Showing posts with label debt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label debt. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Don't believe what lightweights tell you about debit and deficit

If you’ve gained the impression that in their pre-election budget Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg have gone on a wild, vote-buying cash splash spending spree, leaving us – not to mention our grandchildren – with a string of bigger budget deficits and much increased government debt, you’ve been misled.

Some of it’s simply not true, much of it’s exaggerated and the rest has been misunderstood by people who didn’t do economics at high school. They’re people who are led by their emotions and, when they hear frightening words like “deficit” and “debt”, don’t need to be told we’re all in deep doodoo. They don’t stop to read the details.

Let me give you some of those details, with help from the independent economist Saul Eslake and his first-rate budget analysis.

What would you think if you asked me my salary and I gave you a figure I’d first multiplied by four? You’d think I was big-noting. The politicians do this every budget time to make them sound more generous than they are.

They can do it because the budget shows the cost for the coming financial year, plus “forward estimates” for the following three years. The media go along with it because it quadruples their story’s impressiveness.

They told us the budget involved new spending and tax breaks costing $93 billion “over four years”, when it would have been less misleading to say the new measures will cost the budget about $23 billion a year.

Some have implied the new measures are profligate and motivated by vote-buying. Some measures are, no doubt. But the $3.8 billion a year to fix up our scandal-ridden aged care system? The $2.2 billion a year in increased support for the unemployed? The extra $2 billion a year in infrastructure? The $1.3 billion a year to subsidise apprenticeships? Another $1.3 billion in total to help hard-hit aviation and tourism? An extra $450 million a year on women’s economic security?

The extended tax relief for small business will cost a total of $21 billion in a few years’ time, but then will be clawed back. The “new” tax cut for middle-income earners costing $7.8 billion a year Frydenberg told us about is just a one-year extension of last year’s tax cut.

Doesn’t sound much of a splash to me. The increased subsidy of childcare costs doesn’t start for a year and is about a quarter of what Labor’s promised.

Next, if you’ve gained the impression all this spending will increase the budget deficit and add to the government’s debt, you’ve been misled.

At the time of last year’s delayed budget in October, Eslake points out, the net debt was expected to reach $966 billion by June 2024. In this budget the debt’s now expected to be $46 billion less by then.

How is this possible? It’s possible because the economy has recovered much more strongly than was expected even in October. So tax collections are a lot higher than expected, and dole payments a lot lower.

By design, the government’s new spending takes up most, but not all, of this improvement. The econocrats wouldn’t have thought it smart to withdraw too much of the public sector’s support for the private sector – households and businesses – before the recovery was well established and when unemployment was still so high.

The joke is, the people up in arms about the huge growth in debt are a year late. It was last April when all the damage was done. The pandemic was raging and governments decided to put our heath first and the economy second. They locked down the economy, causing the biggest collapse in the nation’s income since World War II.

But to hold the economy together so it could rebound after the lockdown was lifted, the government spent unprecedented sums on the JobKeeper scheme (that’s $90 billion right there), the JobSeeker supplement and a dozen other temporary programs.

It’s all worked far better than expected, but there’s no denying it’s come at a great cost. Should we have let all those people die of the virus? Should we have let the economy stay flat on its back? The debt panickers weren’t saying that a year ago.

The finances of national governments don’t work the way a family’s do. Eventually, parents die. They know they must have their debts paid off before then.

But though the faces change, governments and the populations they serve never die, they just keep growing. Meaning they – like big businesses – never pay off their debt. It goes down sometimes and up others, but still goes on forever.

What governments do is out-grow their debts, so it shrinks relative to the size of the economy and all the income it generates. That’s how the developed countries got on top of the massive debt they were left with after WWII.

They didn’t pay it back, they outgrew it. And the good news is, interest rates on the public debt are now lower than ever – and won’t be going back up in a hurry.

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Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Banks: bad guys one minute; put-upon credit providers the next

With Scott Morrison hit by a seemingly unending series of headline-making problems, his standard techniques for dealing with them are getting easier to detect. He sees them not so much as policy deficiencies to be rectified as political embarrassments to be “managed” away.

One technique is to tough it out, hoping the media caravan will soon lose interest and move on. When that doesn’t work you give the appearance of responding to the outcry without actually doing much. Call an inquiry of some sort – maybe, if the pressure continues, even three or four different inquiries – then say you can’t act, or even discuss the matter further, until the inquiry has reported many months hence.

I’m finding it hard to avoid the suspicion this is how he’s dealing with the huge – and hugely expensive – problems in aged care. When Four Corners came up with (yet another) expose of the mistreatment of old people in institutional care as the election approached in 2019, he neutralised it as an election issue by promising a royal commission.

The commission’s hearings and interim report confirmed our suspicions that mistreatment was widespread. While releasing the interim report, Morrison announced that quite some millions would be spent on measures that sounded like they should help ease the problem – a bit.

When he released the commission’s final report early this month, he announced more millions of spending on this and that, promising the government’s full response to the commission’s multi-billion-dollar recommendations would be revealed in the May budget.

He seemed open to the idea of using an increase in the Medicare income-tax levy to cover the massive cost, but Treasurer Josh Frydenberg lost little time in hosing down that possibility. Aged care has hardly been mentioned again from that day to this.

Why do I have a terrible feeling that, should aged care not come back on the media agenda between now and budget night, what’s announced will be only a token response to the continuing and worsening problem?

You see a similar trickiness in the government’s response to the widespread complaints about the behaviour of the banks and other financial institutions. Those complaints led to repeated calls for a royal commission.

Malcolm Turnbull and his treasurer, Morrison, went for ages fobbing off these demands – denying there was a problem. But when some government backbenchers threatened to support an opposition motion for an inquiry, Turnbull had no choice but to relent.

The hearings by former High Court judge Kenneth Hayne revealed endless instances of financial “misconduct” and received months of media coverage.

Hayne’s final report lobbed just a few months before the 2019 election. Morrison’s successor as Treasurer, Frydenberg, immediately announced he was “taking action on all 76 recommendations” and “going further”. This apparently wholehearted acceptance of the recommendations defused bank misconduct as an issue in the election campaign.

It’s now two years since Frydenberg’s commitment. Professor Kevin Davis, of Melbourne University, says the government has yet to implement 44 of the commission’s recommendations, and has turned its back on five key reforms.

Frydenberg initially accepted the proposal to outlaw the practice of mortgage brokers being remunerated by the lending banks with a commission based on a percentage of the size of the loan. But, after industry lobbying, Frydenberg let it stand, replacing it with an obligation that brokers act in the best interests of their customers.

Hayne’s very first recommendation was that the existing “responsible lending obligation” – making it illegal to offer credit that was unsuitable for a consumer based on their needs and capacity to make payments – not be changed.

But, last September, Frydenberg announced that this obligation had been costly to lenders and was delaying the approval of loans. The present principle of “lender beware” would be replaced with a “borrower responsibility”. Legislation to bring this about is awaiting approval in the Senate.

It’s a “reform” that’s been welcomed by the banks, but vigorously opposed by Davis, various legal academics, consumer groups, the Financial Rights Legal Centre, Financial Counselling Australia – and my co-religionists at the Salvos, whose free Moneycare financial counselling service is offered at about 85 sites across Australia.

Like all the critics, the Salvos note the “asymmetry of knowledge and power” between consumers and the providers of financial services. The credit products offered have become increasingly complex and opaque. “Our experience is that understanding these products requires an above average level of literacy and financial literacy,” they say.

The proposed reduction in the scope of responsible lending obligations would reduce regulatory oversight and thus increase the risks for borrowers. “Our overwhelming evidence [from] delivering financial counselling in Australia for the past 30 years is that credit remains too easily accessible and that this has devastating consequences for the people we support . . .

“For people already experiencing, or at risk of, financial hardship, easier access to credit may mean they will get caught in a cycle of increasing debt. This has significant implications for physical and mental health.”

I fear the Salvos are right.

Read more >>

Wednesday, October 7, 2020

Morrison's new goal: tax cuts adding to higher debt and deficit

This is the hanged-for-a-sheep-rather-than-a-lamb budget. Realising the coronacession means it will be ages before he can make good his premature claim to have the budget Back in Black, Scott Morrison has decided to go for broke (if you'll excuse the expression).

Many people have been anxious to see just how big Josh Frydenberg's expected budget deficit will be (a record $213 billion, dwarfing anything produced by the free-spending Kevin Rudd) and how much public debt it will leave us with (almost a net $1 trillion by June 2024, and continuing to grow every year until at least June 2031).

Mr Frydenberg is right to say that, if we want to get the economy moving and unemployment falling, he has no choice but to spend in giant licks. More concerning is whether all the money added to the debt has been chosen to deliver the greatest possible gain in jobs.

