Category: household liabilities

The Crack in Our Windshield

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May 28, 2023

by Stephen Stofka

This week’s letter is about debt, both public and household. Since 9-11, the public federal debt  has grown five times. The causes include costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a global financial crisis followed by a slow recovery, tax cuts passed under the Trump administration and a once-in-a-century pandemic. Ten percent of the $32 trillion debt was added during the first three months of the pandemic. As the deadline approaches when the government will not be able to make timely payments to vendors and bondholders, we ask why do we have this thing called a debt limit?

Denmark is the only other country in the world to require an approval of a debt limit after the spending has been approved. Their legislators raised the limit so high that it might be a century before the issue comes up again. That leaves only the U.S. in the world where a debt limit debate is a threat. Neither party wants to repeal this century old law because it has the potential to be a powerful negotiating tool. It allows one party to negate or modify the funding priorities that the other party passed in the last legislative session. This is a game of chicken played for high stakes.

Some have criticized the Biden administration for not starting negotiations sooner. However, the House did not put anything on the negotiating table until they passed a bill on April 26th, just a month ago. