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Economics

Está a Economia dos EUA Caminhando para um Pouso Suave?

Jul 17, 2023 Jeffrey Frankel

CAMBRIDGE – Um paraquedista salta de um avião e descobre que seu paraquedas não abre. Na descida, ele encontra um asa-delta que pergunta como ele está. O homem em queda livre grita de volta: "Até agora, tudo bem!"

Para muitos, a economia dos EUA hoje em dia tem uma notável semelhança com aquele praquedista. Desde março de 2022, quando o Federal Reserve começou a aumentar as taxas de juros e encolher seu balanço, o consenso entre os economistas é que os Estados Unidos estão caminhando para um pouso forçado. Muitos economistas têm confiantemente previsto uma recessão há mais de um ano, alguns até afirmando que a economia já começou a se contrair.

A curva de rendimento invertida nos mercados de títulos sugere que o setor financeiro também está se preparando para uma recessão. Na verdade, o termo “recessão” apareceu com mais destaque na mídia no ano passado do que normalmente ocorre durante uma crise real. Essa visão ecoou claramente com o público em geral, com uma pesquisa de maio de 2022 revelando que 55% dos americanos acreditavam que os EUA já estavam em recessão, em comparação com 21% que discordavam.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 9 Comments on this article

vic lai Jul 18, 2023

As of today, the more-than-expected resilient overall performance of the US's post-Covid economy seems to be rejecting the past unchallenged recession-soon-unfolding prediction of the US's highly-inverted government treasury yield curve.
This time relative to the past is perhaps really different, in that
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(a) the QE-assisted successful shale-energy revolution in the US after the GFC of 2007-09 has continued to give a secular non-trivial background support to the overall performance of the US economy, especially when it's compared with most other countries with no shale or any other energy revolution during the past 15 years.
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(b) the massive increase in the US Treasury's deficit spending by both the Trump and the Biden administrations after the breakout of the Covid pandemic, and hence the further significant deterioration of the balance sheet of the US central government, has much improved the excess savings, and hence the overall healthiness of many balance sheets, of the households and corporations in the US's private sector.
The resulting increase in deficit military spending of the US since February 2022, in response to the ongoing Ukraine War in Europe, has also had the same recession-preventing effect on the US economy.
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(c) the various new Basel III requirements imposed on the US's bigger banks after the GFC, and many of the new facilities introduced by the US Fed at the same period of time (like the latest BTFP facility), have combined to help prevent most US banks from going under despite the US Fed's latest relatively fast rate-hiking cycle.
The resulting lack of eventual breaking-out of large-scale financial crisis in the US this time around means that there's been no ensuing economic recession or hard-landing so far in the US.
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(d) the masssive disappearance of many US workers in the US labor market in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, for one reason or another, has sustained the overall tightness of the US labor market and hence the non-trivial growth in nominal wages up until today.
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(e) due to the US Fed's gradual step-like rate-hiking from almost ground zero starting from March 2022, and the country's relatively high and keep-dropping CPI inflation rate during the same period of time, the US's real interest rate has just started to turn positive recently, which means the positive real interest rate has not been high and long enough to induce a noticeable harder landing in the country.
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(f) the US's near-non-stop booming virtual economy so far, represented by her persistently well-performing say stock, property, gold, and bitcoin markets, has maintained a strong positive wealth effect in the US, thereby supporting the country's relatively healthy consumption spending.
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- vic lai Jul 18, 2023
  
  (g) Despite the US Fed's current higher-for-longer rate-hiking cycle,
  (i) Japan's non-stop QE and YCC monetary policies has sustained the relative ample supply of new credits in the US, through the good old channel of dollar-yen carry trades.
  (ii) many buyers in the US had already locked up rather low house-and-car-mortgage borrowing rates provided by the commercial banks well before the start of the Fed's ongoing rate-hiking cycle.
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  - vic lai Jul 19, 2023
    
    (h) the US Fed is currently giving handsome interest revenues to both massive deposits at the central bank's bank-reserve and overnight reverse-repo accounts, thanks to the newly installed policy-interest-rate controlling corridor (which is upper bounded by the higher-and-higher IORB and lower bounded by the higher-and-higher ONRRP rate).
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    (i) the coming newly-issued treasuries of Yellen's US Treasury may mostly be financed by the massive idle cash currently "sleeping" soundly at the Fed's ONRRP account, and so the good old (quantity) crowding-out effect from the central government's deficit spending may pale into insignificance this time around.
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    - vic lai Jul 19, 2023
      