That's the problem. It hasn't. Although the plan to subsidise the wages of newly employed young people in their first year gets a big tick, the brought-forward and back-dated tax cut that is the centrepiece of this budget is among the least effective ways to create jobs.

That's because much evidence shows that a high proportion of tax cuts is saved rather than spent. This is particularly likely at present, when so many people fear they may be next to lose their job.

To be fair, Mr Frydenberg has not brought forward the third stage of the tax plan – still scheduled for July 2024 – which is slanted heavily in of favour high earners. It's well established that high income-earners save a higher proportion of tax cuts than lower income-earners.

If you remember, when stage one of these tax cuts allowed people getting the new "low and middle income tax offset" to receive a flat $1080 refund in July and August last year, Mr Frydenberg confidently predicted it would give a fillip to retail sales. Didn't happen.

Summarising, the new tax cut will be worth the equivalent of almost $21 a week to those earning between $50,000 and $90,000 a year, but about $47 a week to those earning more than $120,000 a year.

Mr Frydenberg justifies the tax cut by saying "we believe people should keep more of what they earn". Fine. But such a belief has little to do with this budget's stated goal, nor the justification for adding to the deficit: it's "all about jobs".

This tax cut is much more about political popularity than getting the economy out of recession.

The government has made much of its efforts to limit the rise in deficits and debt by keeping new spending measures temporary. But the cost of the changed tax scales will roll on forever.

When the Economic Society of Australia surveyed 49 leading economists recently, asking them to choose the four programs that would be most effective in supporting recovery, only 10 of them nominated bringing forward the legislated tax cuts.

So what measures did they favour? More than half wanted spending on social housing (which creates employment in the housing industry, adds to our stock of homes and helps the disadvantaged).

Half the economists wanted a permanent increase in JobSeeker unemployment benefits (because $40 a day is below the poverty line and any increase is almost certain to be spent).

But those two top preferences have been ignored in this budget.

By contrast, some of the measures that are in the budget didn't raise much enthusiasm. An expanded investment allowance for business got support from only 29 per cent of the economists – presumably because it wasn't expected to be very effective. At best, it's likely to draw forward some of the spending on capital equipment that would have been spent in later years.

And even spending on infrastructure projects was preferred by only 20 of the 49 economists – perhaps because too much of it goes on wasteful projects.

The government's two main stimulus measures – the JobKeeper wage subsidy and the JobSeeker temporary supplement – have been most successful in breaking the economy's fall.

But they were cut back from the end of September, and this budget doesn't change the plan to end them from March and December respectively.

If the measures in the budget prove insufficient to fill the gap their withdrawal leaves, and so keep the recovery progressing, it will be because the government has been too quick to limit its spending and replace it with tax cuts.

Read more >>

Monday, July 27, 2020

Why we don't need to panic over big budget deficits

Despite the great majority of economists – including Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe – telling Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg not to worry too much about a record blowout in the budget deficit at a time of a once-in-a-100-year pandemic, it’s clear many people – including many members of the Parliamentary Liberal Party – are very worried.

So much so, they think it’s a more pressing problem than sky-high unemployment. In consequence, the government’s nerve has cracked. The unspoken message from last week’s policy announcements and budget update was: we’re prepared to spend a further $22 billion to turn the feared "fiscal cliff" in September into a less precipitous fall, but after that all you’ll get to help the economy is the airy objectives and cold comfort of "reform".

When the Economic Society of Australia polled 50 leading economists recently, 88 per cent of them agreed that governments should provide ongoing budgetary support to boost demand during the economic crisis and recovery, "even if it means a substantial increase in public debt".

In a speech last week, Lowe said the budget blowout might seem quite a change to people used to low budget deficits and low levels of public debt. "But this is a change that is entirely manageable and affordable and it’s the right thing to do in the national interest," he said.

So why don’t most economists share the worries of so many conservative politicians, headline writers and ordinary citizens? Five reasons.

The first is, these are extraordinary times. I’m not sure Frydenberg is right in claiming the pandemic is "without doubt, the biggest shock this country has ever faced," but it’s certainly one of them. And it’s certainly the most economically devastating pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1919.

As we can see even more clearly in countries that have been less than successful than we have in containing the virus, between the direct damage caused by the lockdown and the psychological damage of great fear and uncertainty about what the future holds, the economy has been flattened.

The pandemic will be working to keep the economy down until an effective vaccine is widely available worldwide, which may be several years way. Just as World War I wasn’t all over by Christmas, nor will this be.

It’s thus not surprising that such extraordinary times should be leading to previously unknown levels of government spending, budget deficits and public debt. Except, of course, that nothing we’re likely to do comes anywhere near where we were by the end of World War II.

Second, as AMP Capital’s Dr Shane Oliver has said, "it makes sense for the public sector to borrow from households and businesses at a time when they have cut their spending, and to give the borrowed funds to help those businesses and individuals that need help".

People ask me where will all the money the government’s spending come from? Mainly from other Australians, who have money they’ve saved and want to lend. Others ask, who buys all those government bonds? There’s no shortage of financial institutions keen to buy, starting with your superannuation fund and other fund managers.

So much so that recent offerings have been way oversubscribed, allowing the government to borrow for five years at a yield (interest rate) of just 0.4 per cent, and for 10 years at just 0.9 per cent. With the inflation rate at 1.7 per cent, this means it’s costing us nothing to borrow.

Third, the federal government has run budget deficits in more than 80 per cent of the years since federation. If deficit and debt is such a terrible thing, how come we’re not in debtors’ prison already?

Fourth, just because our latest levels of debt and deficit are high by our standards, doesn’t mean they are by anyone else’s. Relative to the size of our economy, Australia’s net public debt is much smaller than the Eurozone’s, a hell of a lot smaller than the United States’ and almost invisible compared to Japan’s.

That’s why the International Monetary Fund – the outfit responsible for bailing out countries that get too deeply into debt – keeps assuring us we have plenty of "fiscal space". Translation: Why do you Aussies fret so much about so little debt?

Finally, it’s fine to fret about debt, but what’s the alternative? The alternative to using government spending to support the economy until the crisis finally passes is to let it continue shrinking, with more and more people being thrown out of work and businesses failing.

But this wouldn’t get the budget back to balance, it would cut tax collections even further and increase government spending on unemployment benefits, thus worsening the deficit and adding further to the debt. Why would that be a good deal?
Read more >>

Monday, June 29, 2020

Morrison is taking the recovery too cheaply

In theory, recovery from the coronacession will be easier than recoveries usually are. In practice, however, it’s likely to be much harder than usual – something Scott Morrison’s evident reluctance to provide sufficient budgetary stimulus suggests he’s still to realise.

The reasons for hope arise from this recession’s unique cause: it was brought about not by a bust in assets markets (as was the global financial crisis and our recession of the early 1990s) nor by the more usual real-wage explosion and sky-high interest rates (our recessions of the early 1980s and mid-1970s), but by government decree in response to a pandemic.

This makes it an artificial recession, one that happened almost overnight with a non-economic cause. Get the virus under control, dismantle the lockdown and maybe everything soon returns almost to normal.

It was the temporary nature of the lockdown that justified the $70 billion cost of the unprecedented JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme. Preserve the link between employers and their workers for the few months of the lockdown, and maybe most of them eventually return to work as normal.

Note that, even if this doesn’t work out as well as hoped, the money spent still helps to prop up demand. Had we not experimented with JobKeeper, we’d have needed to spend a similar amount on other things.

Because this recession has been so short and (not) sweet, it’s reasonable to expect an early and significant bounce-back in the September quarter. Just how big it is, we shall see. But, in any case, there’s more to a recovery than the size of the bounce-back in the first quarter after the end of the contraction.

And there are at least five reasons why this recovery will face stronger headwinds than most. The first is the absence of further help from the Reserve Bank cutting rates. People forget that our avoidance of the Great Recession in 2009 involved cutting the official interest rate by 4.25
percentage points.

Second, Australia, much more than other advanced economies, has been reliant for much of its economic growth on population growth. But, thanks to the travel bans, Morrison is expecting net overseas migration to fall by a third in the financial year just ending, and by 85 per cent in 2020-21.

Now, unlike most economists, I’m yet to be convinced immigration does anything much to lift our standard of living. And I’m not a believer in growth for growth’s sake. It remains true, however, that our housing industry remains heavily reliant on building new houses to accommodate our growing population. And if Morrison’s HomeBuilder package is supposed to be the answer to the industry’s problem, it’s been dudded.

Third, we’re used to our floating exchange rate acting as an effective shock absorber, floating down when our stressed industries could use more international price competitiveness, and floating up when we need help constraining inflation pressures – as happened during most of the resources boom.

But this time, not so much. With the disruption to our rival Brazilian iron ore producer’s output, world prices are a lot higher than you’d expect at a time of global recession. And with world foreign exchange markets thinking of the Aussie dollar as very much a commodity currency, our exchange rate looks like being higher than otherwise – and higher than would do most to boost our industries’ price competitiveness.

