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Economics

Amerikas neue Ära der Industriepolitik

Jan 2, 2023 Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca

BERKELEY – In den Vereinigten Staaten setzt sich eine neue Art der Industriepolitik durch. Unter der Führung von Präsident Joe Biden hat die Bundesregierung mit dem Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (550 Mrd. $), dem CHIPSand Science Act (280 Mrd. $) und dem Inflation Reduction Act (IRA, 394 Mrd. $) wichtige neue Programme aufgelegt. Dabei handelt es sich nicht um traditionelle Ausgabenmaßnahmen zur Ankurbelung der Nachfrage. Vielmehr handelt es sich, wie Finanzministerin Janet Yellen erklärt, um angebotsseitige Investitionen zur Steigerung der US-Wirtschaftskapazität, sowohl insgesamt als auch in Schlüsselsektoren wie der Halbleiterindustrie und den erneuerbaren Energien.

Auch wenn sich die einzelnen Bestimmungen und Finanzierungsverfahren unterscheiden, basieren alle drei Programme auf dem öffentlich-privaten Modell, das für die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit der USA im letzten Jahrhundert entscheidend war. Sie sind darauf ausgelegt, private Investitionen zu fördern und zu beschleunigen, nicht zu ersetzen. Daher wird ein erheblicher Teil ihrer Finanzierung – im Falle von IRA und CHIPS sogar der größte Teil – in Form von Steuergutschriften für Unternehmen bereitgestellt.

Die Programme werden auch die Regierungen der Bundesstaaten und Kommunen, die für den größten Teil der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung in den USA verantwortlich sind, zu unterstützenden Änderungen der Rechtsvorschriften ermutigen – zum Beispiel bei der Genehmigung und Standortwahl für grüne Energieprojekte. Und sie teilen verschiedene Merkmale, die einen neuen „nachhaltigen und gerechten“ Ansatz in der Industriepolitik ausmachen. Dazu gehören die Konzentration auf die regionale Wirtschaftsentwicklung auf der Grundlage lokaler Prioritäten mit Schwerpunkt auf dem Kapazitätsaufbau in marginalisierten Gemeinden, die ausdrückliche Verknüpfung mit der tertiären Bildung und der Entwicklung von Arbeitskräften sowie die sektorübergreifende Integration mit wichtigen Dienstleistungen wie dem Gesundheits- und Bildungswesen.

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Laura Tyson

Writing for PS since 2012
117 Commentaries

Laura Tyson, a former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Board of Advisers at Angeleno Group.

Lenny Mendonca

Writing for PS since 2014
49 Commentaries

Lenny Mendonca, Senior Partner Emeritus at McKinsey & Company, is a former chief economic and business adviser to Governor Gavin Newsom of California and chair of the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

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vic lai Jan 3, 2023

A crucial problem facing the coming more and more "entrepreneurial" US federal and state governments is that, how are their coming increased deficit spending for the new real investments of all kinds to be financed ?
There are four main options available to the government, namely to
(i) create credit itself,
(ii) borrow from commercial banks through loan contracts,
(iii) borrow from the central bank, and
(iv) borrow from the private sector (through bond issuance),
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According to Richard Werner, the question why fiscal policy had appeared ineffective in Japan during the 1990s has now been answered:
For every yen in government spending that is not monetized (and hence not supported by credit creation either by the commercial banks in the formal and/or shadow banking sector or by the central bank), private demand must shrink by one yen.
Fiscal policy was almost perfectly ineffective there.
This explains the finding we saw that government expenditure and domestic demand appear to be moving in opposite directions in Japan at that time.
The empirical evidence supports the conclusion that an economic recovery can only take place, if there is an increase in credit creation.
Neither interest rate nor fiscal policies can be expected to be useful.
We have solved the mystery of the ineffectiveness of fiscal policy in Japan: it was not backed by increased credit creation, and hence "quantity crowding-out" reduced private demand one yen for each yen of fiscal spending.
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The problem was the way the deficit spending was financed there.
The Japanese government had chosen the least efficient method, namely option (iv), in the 1990s (and beyond).
Bond issuance to the private sector tends to crowd out private-sector demand, as in the case of Japan in the 1990s, and thus render fiscal policy entirely ineffective in stimulating growth.
Furthermore, it creates more and more debts, and compounding interest liabilities, requiring the country's central bank to keep monetizing the central government's bigger and bigger deficit spending through QEs, without much invigorating the domestic economy (and domestic inflation) at the same time.
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In recent years, China seems to have repeated Japan's past mistakes, by also choosing option (iv) upstairs, instead of using her good old method of option (ii).
I mean, China's local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), traditionally borrowing from the local commercial banks en masse in China's newly-cropped-up shadow banking markets (which had been part of the LGs' famous "Land Finance"), have in recent years been mostly replaced by their formal issuance of local government municipal (and special) bonds in the country's formal banking sector.
But the commercial banks' relatively high deposit-reserve ratios have not fallen enough in recent years to accommodate both the financing of the LGs' new debts and the refinancing of the LG's remaining debts, and so the net quantity crowding out has significantly limited the supply of new bank credits to the country's private SMEs and real estate firms through the same commercial banking system in recent years.
Hence China's laggard growth and economic performance in the years before and after the pandemic breakout in the country, and the problem has been aggravated by the country's very strict Covid lockdown policies.
China's relatively slow money supply growth in recent years also helps explain the country's relatively low and normal inflation rate relative to most other countries after the breakout of the global Covid pandemic.
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The lesson for today's US is that,
(i) those stimulus checks given to the US households after the pandemic breakout in early 2022 should have been (mostly) financed by option (iv), to prevent runaway inflation in the country in the subsequent years (caused mainly by the country's wrong choosing of option (iii) ),
(ii) the massive real investments of the US federal and local governments in the coming years (which should be much bigger, and measured in trillions of US dollars) should suitably be financed by both
(a) option (ii), thereby repeating the Chinese LGs' highly-successful urban-development stories in the past decades, and
(b) option (iii), which, unlike those stimulus-check giving to the households, will no longer be inflationary, because the country's aggregate supply will more or less increase commensurately with the country's increased aggregate demand in the coming decade.
The idea is for the US federal government to crowd-in more and more private real investments of all kinds in the remaining years of this decade, thereby hopefully culminating in the eventual breaking out of the 4th Industrial Revolution in the US in the 2030s.
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- vic lai Jan 4, 2023
  