      (j) Externally, while the ongoing Ukraine War in Europe tends to net-reduce the global supply of oil, natural gas, and other commodities, on the contrary the steam-losing economy of today's China has been reducing the global demand for oil (and many other commodities) even more, which is now being reflected by the relatively low futures price of oil, despite the reduction of oil-producing quota by Saudi Arabia, which needs to balance her own government budget by maintaining the price of oil at around 80 US dollars.
      The continuous release of strategic oil reserves by the US government also helps to sustain the lower price of oil and gasoline in the country.
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      It seems that China's current "hard-landing" economy is substituting for the US's to inadvertently help force the US inflation genie back into the bottle.
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      - vic lai Jul 20, 2023
        
        (k) "Since 2009, China has signed Currency Swap Agreements (CSAs) with numerous countries and regions such as Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, ECB, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, the United Kingdom, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan."
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        Recently some of the above countries, facing perennial lack of US dollars in the Eurodollar market, exchanged their Chinese yuan holdings obtained through CSAs for US dollars say in Hong Kong's offshore yuan market, and so increasing both the foreign demand for US dollars and the foreign supply of yuan.
        The resulting appreciation or revaluation of the US dollar vis-a-vis the Chinese yuan (which was not reflected in U.S. Dollar Index or DXY) has helped strengthen the US dollar at the expense of the Chinese yuan (and many other EM currencies like the ASEAN currencies which have been more or less linked to the yuan), enabling the US to export domestic inflationary pressure to the rest of the world and hence reducing the present workload of US's inflation-fighting and rate-hiking Fed.
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        vic lai Jul 21, 2023
        
        (l) the US's current stronger-than-expected employment market should have been a result of the combination of
        (a) the long-term trend of unabated manufacturing reshoring in recent years, and
        (b) the short-term (inflation-causing) vigor from the quick and solid economic recovery of the country during the post-pandemic period (mainly thanks to the Federal government's money-printing-financed massive deficit spending).
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        The phenomenon of labor shortage generally exists in today's US, which has also lasted for quite a long time.
        The resulting persistent rise in real worker wages (a combination of higher nominal wages and lower CPI rates) has provided a strong support to the US residents' consumption spending, and so we're witnessing the high resilience of the domestic macroeconomy.
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  - vic lai Jul 19, 2023
    
    US's Godot-like formal economic recession still hasn't arrived today, perhaps because the US domestic economy has still been overheating.
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    It's said that the main reason for the two-low and one-high of the US economy (low growth rate, low unemployment rate, and high inflation rate) has been
    (a) the relaxation of the progress of the US's technologival advancement.
    The Godot-like 4th Industrial (or Technological) Revolution on this planet still hasn't formally arrived in the US yet.
    (b) the fall in the US's labor participation rate, which in turn has most probably been mainly caused by the Covid pandemic.
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    The result of the above has been the drop in the growth rate of the US's potential GDP.
    Even though the US's real GDP growth rate has recently been going downtrend, thanks to the US Fed's higher-for-longer rate-hiking cycle, it's now still higher than the country's potential growth rate (perhaps mostly due to the unabated deficit spending of the current Biden administration), thereby causing a positive production gap and hence an overheating domestic economy.
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    - vic lai Jul 19, 2023
      
      The US's second-quarter GDP growth rate this year hasn't come out yet, while the first-quarter rate has just been revised upward from 1.1% to 2%.
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      But, just a casual look at the US's industrial electricity usage in the first quarter this year, which was a negative growth of 2.1%, induces some people to doubt the veracity of the announced print, especially when this figure is compared with China's same-period figure of positive 4.2%.
      With a negative growth rate of electricity usage, how can the US economy keep on growing ?
      Perhaps that US figure, like China's counterpart, was also faked, since it had possibly been artificially boosted by the country's numerous solicitor fees, medical insurance fees, consultancy fees and the like in the service sector.
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      The US Fed will possibly not start her rate-cutting cycle this year (and may start it not earlier than the middle of next year), and will further raise the policy interest rate one or 2 times this year, attracting further capital inflow from the foreign countries.
      It's said that the US Fed will not stop her current tightening policies until the economies of some EM countries eventually crumble, so that the Wall Street scavengers can once again madly bargain-hunt there.
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      - vic lai Jul 20, 2023
        
        According to past US statistics, the number of months from yield curve inversion (10YR3M Spread) to recession start was
        (i) 1970 recession : 12 months,
        (ii) 1974 recession : 6 months,
        (iii) 1980 recession : 14 months,
        (iv) 1990 recession : 14 months,
        (v) 2000 recession : 9 months,
        (vi) 2008 recession : 17 months,
        (vii) 2020 recession : 10 months.
        The arithmetic mean of all the above is 12 months or a year, which means the coming US recession, if any, may more or less start in October this year.
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