Fourth, the long boom in house prices has left our households heavily indebted, and in no mood to take advantage of record-low interest rates by lashing out with borrowing and spending. The “precautionary motive” always leaves households more inclined to save rather than spend during recessions, but the knowledge of their towering housing debt will probably make them even more cautious than usual.

The idea that bringing forward the government’s remaining two legislated tax cuts could do wonders for demand is delusional. If you wanted the cuts spent rather than saved, you’d aim them at the bottom, not the top.

Finally, although our politicians and econocrats refuse to admit it, our economy – like all the advanced economies – has for most of the past decade been caught in a structural low-growth trap. We can’t get strong growth in consumer spending until we get strong growth in real wages. We can’t get strong growth in business investment until we get strong consumer spending. And we can’t get a strong improvement in the productivity of labour until we get strong business investment.

Meanwhile, the nation’s employers – including even public sector employers - will do what they always do and use the recession, and the fear it engenders in workers, to engineer a fall in real wages. Which will get us even deeper in the low-growth trap.

I fear, however, that Morrison and his loyal lieutenant, Josh Frydenberg, will learn all this the hard way.
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Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Economy's need may run second to Morrison's spending hang-ups

Looking back, Scott Morrison's response to the coronavirus has been masterful on the medical side and, on the economic side, his willingness to spend money cushioning the job-threatening consequences of the lockdown was unstinting. But (and there had to be a but) with the economy's recovery far from assured I fear his nerve may be cracking.

The plain truth is that the only way out of deep recessions is for governments to spend their way out. But for a government as far to the right as Morrison's, spending money with enthusiasm is an unnatural act. It has an ideological objection to government spending which, it believes, is a necessary evil at best, and so should be kept to a minimum.

It claims to be motivated by the pursuit of Jobs and Growth but its "revealed preference", as economists say – not what it says, but what it does – is to prioritise the elimination of debt and deficit.

So great is its aversion to debt that the government is impervious to reason. Interest rates have been so low for so long that governments can borrow for 1 per cent or less. When you allow for an inflation rate of about 2 per cent, this means financial institutions (including your super fund) are willing to pay the government for the privilege of lending to it.

In which case, why not borrow as much as you need? Because that word "debt" just sounds so bad. And that debt will have to be repaid by our children. Actually, it won't be. Governments rarely repay debt. What they mainly do is roll it over while they wait for the economy to outgrow it, with help from inflation.

And ask yourself this: what do you think your kids would prefer to inherit? A bit more public debt or an economy that's been deeply recessed for a decade, with stagnant living standards, little opportunity to get ahead and stories about how much better things were in their parents' day.

Recessions always involve the private sector – businesses and households – contracting and the public sector expanding to take up the slack and get things moving again. In our particular circumstances, six years of weak wage growth and record household housing debt mean consumers have little scope to start spending big.

For their part, businesses won't spend on expansion until they see a reason to. Morrison's notion of incentivising business with investment tax breaks, changes to wage fixing and cuts in red tape is magical thinking.

That leaves it up to the government to keep spending until the private sector has the wherewithal to spend. Without a government-laid foundation, believing in a "business-led recovery" is believing the economy runs on spontaneous combustion.

I suspect Morrison has looked at our prospective budget deficits and taken fright. Paradoxically, although he readily agreed to the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme when told it would cost $130 billion, when Treasury realised it wouldn't take nearly as much to "flatten the curve" as the epidemiologists had led it to expect and so cut the cost to $70 billion, Morrison saw this as a miraculous escape from the sin of profligacy.

The ideologically pure end of his own party started urging him to spend no more. And this week he started talking about the need to find budgetary savings.

This would be completely contrary to the advice he received only last week from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that "there is ample fiscal space to support the economic recovery as needed". This is the OECD's way of saying "if you Aussies think you have a frightening level of debt, you're kidding yourselves". The International Monetary Fund says the same.

The OECD continues: "The scarring effects of unemployment – especially for young workers – should be alleviated through education and training, as well as enhancing job search programs. Firms should continue to be supported ... The authorities should be considering further stimulus that may be needed once existing measures expire ... Such support should focus on improving resilience and social and physical infrastructure, including strengthening the social safety net and investing in energy efficiency and social housing."

To be fair, should Morrison turn from spending to cutting before the economy has fully recovered, he'd be no more disastrously wrong-headed than Britain's David Cameron and other European leaders after the global financial crisis, when they started tightening their budgets too soon and condemned their countries to a decade of weak growth.

You can see Morrison's change of tack in his poorly received HomeBuilder package. Reviving the housing industry is a standard part of the response to every recession, but this is the package you have when you're only pretending to have a package.

It's too small to make much difference and the deadlines for its $25,000 grants are so tight few people are likely to qualify. Glaring by its absence was any mention of spending on social housing.

But this raises another of the Libs' hang-ups. They oppose government spending in general, but spending that helps the needy in particular.
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Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Right now, we need all the government spending we can get

Lying awake in bed last night thinking about our predicament, a frightening insight came to me: the only way out of a recession is to spend your way out. It sounds wrong-headed, but it’s not. It’s just, as economists say, “counter-intuitive”.

Who must do all this spending? In the first instance, the government. And let me tell you, if Scott Morrison lacks the courage to spend as much as is needed – as it seems he may – he’s likely to be kicked out at the next election because we’ll still be languishing in a recession that’s deeper and longer than it needed to be.

The reason spending your way out of trouble strikes us as foolhardy is that we’re used to thinking as individuals. If I and my family tried that solution, we’d soon get ourselves into even deeper trouble. True. But what’s true for the individual isn’t necessarily true for all of us acting together via the government – which we elected to do things on our behalf and to our benefit.

It shouldn’t really surprise us that governments can get away with doing things you and I can’t. That’s partly because the federal government represents 25 million individuals. It’s also because national governments have powers you and I don’t possess: the power to cover the money they spend by imposing taxes on us, and even the power simply to print the money they spend.

This, of course, is what worries Morrison and his ministers about spending big. When governments spend too much they go into deficit and debt, and then they have to raises taxes to cover the deficit and eventually pay off the debt.

But that’s the wrong way to think about it. The right way is the way Morrison has already said we’ll cope with the debt: we’ll grow our way out of it. The trick, however, is that you don’t get the economy back to growing unless you spend enough to get it growing.

Let’s get back to basics. Economic activity is about getting and spending – producing and consuming. We earn incomes by producing goods or services (or, more likely, by helping our employer produce goods or services), then spend most of that income on the goods and services we need to live our lives.

Recessions occur when, for some reason, we stop spending enough to buy all the goods and services being produced. (In the present case, the reason is that, in order to stop the virus spreading, the government ordered non-essential businesses to close their doors, and you and me to stay in our homes and not go out buying things.)

When people stop spending enough to buy all that businesses are producing, those businesses cut back their production. This often involves sacking workers or putting them on short hours. Obviously, people who lose their jobs cut their spending.

Even people who’ve kept their jobs tighten their belts for fear they’ll be next. Optimism evaporates as everyone gets fearful about the future. Rather than spending, people save as much as they can.

The private sector – businesses and households – contracts. To be crude, it starts disappearing up its own fundament. Until someone breaks this vicious circle, the private sector keeps getting smaller and unemployment keeps rising.

Obviously, what’s needed to reverse the cycle is a huge burst of spending. But there’s only one source that spending can come from: the government. The smaller public sector has to rescue the much bigger private sector and get it going again.

This creates a dilemma for people who’ve convinced themselves that government spending is, at best, a necessary evil to be kept to an absolute minimum because, just as dancing leads to sex, government spending leads to me paying higher taxes.

Turns out that government spending does much good and we shouldn’t be so stingy and resentful about the taxes we pay. (If some government spending is wasteful then eliminating waste is what we should be focusing on.)

In any case, provided you spend enough to get the economy growing again, that growth means rising incomes from which to pay tax. As well, once the economy is growing faster than the debt is, it declines relative to the size of the economy; the problem shrinks. We ended World War II with debt hugely higher than today. How did we get it down? That’s how.

You and I are in a hurry to pay down our debt partly because we’re mortal. We need to get it paid before we retire, let alone before we die. Governments, however, need be in no such hurry because they go on forever.

The other reason you and I are in a hurry to repay, of course, is the interest we must keep paying until we do. The higher the rate of interest, the more hurry we should be in. In evidence to a Senate committee last week, Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy advised that the interest rate the government is paying on the 10-year bonds it’s issuing is 1 per cent – less than inflation. Still worried?
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Saturday, May 16, 2020

There's a lot of economic worry about, but here's what matters

If you’re wondering what shape the economy will be in when we come out of lockdown, how the recovery will go – what to worry about and what not to – there are three key issues: the economy and its growth, the budget and its deficit, and unemployment and its consequences.

