The Economy: Recovering, Or Ready To Plunge Again?

Alan Blinder's recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal extolled the imminent blast-off for the US economy of Samuelson's accelerator-multiplier effect.

Blinder didn't credit the retired MIT Nobel Economist in his editorial, but he provided the math to explain how housing and autos, having plunged so low, will kick-start the US economy in the next quarter just by being non-negative.

Dick Hoey, whom I knew briefly at EF Hutton many years ago, was saying the same things on CNBC yesterday afternoon.

Then we have a very detailed, persuasive editorial in last Tuesday's Journal, written by Mort Zuckerman. In his piece, the chairman of US News & World Report, and head of Boston Properties, dwells almost exclusively on the under-representative current unemployment rate of 9.5%.

Zuckerman lists 10 separate, but related points, all of which provide evidence that the demand side of the economy, via consumer spending, will almost certainly be much lower in the next few years than most pundits, analysts and economists realize.

Among his points, Zuckerman cites: underemployed, those no longer even looking for work, workers 'employed' but on unpaid leave, part-time workers who were once full-time, shorter work weeks among the employed, a 65% capacity utilization at US factories, and, finally, the longest average length of official unemployment- 24.5 weeks- since this data item has been tracked back in 1948.

For good measure, Zuckerman adds that low consumer confidence and high debt levels have increased the savings rate which will, of course, dampen any subsequent recovery, as the consumer's 'marginal propensity to consume' will be much lower than in recent years. He laments that now, when a truly job-creating, infrastructure-building federal spending bill would help, it's too late. That's because $787B was allocated for what has been, to date, largely increases in Medicare and other state-based transfer payment programs.

In effect, Zuckerman would conclude that people like Bank of New York's Hoey mistakenly believe that there will be sufficient consumer demand to justify rebuilding inventories, building new cars and houses.

Who's right?

Personally, I'd put my money on Zuckerman. Leaving aside that Dick Hoey was a fixed income manager back in the day, and his BONY/Mellon/Dreyfus bio doesn't exactly laud him as an economic Nobel Laureate, I don't think Hoey is sufficiently observant of the real differences in the effects of the recent recession on the US labor force from those of recessions prior to 1992.

That so-called 'jobless recovery' may well have marked a turning point for the US economy which has not yet been captured in various models and adequately observed by pundits-cum-economists like Hoey. Or even Alan Blinder.

Prior to the 1991-92 recession and recovery, you are looking back to 1982-83, the early Reagan years, now very nearly thirty years ago. For perspective, was the 1960 economy different from that of 1930? Very much so. And the 1980 economy was so radically different from that of 1950, thanks to electronics and technological advances in communications as to make forecasting the former with models of the latter seem laughable.

I suspect that's what is happening now. Those analysts and economists harking back to the early 1980s and using conventional models with estimates of consumer spending and labor growth have missed some important transformations in the US economy of 2009.

I don't think Zuckerman is one of them.