Economics, Cycles & Politics

As I listened to this past Friday's dismal job growth numbers and persistent high unemployment, coupled with the prior Friday's dismal GDP growth numbers, it occurred to me that, due to the misleading mythology allowed to grow up around FDR's presidency, the US now seems destined to borrow and spend its way to ruin thanks to empirically discredited Keynesian economic policies.

Let's go back to basic macroeconomics. Before Keynes.

Economies move in cycles. If there were no presumption on the part of governments to attempt to repeal the laws of economic cycles, then we'd see what was prevalent in pre-1930s America and elsewhere. Expansions eventually slow as Samuelson's accelerator-multiplier  (see also here) theory kicks in,

"Stunningly simple, it seems to square, for me, at least, with human behavior. As many great economic insights do. Such as fellow Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman's concept of income as a steady, long-term expected value.



Samuelson noted that when growth slows from a higher rate, to a lower one, the mere slackening of growth is transmitted back through what we now would call the supply chain, as a series of demand reductions.


Instead of 10% more materials each year to make my products, this year, I need only 5% more.


My supplier will see a decrease in expected sales. Growth will be half of what it was, and, thus, sales fall below expectations.


While real output is still higher, the gradual cutback in production from expectations results in a contraction, as workers work to produce less. The cycle continues, and the multiplier effect, which, in forward gear, causes economic expansion, is responsible for its contraction when run in reverse.


Seen in this light, recessions which are attributable to simple changes in economic outlook can't really be affected very effectively by one-time fiscal monetary transfers."


Contraction follows expansion, then recession, followed by recovery and, subsequently, expansion.

Before America had the world's reserve currency, was the free world's economic hegemonist, and could basically print or borrow dollars at will, that's how most economies behaved.

Yes, you will now hear Keynesians decry over-savings, or the paradox of thrift, as ex-PIMCO managing director Paul McCulley did in a Bloomberg television interview on Friday afternoon. He now looks like some wild-haired ape-man, with an even more virulent streak of Keynesianism, now that he has no responsibility to PIMCO to appear the least bit economically sane.

But those arguments only appeared as Keynes wrote the General Theory and mistakenly believed that pump-priming, deficit spending, call it what you will, could actually and benevolently affect long term economic conditions positively.

We know now, decades later, that Keynes' theory was simply a sop to human desire for immediate gratification, while ignoring the very real longer-term consequences of debt, higher taxes, and reduced personal economic freedoms.

The linked post from last week, discussing the true nature of WWII as a time of immense savings and lowered consumption, setting the stage of the US economy's rapid growth in the 1950s, puts the lie to McCulley's contention regarding the so-called paradox of thrift.

The reality is that savings are collected and invested, eventually forming capital and underpinning healthy economic growth in the private sector, when natural economic forces are allowed to operate.

I believe that, much like the current mistaken belief by many that cutting social welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, constitutes a broken societal promise, the real question is whether the cure is worse than the disease.

Those social programs will never operate in a sustained fashion, designed, as they all were, with fatal flaws.

So, too, does Keynesian theory on government stimulus exist in a sort of fantasy world of arithmetic, rather than human, behavior. The reality is that the forced spending doesn't create lasting employment or economically-viable industries, but it leaves very real debt and a need for future spending reductions or increased taxes.

What was wrong with simply allowing natural economic cycles to operate in the first place, if the policies which economists have been able to develop as a method of repealing the laws of economic cycles bring side-effects which have ultimately proven worse than the original condition of naturally-occurring phases in economic cycles?

If the US federal government didn't have the monetary power of the world's reserve curency, combined with politicians of both parties who, once elected President, Senator, Representative or Fed Chairman, work furiously to retain those positions, do you really think we'd seriously be spending trillions of borrowed money to try to remove recessions and contractions from our economic cycles?

This folly has been primarly a politically-generated error. The health of the American economy doesn't require Keynesian stimulus spending- only the political careers of federal elected officials.