These three are different but related. The trick is to understand how they’re related. What causes what. The media bombards us with information about them — without pausing to put them into context.

For instance, we hear so much about the budget and its deficit (which adds to the huge amount of debt) that I’m sure some people think the budget is the economy. If only we could get the budget balanced, the economy would be right, right?

No. But you could be forgiven for thinking so because Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, have been saying things that get the two muddled up. They’ve been saying: terribly sorry about what the lockdown's done to the economy, and all the money we’ve had to spend on JobKeeper and JobSeeker and the rest as a consequence, but at least we’d got the economy back in good shape before, through no fault of ours, we were hit by the virus.

But they’re not talking about the economy, they’re talking about the budget. It was the budget they’d finally got back to balance after six years in office and were set to it get back into surplus this year before the virus upset their plans.

They were saying, at least we’d got the budget back in balance before we had to start spending like mad — about $200 billion so far — and going back into (huge) deficit. Trouble is, they’d got the budget back in shape by causing the economy to grow more slowly than it would have. So the economy was in a weak state before the virus hit – which doesn’t sound like a good thing to me.

Huh? Let’s get back to basics. The budget is just a summary of the federal government’s finances: how much money it brings in from taxes and charges, less how much money it puts out in spending on health, education, pensions and the rest.

When it raises and spends equal amounts, its budget is in balance. When it spends more than it raises, its budget is in deficit and this deficiency has to be covered by borrowing. When it raises more than it spends, its budget is in surplus. It will use the surplus to repay money it’s borrowed in earlier years.

The government and its budget are just part (a reasonably small part) of the economy, which consists of all our businesses and our households (you and me) as well as the government (federal, state and local).

The money the government raises in taxes comes from the rest of the economy, whereas the money it spends goes to the rest of the economy. So when the government reduces its deficit (as it has been until now), this means it’s reducing the net amount it’s putting into the private sector, causing its growth to be weaker than otherwise.

This can be a good thing if the private sector is growing too strongly and threatening to worsen inflation. But if the private sector’s growth is weak, as it has been, this pullback by the government will weaken it further – as it has been.

Until now. The response to the virus, with all the lockdown has done to reduce the turnover of businesses and the income of workers, has hit the private sector for six. But all the extra government spending – which has hugely increased the budget deficit – has done much to break the private sector’s fall. That cushioning will make it easier for businesses and workers to get back on their feet.

But here’s the thing: the government’s big spending (plus, don’t forget, the much less income and other taxes we’ll be paying on our greatly reduced incomes) has blown out the budget deficit and will hugely increase the government’s debt.

So, which is the bigger worry? The big increase in the government’s debt, or the big contraction in the economy? I think it’s obvious. It’s the health of the economy that matters most because that’s where all Australians (even the retired) gain their livelihood.

The budget isn’t an end in itself. It’s an instrument – one of the means to the ultimate end of helping Australians have a good life. In recent weeks, we’ve seen the government doing what all governments do: using its budget to protect our lives and livelihoods.

Sure, that will leave us with a lot more deficit and debt. But first things first. What matters most is the health, economic and social wellbeing of the people who constitute “the economy”.

We’ll worry about the debt later. In any case, as I’ll explain another day, the debt isn’t as worrying as it looks. Hint: the lower interest rates are, the less you need to worry about how much you owe — and the less hurry you need to be in to pay it back.

Next, what’s the relationship between the economy’s growth and unemployment, and which matters more? The economy is usually measured by the value of all the goods and services we produce – gross domestic product – during a period, which is also the nation’s income.

The econocrats are expecting real GDP to fall by an unprecedented 10 per cent in the present quarter, but then start growing quite quickly as businesses get back to normal. If that happens, it will be good because it’s goods and services that people are employed to help produce.

So an early return to growth in the economy is good because it gets employment up and unemployment down – which is what matters most if you think people matter more than money.

But here’s the trick: the economy returns to growth a lot earlier than unemployment returns to where it was.
Read more >>

Monday, February 17, 2020

Home ownership has become a devouring monster


Like all the advanced economies, ours has stopped working the way we’re used to. Our obsession with home ownership is a fair part of the problem.

Let’s be clear: I’m a believer in the Great Australian Dream of owning your own home.

But right now, it’s adding to the economic troubles of many countries. I doubt if the preference for home ownership is causing those countries bigger problems than it’s causing us. We have one of the highest rates of household debt to household disposable income (although ours is made to look worse than the others because of our unusual tax breaks for negatively geared property investments).

Like a lot of people who care about the state of the world we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren (my four-year-old grandson is “helping” me as I write this), I was pleased to see the period of spiralling house prices come to an end a few years back and prices start falling.

But, for Sydney and Melbourne, this sorely needed correction came to an end last year, after three interest-rate cuts and a change in prudential lending rules saw prices resumed their upward climb.

If we can’t cut interest rates a little without an upsurge in borrowing causing us to resume bidding up house prices, we’ve got a problem. Our household debt is at near-record levels, but let’s add to it.

Meanwhile, when you add falling house prices to the economy’s deeper problem of protracted weak wage growth, many home buyers worry and slash their consumer spending to try to reduce their debt.

That huge household debt will be a drag on our economy for years, keeping growth low. Another issue that isn’t helping is our “new normal” of exceptionally low price and wage inflation.

Until recent years, first-home buyers (or any other borrowers for owner-occupied housing) used to be able to load themselves up to the gunnels in debt and monthly payment obligation, secure in the knowledge that, after a few years of high growth in nominal wages, those repayments (little changed in nominal terms) would be reduced to a much more manageable share of their income.

When such “norms” get stuck in people’s heads, it can take years for people to realise they can no longer be relied on. And for those couples for whom the memo arrived too late, they’ll be struggling to keep up their huge mortgage payments for many more years than they bargained for.

So, on one hand we’ve got the economy being held back by households’ huge level of debt and mortgage payments while, on the other, home ownership is becoming unattainable for an increasing proportion of the population. Those who do eventually manage to attain it have to scrimp on other aspects of their living standards, and often get there so much later in their working lives that their ability to save for retirement is diminished.

The devouring monster we’ve allowed home ownership to become is now eroding what’s long been the fourth leg of retirement income policy. More people are retiring without owning a home, whereas the level of the age pension is kept low under the assumption that almost everyone owns their home outright.

Get it? We’re suffering the wider economic disadvantages of huge household debt without the commensurate advantage of a higher rate of home ownership. The rate of home ownership is actually falling slowly as the oldies with high rates of home ownership are dying and being replaced by newly formed, young households, very few of which can afford a mortgage.

But Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe has injected a note of hope. When measured against the ruler of household income, America’s house prices are much lower than ours. Why? Because of differing policies towards housing. The Yanks have kept land prices lower by allowing more suburban sprawl.

For our part, we’ve had various tax and pension policies seemingly intended to help would-be first-home buyers that, in reality, work to benefit existing home owners. We’ve made housing – whether owner-occupied or rental properties – a tax-preferred investment, not just a means to security of tenure. In the process, we’ve made it too hard for young first-home buyers to afford.

When parents respond to this by recycling to their offspring some of the capital gain they’ve enjoyed on their own property investment (as I have), they’re solving their own children’s affordability problem in a way that keeps house prices high, at the expense of those many young people whose parents aren’t able to help out.

No, if we want to make home ownership more affordable for more young people seeking security of tenure for their home, the answer is to make home ownership less attractive as a form of investment.
Read more >>

Monday, August 5, 2019

Are low interest rates bad? It depends on your perspective


Although media coverage invariably assumes that low interest rates are good news, they’re now so low there’s a backlash, with people pointing to the disadvantages of low rates and getting quite worried.

The fightback is coming at the usual level of complaints from the retired, but also from more sophisticated observers, such as Andrew Ticehurst, of the Nomura banking group, and Dr Stephen Grenville, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank.

It’s understandable that the retired and other savers object to the Reserve Bank’s decisions to cut interest rates and are particularly exercised now rates are so close to zero. Doesn’t the Reserve understand we live on our interest income? Of course it does. So why does it persist?

Interest rates are the price borrowers pay lenders (and, ultimately, savers) for the use of their money for a period. Clearly, cutting rates benefits borrowers at the expense of savers. Central banks cut rates to encourage borrowing and spending because they know the expansionary effect on borrowers greatly exceeds the contractionary effect on savers.

They’ll never be dissuaded from this approach. It’s true interest rates are a “blunt instrument”, but they’re pretty much the only instrument central bankers have.

The retired are on much stronger ground when they insist the government continually updates the “deeming rates” it uses to assess the effect of people’s savings on the amount of their part-pension. It’s surprising the grey lobby has taken so long to wake up to this.

The more sophisticated criticism is that, though market economies thrive on risk-taking (and this is one of the mechanisms by which lower rates are expected to stimulate demand), unduly low rates encourage excessive risk-taking.

