Evidence from Nonlinear Electricity Pricing (pp. 537-63) Koichiro Ito Time to Build and Fluctuations in Bulk Shipping (pp. 564-608) Myrto Kalouptsidi Time Allocation and Task Juggling (pp. 609-23) Decio Coviello , Andrea Ichino and Nicola Persico Shorter Papers How Financial Incentives Induce Disability Insurance Recipients to Return to Work (pp. 624-55) Andreas Ravndal Kostol and Magne Mogstad Outside Options and the Failure of the Coase Conjecture (pp. 656-71) Simon Board and Marek Pycia Raising Retailers' Profits: On Vertical Practices and the Exclusion of Rivals (pp. 672-86) John Asker and Heski Bar-Isaac Are Private Markets and Filtering a Viable Source of Low-Income Housing? Estimates from a 'Repeat Income' Model (pp. 687-706) Stuart S. Rosenthal Income and Democracy: Comment (pp. 707-19) Matteo Cervellati , Florian Jung , Uwe Sunde and Thomas Vischer
Dec-04 215,749 218,310 2,561 Jan-05 202,217 r 194,111 r -8,106 Feb-05 r 100,871 r 214,660 r 113,789 Mar-05 r 148,759 r 220,483 r 71,724 Apr-05 r 277,614 r 219,690 r -57,924 May-05 152,731 r 188,920 r 36,190 Jun-05 r 234,808 r 212,335 r -22,473 Jul-05 142,092 r 195,487 r 53,395 Aug-05 155,438 r 206,474 r 51,036 Sep-05 251,628 r 216,394 r -35,234 Oct-05 149,488 r 196,764 r 47,277 Nov-05 138,840 r 221,911 r 83,072 Dec-05 241,883 r 230,916 r -10,967 Jan-06 230,010 r 209,045 r -20,964 Feb-06 112,853 r 232,091 r 119,237 Mar-06 164,563 r 249,843 r 85,281 Apr-06 315,090 r 196,249 r -118,841 May-06 192,657 r 235,564 r 42,907 Jun-06 264,355 r 243,838 r -20,517 Jul-06 159,761 r 192,925 r 33,164 Aug-06 153,878 r 218,595 r 64,717 Sep-06 283,298 r 227,131 r -56,167 Oct-06 167,693 217,014 49,321 Nov-06 145,866 218,907 73,042 Dec-06 259,969 218,007 -41,961 Jan-07 260,609 222,372 -38,236 Feb-07 120,312 240,305 119,993 Mar-07 166,490 262,761 96,270 Apr-07 383,641 205,967 -177,674 May-07 164,239 231,937 67,699 Jun-07 276,517 249,036 -27,481 Jul-07 170,439 206,886 36,447 Aug-07 166,545 283,518 116,973 Sep-07 285,354 r 172,488 r -112,866 Oct-07 178,175 r 235,014 r 56,838 Nov-07 151,055 249,293 98,238 Dec-07 276,982 228,721 -48,261 Jan-08 255,217 237,379 -17,839 Feb-08 105,723 281,287 175,563 Mar-08 178,816 227,028 48,212 Apr-08 403,751 244,469 -159,282 May-08 124,272 290,199 165,927 Jun-08 259,912 r 226,365 r -33,547 Jul-08 160,494 263,261 102,767 Aug-08 157,016 268,930 111,914 Sep-08 r 272,228 r 226,494 r -45,734 Oct-08 r 164,827 r 320,360 r 155,533 Nov-08 r 144,769 r 269,970 r 125,201 Dec-08 r 237,786 r 289,540 r 51,754 Jan-09 r 226,090 r 289,548 r 63,457 Feb-09 r 87,312 r 281,171 r 193,859 Mar-09 r 128,926 r 320,514 r 191,589 Apr-09 r 266,206 r 287,113 r 20,907 May-09 r 117,217 r 306,868 r 189,651 Jun-09 r 215,340 r 309,671 r 94,332 Jul-09 r 151,481 r 332,160 r 180,680 Aug-09 r 145,529 r 249,084 r 103,555 Sep-09 r 218,880 r 264,088 r 45,207 Oct-09 r 135,293 r 311,656 r 176,363 Nov-09 r 133,563 r 253,850 r 120,287 Dec-09 218,919 r 310,329 r 91,410 Jan-10 r 205,239 r 247,873 42,634 Feb-10 107,520 328,429 220,909 Mar-10 153,358 218,745 65,387 Apr-10 r 245,260 r 327,950 82,689 May-10 r 146,794 r 282,721 135,927 Jun-10 251,048 319,470 68,422 Jul-10 155,546 320,588 165,043 Aug-10 163,998 254,524 90,526 Sep-10 r 245,207 r 279,813 r 34,607 Oct-10 145,951 286,384 140,432 Nov-10 r 148,970 r 299,364 150,394 Dec-10 236,875 r 315,009 r 78,134 Jan-11 r 226,550 r 276,346 49,796 Feb-11 110,656 r 333,163 r 222,507 Mar-11 150,894 r 339,048 r 188,154 Apr-11 289,543 r 329,929 r 40,387 May-11 r 174,936 r 232,577 57,641 Jun-11 249,658 292,738 43,080 Jul-11 159,063 288,439 129,376 Aug-11 r 169,246 r 303,388 134,143 Sep-11 240,153 r 302,903 r 62,750 Oct-11 163,072 261,539 98,466 Nov-11 152,402 289,704 137,302 Dec-11 239,963 325,930 85,967 Jan-12 234,319 r 261,726 r 27,407 Feb-12 103,413 r 335,090 r 231,677 Mar-12 171,215 r 369,372 r 198,157 Apr-12 318,807 259,690 -59,117 May-12 180,713 305,348 124,636 Jun-12 260,177 319,919 59,741 Jul-12 184,585 254,190 69,604 Aug-12 178,860 369,393 190,533 Sep-12 261,566 r 186,386 r -75,180 Oct-12 184,316 304,311 119,995 Nov-12 161,730 333,841 172,112 Dec-12 r 269,508 r 269,699 r 1,191 Jan-13 272,225 r 269,340 r -2,886 Feb-13 122,815 326,354 203,539 Mar-13 186,018 292,548 106,530 Apr-13 406,723 293,833 -112,889 May-13 197,182 335,914 138,732 Jun-13 286,627 170,126 -116,501 Jul-13 200,030 r 297,623 97,593 Aug-13 185,370 333,293 147,923 Sep-13 r 301,435 r 226,366 -75,070 Oct-13 198,927 290,520 91,592 Nov-13 182,453 317,679 135,226 Dec-13 283,221 230,001 -53,220 Jan-14 295,997 306,418 10,421