  By the time the Fed has fully tamed the country's inflation monster, the US economy should already have run into an economic recession, which this time may be a "jobful recession" and so should be relatively mild so far as its adverse effect on the US's average household is concerned.
  The expected relatively mild recession in turn should enhance the Fed's current resolve to fight today's inflation by keeping her rate-hiking cycle higher and longer, the extent of which this time may not be as big as that during Paul Volcker's inflation-fighting time.
  Why ?
  ---
  This is because, while most people think that Volcker was only concentrating on the interest rate, it's said that he was also observing the country's money supply then.
  When Volcker started to push the interest rate up from 10% to 20%, in the beginning he found that the money supply hadn't dropped.
  Only when the interest rate he controlled rose to around 20% did he observe the drop in money supply.
  After that, the American economy started her non-trivial recession in the first half of 1980s.
  ---
  Today, according to the US's latest November-2022 M2 money supply statistic, the US M2 money supply had maintained her latest falling trend since as early as March 2022, and so
  (i) Powell's expected higher-for-longer rate-hiking cycle this time may be shorter than the market currently expects,
  (ii) the US economy will probably run into a perhaps relatively-mild recession in the foreseeable future. This probability is also strengthened by the observation that, starting from around the beginning of 2021, the total M2 money supply of the world's 3 big central banks (the Fed, ECB, BOJ) kept falling quite rapidly, meaning that the western world will have a high possibility of running into a new recessionary trap.
  ---
  Since the US government's enhanced fiscal deficit-spending as a result of her new era of industrial policy may further invigorate the country's current inflation monster, those industrial policies should now wait a (little) bit first, until Powell's Fed has truly finished putting the inflation genie fully back into the bottle.
  ---
  - vic lai Jan 5, 2023
    
    Roosevelt's New Deal and WWII mass-mobilization wartime policies together had enabled the US's economy to eventually recover fully from the Great Depression --- an imitation of what Nazi Germany did in the early 1930s which had enabled Germany to quickly recover from the economic malaise of the Great Depression.
    By starting WWII in Europe, forcing the US government to eventually fully mobilize, Nazi Germany had de facto enabled the US both to escape fully from the depressionary trap and to help defeat herself in the world war.
    ---
    The coming Taiwan War, if any, if initiated by China
    (i) before today's US Fed has fully accomplished the country's inflation-fighting mission, will much complicate the Fed's coming top-priority inflation-fighting job, since the US's required military mobilization for the war will have to be financed by much-propped-up new inflation-prone government deficit spending.
    (ii) after today's US Fed has fully finished her inflation-fighting mission, may also induce the US government to mobilize, to be financed by massive new government deficit-spending, helping to pull the US much more quickly out of the coming recession trap resulting from the Fed's current inflation-fighting monetary policies, without causing much inflationary pressure in the country at that time, thereby making it economically more easy for the US to militarily defend Taiwan against China.
    ---
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Amerikas neue Ära der Industriepolitik

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