Businesses are encouraged to become dangerously highly “geared” or “leveraged” (too dependent on borrowed capital rather than share capital) and firms invest in projects that are high-risk or are profitable only if the cost of borrowing is unrealistically low.

In both cases, the seeds of the next bust are being sown. When rates go back up, firms and projects will fall over and there’ll be hell to pay. Very low rates also allow the survival of “zombie” firms – those that have failed and should have died, but are still living – which tie up resources that could be used more efficiently elsewhere.

Running “ultra-loose monetary policy” at a time when demand is weak can do more to cause dangerous bubbles in share, property and other asset markets than to stimulate markets for goods and services.

There’s merit in these arguments – in normal times. But this brings us to the key question of our times: are our present troubles cyclical or structural? Is it just taking frustratingly long for the economy to return to the old normal, healthy rate of growth, or have so many major (but, as yet, not fully understood) changes occurred in the structure of the economy that a “new normal” has arrived, requiring us to get used to a much lower rate of growth, complete with permanently lower inflation and interest rates?

Treasury is sticking firmly to the view that we’ll soon return to the old normal (thus adding weight to the critics’ worries about the bad seeds being sown by protracted low interest rates) and so is the Reserve – except that governor Philip Lowe’s recent exposition of the reasons for persistent low inflation had a bob each way, nominating cyclical (spare capacity) and structural (effects of digitisation and globalisation) factors.

Remember, interest rates come in two parts: the borrower’s compensation to the lender for the loss of their money’s purchasing power while it’s in the borrower’s hands (the expected inflation rate) plus the borrower’s payment to the lender for the use of their money during the loan (the “real” interest rate).

For as long as inflation stays low, nominal interest rates will stay low – without any real loss to savers, even though their susceptibility to “money illusion” (forgetting to allow for inflation) means many don’t realise it.

And here’s something many people haven’t realised: globally, real interest rates have been falling since the 1970s and are still falling. Harvard’s Lawrence Summers finds in a recent paper that real rates have declined by at least 3 percentage points over the past generation.

Put the two parts together and interest rates – both nominal and real – look like staying low for a long time, whether we like it or not. This says many formerly unprofitable investment projects are now profitable, and budget deficits and high public debt are now much less worrying.

The critics imply the Reserve has great freedom to keep the official interest rate high or low. Not really. It can’t defy economic gravity. It’s the Morrison government that could, at the margin, use its budget to reduce the pressure on the Reserve to cut rates further.
Read more >>

Saturday, June 15, 2019

It's the budget, not interest rates, that must save the economy


According to a leading American economist, there are two views of the way governments should use their budgets ("fiscal policy") in their efforts to manage the macro economy as it moves through the business cycle: the old view – which is now wrong, wrong, wrong – and the new view, which is now right.

In late 2016, not long before he stepped down as chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and returned to his job as an economics professor at Harvard, Jason Furman gave a speech in which he drew just such a comparison.

I tell you about it now because, with our economy slowing sharply, but the Reserve Bank fast running out of room to cut its official interest rate so as to stimulate demand, it’s suddenly become highly relevant.

Furman says the old view has four key principles. First, "discretionary" fiscal policy (that is, explicit government decisions to change taxes or government spending, as opposed to changes that happen automatically as the economy moves through the ups and downs of the cycle) is inferior to "monetary policy" (changes in interest rates) as a tool for trying to stabilise the economy.

This is because, compared with monetary policy, fiscal policy has longer "lags" (delays) in being put into effect, in having its intended effect on the economy and in being reversed once the need for stimulus has passed. Scott Morrison’s inability to get his tax cut through Parliament by July 1, as he promised he could, is a case in point.

Second, even if governments could get their timing right, stimulating the economy just when it’s needed, not after the need has passed, discretionary fiscal stimulus wouldn’t work.

It could be completely ineffective because, according to a wildly theoretical notion called “Ricardian equivalence”, people understand that a tax cut will eventually have to be paid for with higher taxes, so they save their tax cut rather than spending it, in readiness for that day. Yeah, sure.

Or it could be partially ineffective because the increased government borrowing need to cover the budget deficit would force up interest rates and thus "crowd out" some amount of private sector investment spending.

Third, use of the budget to try to boost demand (spending) in the economy, should be done sparingly, if at all, because the main policy priority should be long-run fiscal balance or, as we call it in Oz, "fiscal sustainability" – making sure we don’t end up with too much public debt.

Now, I should explain that this view is the international conventional wisdom that eventually emerged following the advent of "stagflation" in the early 1970s, and the great battle between Keynesians and "monetarists" that ensued.

But Furman adds a fourth principle to the old view of fiscal policy: policymakers foolish enough to ignore the first three principles should at least make sure that any fiscal stimulus is very short run, so as to support the economy before monetary stimulus fully kicks in, thereby minimising the harm done.

Remind you of anything? The package of budgetary measures – the cash splashes and shovel-ready capital works – designed mainly by Treasury’s Dr Ken Henry after the global financial crisis in 2008 which, in combination with a huge cut in interest rates, succeeded in preventing us being caught up in the Great Recession, was carefully calculated to be "timely, targeted and temporary".

Furman says that, today, the tide of expert opinion is shifting to almost the opposite view on all four points.

That’s because of the prolonged aftermath of the financial crisis, the realisation that the neutral level of interest rates has been declining for decades, the better understanding of economic policy from the past eight years, the new empirical research on the impact of fiscal policy, and the financial markets’ relaxed response to large increases in countries’ public debt relative to gross domestic product.

Furman admits that this "new view" of the role of fiscal policy is essentially the "old old view" dating back to the Keynesian orthodoxy that prevailed between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s.

Furman outlines five principles of the new view of fiscal policy. First, it’s often beneficial for fiscal policy to complement monetary policy.

This is because the use of monetary policy is constrained by interest rates being so close to zero.

This isn’t new: the real interest rate has been trending down in many countries since the 1980s and was already quite low before the financial crisis.

Second, in practice, discretionary fiscal policy can be very effective. Experience since the crisis shows that Keynesian “multipliers” (where stimulus of $1 adds more than that to GDP) are a lot bigger than formerly thought.

And when you apply fiscal stimulus at a time when private demand is weak, there's little risk of inflation, so central banks won’t be tempted to respond by tightening monetary policy and lifting interest rates, thus countering the fiscal stimulus.

Third, governments have more “fiscal space” to run deficits and increase debt than formerly believed. The economic growth that fiscal stimulus causes means nominal GDP may grow as fast or faster than the increase in government debt.

Partly because of reform, the ageing of the population won’t be as big a burden on future budgets as formerly thought.

Fourth, if government spending involves investment in needed infrastructure, skills and research and development, it not only adds to demand in the short term, it adds to the economy’s productivity capacity (supply) in the medium term.

And finally, when countries co-ordinate their fiscal stimulus – as they did in their initial response to the financial crisis - the benefit to the world economy becomes much greater. This is because one country’s “leakage” through greater imports is another country’s “injection” through greater exports, and vice versa.

It seems clear Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe understands all this.

But whether the present leaders of Treasury, and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s private advisers, have kept up with the research I wouldn’t be at all sure.
Read more >>

Saturday, June 1, 2019

As you were: getting back to budget surplus no longer urgent

Sometimes, changes in fashion are shocking. In economics, the fashion leaders are top American economists. Their latest fashion call is highly relevant to Australia’s circumstances, but will shock a lot of people: stop worrying so much about debt and deficit.

Among the various big-name economists advocating this change of view, the one who made the biggest splash was Professor Olivier Blanchard, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in his presidential lecture for the American Economic Association early this year.

Blanchard was formerly chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and had a big influence on the advanced economies’ response to the global financial crisis. He offered a simpler version of his lecture in a paper for the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

When governments spend more than they raise in taxes, they cover their deficit by borrowing via the sale of government bonds. If you run deficits for many years, you rack up much debt.

So the conventional wisdom – which we heard from both sides in the election campaign – has long been that, as soon as the economy has recovered from its downturn, governments should raise more in taxes than they spend, so as to run an annual budget surplus. They use the surplus to buy back some of the bonds the government has issued, and thus reduce its debt.

Why do most people – and many economists still - think this is the right thing to do? Because when you borrow money you have to pay interest. The more you borrow, the more interest. And the only way to stop having to pay interest is to repay the debt.

Blanchard calls this the “fiscal [or budgetary] cost”. In the end, interest payments and repayments of principal have to be covered by the higher taxes extracted from people, which may discourage them from working or distort their behaviour in other ways.

But Blanchard realised there may be no fiscal cost because interest rates are so low – especially for governments, whose debt is regarded as risk-free (or “safe” as he calls it). Governments are almost always able to repay their debts because, unlike the rest of us, they can get the money they need by increasing taxes. Or they could simply print more money.