Middle Class? Here's What's Destroying Your Future Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/12/2012 11:13 -0400 Submitted by Peak Prosperity contributing editor Charles Hugh Smith Middle Class? Here's What's Destroying Your Future According to the conventional account, the Great American Middle Class has been eroded by rising energy costs, globalization, and the declining purchasing power of the U.S. dollar in the four decades since 1973. While these trends have certainly undermined middle-class wealth and income, there are five other less politically acceptable dynamics at work: The divergence of State/private vested interests and the interests of the middle class The emergence of financialization as the key driver of profits and political power The neofeudal “colonization” of the “home market” by ascendant financial Elites The increasing burden of indirect “taxes” as productive enterprises and people involuntarily subsidize unproductive, parasitic, corrupt, but politically dominant vested interests The emergence of crony capitalism as the lowest-risk, highest-profit business model in the U.S. economy Higher Energy Costs = Lower GDP, Lower Incomes Let’s start with the conventional forces of higher energy costs. The abundance or scarcity of energy is only one factor in its price. As the cost of extraction, transport, refining, and taxes rise, so does the final price. EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) helps illuminate this point. In the good old days, one barrel of oil invested might yield 100 barrels of oil extracted and refined for delivery. Now it takes one barrel of oil to extract and refine 5 barrels of oil, or perhaps as little as 3 barrels of unconventional oil. It doesn’t matter how abundant oil might be; it’s the cost that impacts GDP and income. Here we see that GDP in relation to the price of gasoline hit bottom in the wake of the 1979 oil shock. GDP soared in the late 1990s when oil plummeted to $15/barrel. It spiked lower when oil hit $140/barrel in 2008, and popped back up when oil dropped (briefly) to $40/barrel. (FRED charts courtesy of B.C.) Here we see the cost of oil’s impact on wages: As oil costs rise, wages and GDP decline. If we read between the lines, this chart reflects an economy that has become less dependent on oil for its GDP growth than it was in the 1970s, but oil’s influence on growth and income is clearly still fundamental. This fifty-year history of oil, GDP, wages, and household debt reveals that GDP and wages only rose smartly in brief eras of depressed oil prices. Households compensated for the stagnation of their wages by borrowing. The Middle-Class Work-Around: Substituting Debt for Income The key idea here is that real income can only rise if the productivity of labor and capital investment increases. If productivity of labor and capital is flat, any increase in income is a mirage; i.e., a rise in nominal income that is not an actual increase in purchasing power. Here we see that labor productivity has risen steadily, more than doubling since 1970. Wages also rose—but household debt rose at a much higher rate than wages. I have been asked by readers to use only “adjusted” or “real” measures of GDP, wages, etc., but sources rarely compare apples to apples, and the high probability that “official” inflation has been understated leaves even “adjusted” data suspect. In nominal terms, the ratio of these two lines is what’s important. From the point in time when they began diverging (1983), wages tripled but household debt rose sevenfold. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) inflation calculator, $1 in 1983 is equal to $2.31 in 2012 dollars.) If we dead-reckon that “real” inflation is probably more like $1 in 1983 = $3 in 2012, this still suggests that wages doubled in the past 30 years. The increase (however you calculate it) flowed entirely to the top 10% of households. That the bottom 90% of wage earners lost ground has been well established. This summary from the New York Times encapsulates the stagnation: According to the Census figures, the median annual income for a male full-time, year-round worker in 2010 — $47,715 — was virtually unchanged, in 2010 dollars, from its level in 1973, when it was $49,065. Overall, median household income adjusted for inflation declined by 2.3 percent in 2010 from the previous year, to $49,445.That was 7 percent less than the peak of $53,252 in 1999. The decline in earnings isn’t just income inequality at work. Labor’s share of the