Safe interest rates in the rich economies – including Australia – are so low that, after you allow for inflation, the “real” interest rate may be close to zero, or even negative. If they’re zero they’re costing the government nothing.

If they’re negative, the lender is actually paying the government to borrow from them (once you remember that, because of inflation, the lender will be repaid in dollars with less purchasing power that the dollars originally borrowed).

But that’s not all. A government’s revenue-raising capacity tends to grow in line with the size of the economy – nominal gross domestic product. And nominal GDP almost always grows faster than the nominal safe interest rate.

If so, the government can go on, year after year, paying the interest on its debt and continuing to run a budget deficit - provided it isn’t too big – without its debt growing relative to the size of the economy.

Now, you may object that interest rates are so low at present only because it’s taking so long for the world economy to recover from the global financial crisis and the Great Recession.

But if interest rates are higher in the future, that will be because there’s stronger demand to borrow relative to the supply of funds available, and this, in turn, should mean the economy is also growing at a faster rate.

In any case, Blanchard and others have shown that nominal GDP growth has been higher than the safe interest rate for decades.

So, unless budget deficits are very high, the value of the debt should decline over time as a percentage of GDP. This, in fact, is the way all countries got on top of the massive debts they incurred during World War II.

The second conventional reason for worrying about government debt is the cost to the economy, which Blanchard calls the “welfare cost”. When governments borrow to fund their deficit spending, they compete with private sector borrowers, driving up the interest rates firms have to pay and so “crowding out” some business borrowers.

This causes firms’ investment in renewing or expanding their businesses to be lower than otherwise which, in turn, leads to less economic growth and job creation than otherwise.

(That’s the standard argument, used since Milton Friedman’s day. It’s still relevant to an economy as huge as America but, in an economy as small as ours, it stopped applying after we floated the dollar and our financial markets became integrated with the global market. In Australia, if crowding out happens, it does so via the inflow of borrowed foreign capital causing our exchange rate to be higher than otherwise and thus making our export and import-competing industries less price competitive.)

But Blanchard argues that, in fact, the welfare cost of high government debt is probably small. If the average rate of return on business investment projects is higher than the rate of growth in nominal GDP, this implies there is a cost to the welfare of people in the economy.

On the other hand, if the safe interest rate is lower than the rate of growth in nominal GDP, this implies a welfare benefit from the government debt. Putting the two together implies that the welfare cost, if any, wouldn’t be great.

Blanchard is quick to warn, however, that these arguments don’t “add up to a licence to issue infinite amounts of [government] debt”. Debt and deficit make sense when government spending is countering the weakness in private sector spending. When this fiscal stimulus succeeds in restoring strong growth in private sector spending, governments should pull back to avoid excessive inflation pressure.

And, to be on the safe side, government borrowing should be used mainly to support investment in needed infrastructure, education and healthcare, so it’s adding to the economy’s productive capacity, not just to consumption.
Read more >>

Monday, April 15, 2019

Strong economy? No, but maybe it will be eighth time lucky

Scott Morrison wants the Coalition re-elected because of its superior management of the economy. In Josh Frydenberg’s budget speech he referred to our “strong economy” 14 times. Why? He had to keep saying it because it ain’t true.

But get this: it’s not the government’s fault. It’s happening for reasons far beyond the government’s control. Growth is weak in Australia and throughout the developed world for deep reasons economists don’t yet fully understand.

It’s taken a while to realise this because the econocrats – mainly Treasury, but with the acquiescence of the Reserve Bank - either can’t or won’t accept its truth. They’ve gone for eight budgets in a row forecasting an early return to strong growth.

And for seven years in a row they’ve been way off. But so great is their certainty that nothing fundamental has changed, they’ve fronted up with yet another forecast that this year will be different. This year we'll reach lift-off.

It may not be entirely coincidental that, the longer Treasury dwells in the land of hope-springs-eternal, the more it gives its political masters the budget numbers they crave: ones showing the budget deficit soon returning to surplus and staying in surplus as the net debt falls to zero.

In what follows, I’ll ignore Treasury’s cute distinction between “forecasts” and “projections”. Sorry, guys, you’ve played that card too many times.

It’s a key part of the way you’ve misled the public, your political masters, economists and probably even yourselves, that everything’s going fine and will soon be back to normal. It’s part of the reason the net debt’s been allowed to double under this government – we kept being told it wasn’t happening.

When laughing-stock Wayne Swan began his 2012 budget speech promising four budget surpluses in a row, this was based on Treasury’s forecast that real gross domestic product would grow by 3.25 per cent in 2012-13, and then by 3 per cent in each of the three following years.

The 3.25 per cent turned out to be 2.6 per cent, then another 2.6 per cent, 2.3 per cent and 2.8 per cent.

After such an embarrassing stuff-up, you’d think Treasury might have had a rethink. Not a bit of it. Just two budgets later – this government’s first - it had the economy’s growth accelerating over the forward estimates not to 3 per cent, but 3.5 per cent. The first of these turned out to be 2.3 per cent and the next one, 2.8 per cent.

In the 2016 budget, Treasury took a bit of a pull and reverted to forecasting recoveries to no more than 3 per cent growth.

In this month’s budget, Treasury has us growing by only 2.25 per cent in the year just ending. But not to worry. In the coming year it will strengthen to 2.75 per cent, and be back to 3 per cent in the second last year of the forward estimates, where it will stay in 2022-23.

It’s a similar story with what’s become the key problem component of GDP, wages. In Swan’s ill-fated budget, the wage price index was forecast to grow by 3.75 per cent in the budget year and the year following. Turned out to be 2.9 per cent and 2.5 per cent.

The following year’s budget – Swan’s last – put expected wage growth in 2014-15 at 3.5 per cent. Turned out to be 2.3 per cent. Treasury’s first guess for 2017-18 was 3 per cent. Came in at 2.1 per cent.

Treasury’s response to its repeated over-forecasting is just to push the ETA of the return to strong growth out another year. Nothing fundamental in the economy has changed, nothing’s wrong with the forecasting method, it’s just taking a bit longer than we thought. This time we’ll be right.

But, you may object, if the economy’s remained so weak for so long, how come growth in employment has been strong since early 2017 and unemployment has slowly fallen to 5 per cent?

Because of high levels of immigration – high even by our standards, and unmatched by the other rich countries – and because the under-employment rate was worsening until recently.

Much of the jobs growth has come from federal government spending on rolling out the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and state government spending on infrastructure. After all, public sector consumption and investment spending accounted for more than half the surprisingly weak GDP growth of 2.3 per cent over calendar 2018.

Remember this: a strong, healthy economy is one where demand is always threatening to push inflation above the target zone. Our inflation rate's been below the target for three years.

And this amazing fact: the world real long-term interest rate has been falling for years and is now at zero or below. That’s a sign of strong growth?

It’s time Treasury and the Reserve stopped kidding themselves – and us.
Read more >>

Monday, April 8, 2019

Frydenberg's budget: if it looks too good to be true . . .

What a wonderful world we live in now our politicians have discovered the cure for opportunity cost. In his first budget, Josh Frydenberg is doing a Gladys: he wants us to believe “we can have it all”.

Over the next 10 years, he can give us: tax cuts worth $302 billion, new infrastructure worth $100 billion, sundry other goodies, and a budget that’s back in the black and stays there, so that the net debt falls to zero. Yeah? How?

But first, a flashback. Labor’s Wayne Swan ended up a laughing stock after he began his 2012 budget speech with the immortal words: “The four years of surpluses I announce tonight . . . this budget delivers a surplus this coming year, on time, as promised, and surpluses each year after that, strengthening over time.”

Here's what Frydenberg said seven years later: “Tonight, I am pleased to announce a budget surplus of $7.1 billion . . . In 2020-21, a surplus of $11 billion. In 2021-22, a surplus of $17.8 billion. In 2012-23, a surplus of $9.2 billion. A total of $45 billion of surpluses over the next four years.”

Oh dear. This year even the media knew not to fall into their usual trap of treating the government’s estimate of next year’s budget balance as an already accomplished fact. Actually, we won’t know the “actual” for another 18 months.

But, as usual, the media took little notice of the expected budget balance for the year just ending – a truth the Finance Department’s creative accountants have long exploited to improve the new year’s expected balance at the expense of the old year’s.

Some have questioned why Frydenberg didn’t try harder to turn the old year’s small deficit into a small surplus so that, should the Coalition lose the election, it would have avoided going into the history books as a government that was in power for six years without ever recording a surplus.

Short answer: it couldn’t afford to. Reading the budget papers’ fine print makes it clear the creative department had to put in much furniture shifting to come up with the predicted surplus of $7.1 billion – an amount Frydenberg has been able to assert is “substantial” rather than “wafer thin”.

Think about this: in the old year, government spending is expected to leap by 4.9 per cent in real terms, whereas in the new year it will grow by just 0.1 per cent real. Do you reckon that discontinuity happened by chance?

My colleague Shane Wright has noted the government’s decision to bring forward to the old year $1.3 billion in grants to local councils due to be made in the new year. He could have added that two new one-off cash grants, one to help recipients of residential aged care and another to help pensioners with their energy bills, with a total cost approaching $700 million, will be paid in the old year rather than the new.

The government’s been promising to have the budget “back in the black” by 2019-20 since Joe Hockey’s time. And for some years has been “reprofiling” the timing of payments and receipts to ensure this target is met.

Wright reminds us that a change in the timing of tobacco excise collections announced in last year’s budget will, purely by chance, yield a one-off boost of several billions in the new financial year.

Why are we so anxious to get the budget back in black? Because we want to start reducing the government’s debt. Trouble is, since Peter Costello’s day, successive treasurers have drawn our attention to the underlying cash deficit and away from the ironically named “headline” cash deficit.

That’s a problem because it’s actually the higher headline deficit that has to be funded by borrowing – or, if it’s in surplus, can be used to pay off debt. Guess what? The budget estimates that we’ll still be in headline deficit of $4.4 billion in the coming year, and won’t be in surplus until 2021-22.

The discrepancy is explained mainly by successive governments using an accounting loophole to exclude their spending on the NBN, the second Sydney airport, the inland railway and other projects from the underlying deficit.

Even so, Frydenberg assures us the government’s net debt will have been fully repaid by June 2030 – and he has a lovely graph that proves it. How is our path to a debtless Nirvana achieved?

By assuming that government spending grows with almost unprecedented slowness despite the ageing of the population, that the economy grows strongly for another 10 years without missing a beat and with productivity improving each year at a rate faster than we’ve achieved in decades, and – get this – that the government’s financial assets will grow by almost 3 percentage points to 12.8 per cent of gross domestic product.

When it comes to creativity, Australia’s politicians are second to none.
Read more >>

Monday, April 1, 2019

The budget's getting better, but the economy's getting worse

Why would a government that boasts of its superior economic management be entering an election campaign with a budget warning of harder economic times ahead? Because it has no choice.

It will turn this admission of a bleaker economic outlook – with a slowdown in the global economy and, domestically, the risk that falling house prices could further weaken consumer spending – into a warning that now is just the wrong time to turn the economy over to those bunglers in the Labor Party, but this will be making the best of a bad deal.

There’s nothing new about a big give-away pre-election budget, but the budget we’ll see on Tuesday night will be different in several respects. For one thing, it’s not often you get a full budget that’s timed to be the kick-off of a six-week election campaign.

It will be more like an election policy speech than a budget, since none of its measures will have been legislated, let alone put into effect. Unless the Coalition wins, it’s a budget we’ll never hear of again.

For another thing, it’s reasonable to expect that strong economies and strong budgets go together, as do weak economies and weak budgets. The state of economy determines the state of the budget balance.

Not this time. As Deloitte Access Economics’ Chris Richardson has observed, “the economy is getting worse, but the budget is getting better”. Let’s start with the budget.

Politically, this budget is built on a fiction: that its centrepiece, a further round of tax cuts (and possibly one-off cash grants to pensioners) on top of last year’s three-stage, seven-year tax cuts costing $144 billion over 10 years, is the fruit of the government’s success in returning the budget to surplus, not a sign of its political desperation.

In truth, the government’s budgetary record is hardly anything to boast about, particularly when you remember the confident promises it made while in opposition about how quickly and easily it could eliminate “debt and deficit”.

The deficit may be gone, but there's still a lot of debt - which the Coalition seems in no hurry to pay back.

We know the government will budget for a decent surplus in the coming financial year, but it’s so close to balance in the present year that it would take only minor creative accounting to produce a “surprise” surplus a year earlier than promised.

When you remember how close to balance Labor’s Wayne Swan got in 2012-13, however, it’s surprising it’s taken the Coalition all of two terms to get us to where we now are.

You can blame this on lack of political will, but it’s now more apparent than it has been that the delay is a product of the economy’s slowness to recover from the Great Recession we supposedly didn’t have.

Even since Swan’s day, the econocrats – including the Reserve Bank – have each year been forecasting an early return to strong economic growth and a greatly improved budget balance.

And, each year, their forecasts have proved way too optimistic, particularly for a return to strong wage growth. A return to economic business as usual has repeatedly eluded us.

It’s not the econocrats’ fault, it’s the slowness of all of us to realise that the “secular stagnation” that’s dogged the United States and the other advanced economies is also dogging us. But with the economy’s unexpected slowing to growth of just 2.3 per cent over 2018 – or 0.7 per cent when you subtract population growth – it’s now a lot harder not to realise.

Few remember that Tony Abbott’s ill-fated first budget in 2014 was carefully designed to do little to reduce the budget deficit for the first three years because the economy was still too weak withstand a move to contractionary fiscal policy.

The surprising fact is, little has changed in all the years since then. This is the macro-economic justification for Tuesday’s purely politically motivated announcement of further tax cuts. The economy’s still too weak to withstand contractionary fiscal policy as the budget heads into surplusland.

But, in that case, how have we finally got back to surplus? Partly, through surprisingly limited real growth in government spending. But, mainly, through years of bracket creep, the exhaustion of companies’ prior tax losses, more effective anti-avoidance measures and, above all, the good luck of a (probably temporary) recovery in coal and iron ore prices and, thus, mining company profits.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will be hoping to convince us the budget improvement is lasting, but the weak economy is temporary. It’s more likely to be the other way round.
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Monday, December 31, 2018

Find parenting tough? Be glad you're not American

I have a news flash: being a grandad beats being a parent. Parenting is now a much tougher gig, whereas grandparenting is all care and no responsibility. And it’s a lot cheaper.

These thoughts are prompted by an article in the New York Times, in which Claire Cain Miller writes that parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding than it used to be.

“Over just a couple of generations,” she writes, “parents have greatly increased the amount of time, attention and money they put into raising children. Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.”

(How does she know how much time mothers spend on their kids? Because the US government conducts regular surveys of how people use their time. We used to do so too, but have since decided we can’t afford to keep it up. Great decision, guys.)

“The amount of money parents spend on children, which used to peak when they were in high school, is now highest when they are under 6 and over 18 and into their mid-20s,” she writes.

The most momentous social change in my lifetime came sometime in the 1960s when Australia’s parents decided (as did parents in most advanced economies) that their daughters were just as entitled to a good education as their sons.

That simple attitudinal change has had huge economic and social ramifications, to which we and our governments are yet to fully adjust.

These days, most kids go to year 12, and most of those go on to uni. But girls outnumber boys in year 12 and at uni. When girls (and their parents and the taxpayer) have invested so much time and money in attaining a good education, it’s hardly surprising most of them want to put that education to work, so to speak, to gain the monetary reward but also to gain more intellectual (and social) stimulation than they would staying at home.

This “economic emancipation of women” has greatly increased the rate at which women participate in the (paid) labour force, making Australians a lot more prosperous, including by creating a lot of jobs for women performing services most women formerly performed for themselves at home, such as childcare.

The rise of the two-income family is one factor contributing to higher house prices. Governments have had to do a lot of work (and spend a lot of money) renovating the institutions of the labour market which, over the centuries, were designed exclusively to meet the needs of male breadwinners.

They’ve had to spend a lot more on high school and university education, legislate to ensure women (and later men) keep their places when they go on parental leave, receive at least some payment while on that leave, and receive big subsidies for a greatly expanded and heavily regulated system of childcare – in which childcare workers are better trained and much better paid.

Now there are strengthening efforts to ensure women get a much bigger share of the top jobs (with pay equal to the top men) – including in parliament.

Meanwhile, however, the nature of parenting has changed. Two-income families have more money to spend on fewer kids, and spend it they do – partly, I suspect, because mothers feel guilty about the time they don’t spend with their kids (I’m not saying they should, just that many do).

Parents, mainly mothers, put much time and money into taking their kids to after-school sporting and cultural training and (particularly in NSW) exam coaching. Many imagine sending their kids to expensive private schools will buy them a better education.

We’ve entered the era of “intensive parenting”, which brings us to Miller’s point that modern American mothers spend just as much time parenting as their stay-at-home mothers or grandmothers did. They just do different things.

As yet, however, it’s not nearly as bad in Oz as it is in the US. The gap between rich and poor has widened so much in America (with a bigger cost and status gap between government-funded universities and private Ivy-League colleges), that parents worry their kids won’t be able to live as well their parents did. In the States, parenting has become a lot more competitive.

Nor is it nearly as true here that children are most expensive before they get to school and after they leave it and head to uni. Our childcare is much more heavily subsidised than America’s. And our HECS-HELP “income-contingent loans” for uni tuition fees are much more concessional than what the Yanks do.