national income has plummeted to historic lows. Clearly, the middle class (whatever way you choose to define it, it can’t be the top 10%) compensated for stagnating income with a “work-around” that was heavily incentivized by tax deductions of interest and declining interest rates: borrowing money. Meanwhile, corporate profits have risen sevenfold since the early 1980s (as did household debt—an interesting coincidence). Perhaps a more accurate measure of corporate profits is to view them as a share of GDP: Corporate profits as a share of GDP zoomed to historically unprecedented levels in the credit-bubble era following the brief 2001 post-dot-com recession. What accounts for this unprecedented rise in corporate profits and equally unprecedented decline in labor’s share of the national income? The forces at work can be summarized in one word: financialization. The Perverse Incentives and Feedback of Financialization Financialization is the incentivization of debt, leverage, speculation, and regulatory capture (i.e., “deregulation”) that enables graft, fraud, and collusion as the “business model” for low-risk profits. From the long view, modern-day corporate/State capitalism (Neoliberal Capitalism) ran aground in the 1970s on two shoals: the rise in energy costs and the exhaustion of consumerist demand driven by rising wages. After stumbling badly through the 1970s (adjusted for inflation, the SP 500 stock index lost 67% of its value in that high-inflation decade), Neoliberal Capitalism developed a financialization model for growing profits. As the cost of borrowing fell, a stagnant income could leverage (serve as collateral) for larger amounts of debt. This new debt-driven demand boosted the value of assets such as houses and stocks, which then provided new collateral for even more debt. Restrictions on leverage and speculation were loosened or gutted via State-mandated financial deregulation. This created a self-reinforcing “virtuous cycle” of ever-rising debt, leverage, speculation, asset valuations, and financially derived profits. In the final stages of this debt-based “prosperity,” auto manufacturers were booking most of their profits on auto loans; the actual manufacture of vehicles was merely a step in the origination of new debt. This increasing reliance on debt for “growth” and “prosperity” aligned perfectly with the interests of the stagnating middle class, which had turned to debt as a substitute for income to support its lifestyle. Thus in the early stages of financialization, the interests of the financial sector and the middle class borrowers were aligned, as were those of the Central State, which saw tax revenues climb as income and profits rose. Ever-expanding debt rose faster than income, however, so leverage had to constantly increase if debt were to continue rising. This is why by the end of the financialization cycle in 2006, the housing bubble was being driven by “zero down payment” mortgages ($0 down leveraging a $500,000 loan) and “no-document” mortgages (“liar loans”), where phantom income served as collateral for phantom assets. The “virtuous cycle” ends once leverage cannot be extended any further. As overall debt expansion ceases, the asset bubbles created by debt-dependent demand implode, and the cycle reverses into deleveraging: as assets decline in value, assets must be sold off and debt either paid down or repudiated/written off. The assets were phantom, but the debts left behind were real, and the losses were real, too. Real income must be devoted to paying down debt that was based on phantom assets. The middle class gorged on debt for 30 years as a “work-around” for stagnant income, and its wealth rose as its investments in housing and stocks reached bubble heights. Now that the credit-based expansion of asset valuations has reversed, middle class wealth has been gutted even as its income is largely devoted to servicing underwater mortgages, high-interest student loans, and other household debt. The interests of the middle class have now diverged from the vested interests of the Central State and the financial sector, which used its expanding profits to capture regulators and buy political protection of its financialization rackets. Even now, four years after the implosion of the financialization model, we are treated to headlines such as “Rigged Rates, Rigged Markets.” The Neofeudal Colonization of Home Markets The use of credit to garner outsized profits and political power is well-established in Neoliberal