We have no need to worry about our kids being loaded up with HECS debt.
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Monday, September 17, 2018

Long way to go to get banks back in their box

Have we learnt from the mistakes of the global financial crisis, now 10 years ago? Yes, but not nearly as much as we should have.

Of course, the answer is different for the Americans and the other major advanced economies to what it is for us, who managed to avoid bank failures and the Great Recession.

Globally, much has been done under the Basel rules to strengthen requirements for banks to hold more capital and liquidity, reducing the likelihood of them getting themselves into difficulties.

It would be naive, however, to imagine this has eliminated the possibility of any future financial crisis. Recurring financial crises are a feature of capitalist economies through the centuries.

All we can do is work on reducing their frequency and severity. On that score, the rich countries could have done a better job of rationalising the division of responsibility between the various buck-passing authorities supposed to be regulating their financial system.

The root cause of the GFC was ideological: the belief that the more lightly regulated the banks and other financial players were, the better they’d serve the wider economy’s interests, allied with the belief that their greater freedom wouldn’t tempt them to take excessive risks because that would be contrary to their interests.

Wrong. This badly misread the perverse incentives bank executives faced – heads I win big bonuses; tails my shareholders do their dough – and the way the heat of competition can induce business people to do things they know they shouldn’t, not to mention the “moral hazard” of knowing that, should the worst come to the worst, the government will have no choice but to bail us out.

As actually happened. In the North Atlantic economies, politicians and central bankers did the right thing in rescuing failing banks. Had they not, the whole financial system would have collapsed and the loss of wealth and employment would have been many times greater than it was.

But don’t try telling that to a public that watched governments racking up billions in debt to save banks and bankers, who then proceeded to turn out on the street people who could no longer afford the mortgages they should never have been granted.

The US authorities’ mistake was failing to draw a clear distinction between saving banks to protect their customers and stop the system collapsing, and punishing the failed banks’ managers and shareholders for screwing up.

Why didn’t they? In short, because the banks are too powerful politically.

Which brings us to Australia’s response to the GFC and how we escaped the Great Recession. Our big banks didn’t fall over because our econocrats never believed the banks wouldn’t be silly enough to take risks that could endanger their survival. Our banks didn’t buy toxic assets because our prudential supervisors wouldn’t let ‘em.

That didn’t stop the GFC dealing a blow to business and consumer confidence, such that real gross domestic product contracted by 0.5 per cent in December quarter 2008. That we avoided recession is thanks to the quick action of the Reserve Bank in slashing interest rates and the Rudd government in applying huge fiscal stimulus, which stopped the economy unravelling.

At another level, however, the econocrats did believe the banks should be lightly regulated in their relations with customers, and could be trusted not to mistreat them. Outfits such as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission had their funding cut and were given the nod not to be overactive.

The absence of a crash meant our governments didn’t learn that, in the non-textbook world, market forces can cause, as well as limit, the mistreatment of customers. Our own banks’ great political influence reinforced this naivety, prompting governments to wave aside the mounting evidence of bank misconduct and the public’s mounting disquiet and distrust.

So, in a sense, the banking royal commission is the product of our earlier failure to learn what we should have from the GFC.

But there’s a much broader lesson we’ve yet to learn from the crisis, one that applies to all the advanced economies. It’s that the banking and “financial services” sector is far bigger than we need, is bloated by rent-seeking, involves many times more trading between banks (a form of gambling) than trading between banks and real-economy customers, and is thus a waste of economic resources.

When financial services’ share of our economy (and most other advanced countries’) was expanding rapidly in the decades preceding the crisis, economists told us we were benefiting from financial innovation and advances in the management of financial risk.

The GFC revealed that rationale as about 95 per cent bulldust. To misquote Keynes, the economy would be better off if most of the people making big bucks in finance got useful jobs such as being dentists.
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Saturday, September 15, 2018

Morrison optimistic we’ll get much bracket creep

The mystery revealed. Consider this: how does the Morrison government cut income and company taxes and avoid big cuts in government spending, but still project ever-rising budget surpluses and ever-falling net public debt over the next decade?

With publication of the Parliamentary Budget Office’s report on the May budget’s medium-term projections, we now know. Short answer: by assuming loads more bracket creep between now and then.

You may remember that, at the time of budget, I was highly critical of the rosy forecasts and assumptions used in the budget’s “forward estimates” from 2018-19 to 2021-22, and then in its “medium-term projections” out for a further seven years to 2028-29.

They showed the budget’s underlying cash balance returning to a tiny surplus in 2019-20, then the surplus growing steadily to about 1.3 per cent of gross domestic product by the end of the decade.

As a consequence, the government’s net debt would peak in June this year at 18.6 per cent of GDP, then fall sharply to just 3 per cent in 2028-29 as the annual surpluses were used to repay debt.

There you go. Big cuts in company tax and a plan for three cuts in income tax, but we’ll soon be back in the black and eliminating the debt. I thought then it sounded too good to be true.

The budget office, which is independent of the government, is required by its Act to accept the government’s forecasts and macro-economy assumptions for its projections. But the budget papers gave no details of how, according to the government’s projections, the budget surplus would grow from 0.8 per cent of GDP in 2021-22 to 1.3 per cent in 2028-29.

This is what the office’s report tells us. It does so using its own modelling of each of the main taxes and 23 big spending programs, while sticking to the government’s macro-economy assumptions.

The report’s projections show total receipts ending the seven years where they began, at 25.5 per cent of GDP, while total spending grows more slowly than GDP so that it falls from 24.7 per cent to 24.1 per cent.

This implies that all the projected improvement in the budget surplus is expected to come from many years of amazingly disciplined spending restraint. But such a conclusion misses an obvious question: how can total receipts stay growing as fast as the economy is projected to grow when the government is planning to cut the rate of company tax by a sixth (from 30 to 25 per cent) and have three cuts in income tax?

Ah, that’s the report’s big reveal. Its projections show company tax collections declining as a proportion of GDP and “other receipts” also declining, but with this being exactly offset by the growth in income tax collections.

And that would be made possible by the fiscal magic of bracket creep. Remember bracket creep? It was the justification for the tax cuts and, according to then-treasurer Scott Morrison, the tax cuts would “eliminate bracket creep for the middle class”.

Or not. Turns out, according to the report’s projections, there’ll be so much continuing bracket creep as to more than wipe out the benefit from the promised tax cuts.

Taken over the full 10 years – and remembering that the first of the tax cuts began in July this year - income tax collections are projected to rise from 11.2 per cent to 12.5 per cent as a proportion of GDP, a huge jump of 1.3 percentage points.

Over the same decade, the average tax rate across all taxpayers is projected to rise from 22.9¢ in every dollar to 25.2¢. But here’s another important revelation by the report: some people do much better from the tax cuts than others, while bracket creep doesn’t affect everyone equally, either.

The report ranks everyone paying income tax according to their income, then divides them into five groups of about 2.9 million each - “quintiles” – from lowest to highest. It then looks at the way the average tax rate in each quintile is affected by the tax cut and by bracket creep. It looks at the change from 2017-18 to 2026-27.

On average, the three-stage tax plan will cut the average tax rate paid by people in the bottom quintile by just 0.3¢ in the dollar. Those in the second and third quintiles will save 0.9¢, while those in the fourth quintile save 1.1¢ and those in the top quintile save 2.1¢ in every dollar.

(This, BTW, is the proof that the three-stage tax plan does change the progressive income tax scale in a regressive direction, making it significantly less progressive.)

Now, the effect of bracket creep (before allowing for the tax cuts). It raises the bottom quintile’s average tax rate by 1.1¢ in the dollar, then the second and third’s by 5.4¢, but the fourth’s by 3.7¢ and the top quintile’s by just 2.9¢ in the dollar.

Leaving aside the bottom quintile (where most people rely on benefits and earn little income), the big net losers - bracket creep less tax cut – are those in the second and third quintiles. That is, those earning between 30 percentage points below the median income and 10 points above it.

Another name for such people is “low to middle income-earners” – the very people Morrison claimed his cuts were aimed at helping most.

But before you get too steamed up, remember that the budget office is merely exposing the previously hidden implications of the government’s medium-term projection and the rosy assumptions it depends on.

The key assumptions are “above-trend economic growth for much of the period” – which contains a hidden assumption that our record of 27 years without a severe recession will roll on for another 10 – and, in particular, “a return to trend wage growth”.

That is, it will take only a few years before wages are back to growing by 3.5 per cent a year – a percentage point faster than prices – and will stay growing that fast for the duration.

It’s this strong wage growth that does most to produce the bracket creep. So, if you’re not as optimistic about wages grow, you don’t need to be as concerned about bracket creep. By the same token, however, we wouldn’t be making as much progress reducing public debt.
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