Capitalism. In what we might call the Neoliberal Colonial Model (NCM) of financialization, credit-poor developing world economies are suddenly offered unlimited credit at very low or even negative interest rates. It is “an offer that’s too good to refuse,” and the resulting explosion of private credit feeds what appears to be a “virtuous cycle” of rampant consumption and rapidly rising assets such as equities, land, and housing. Essential to the appeal of this colonialist model is the broad-based access to credit. Everyone and his sister can suddenly afford to speculate in housing, stocks, commodities, etc. and live a consumption-based lifestyle that was once the exclusive preserve of the upper class and State Elites. (In developing nations, this is often the same group of people). In the nineteenth-century colonialist, model, the immensely profitable consumables being marketed by global cartels were sugar (rum), tea, coffee, and tobacco—all highly addictive, and all complementary: tea goes with sugar, and so on. (For more, please refer to Sidney Mintz’s landmark study, Sweetness and Power .) In the Neoliberal Colonial Model , the addictive substances are credit and the speculative consumerist fever it fosters. In the financialization model, the opportunities to exploit “home markets" were even better than those found abroad, for the simple reason that the U.S. government itself stood ready to guarantee that there would be no messy expropriations of capital or repudiation of debt by local authorities who might decide to throw off the yokes of credit colonization. In the U.S. “home market,” the government guaranteed that lenders would not lose money, even when they loaned to marginal borrowers who could never qualify for a mortgage under any prudent risk management system. This was the ultimate purpose of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and now the FHA, which is currently guaranteeing the next wave of mortgages that are entering default. In my analysis, the Status Quo of “private profits, public losses,” and the incentivization of gargantuan household debt amounts to a modern financialized version of feudalism, in which the middle class now toils as debt-serfs. Their debt cannot be repudiated (see student loans), their stagnating disposable income is largely devoted to debt service, and their assets have evaporated as the phantom wealth created by serial credit bubbles has largely vanished. Subsidizing a Parasitic Central State and Crony Capitalist Cartels In broad brush, financialization enabled the explosive rise of politically dominant cartels (crony capitalism) that reap profits from graft, legalized fraud, embezzlement, collusion, price-fixing, misrepresentation of risk, shadow systems of governance, and the use of phantom assets as collateral. This systemic allocation of resources and the national income to serve their interests also serves the interests of the protected fiefdoms of the State that enable and protect the parasitic sectors of the economy. The productive, efficient private sectors of the economy are, in effect, subsidizing the most inefficient, unproductive parts of the economy. Productivity has been siphoned off to financialized corporate profits, politically powerful cartels, and bloated State fiefdoms. The current attempts to “restart growth” via the same old financialization tricks of more debt, more leverage, and more speculative excess backstopped by a captured Central State are failing. Neofeudal financialization and unproductive State/private vested interests have bled the middle class dry. In Part II: The Middle Class Survival Guide , we look at what we can do to avoid serfdom and collaborating in an unjust, exploitative, and ultimately doomed system. We are not powerless simply because we are not individually wealthy and politically powerful. The Status Quo depends on our passivity, complicity, and collaboration. Just as each vote we cast in an election supports or resists the Status Quo, every dollar we spend is a “vote,” too. Every dollar we don’t send to a cartel or quasi-monopoly is a dollar we can spend locally or invest in our own life. Click here to access Part II of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).
Over the last ten years student debt outstanding has grown from less than $300 billion in 2002 to $1 trillion in 2012. http://www.mybudget360.com/student-loan-bubble-college-debt-bubble-studen-borrowers-past-due-2012/ : :
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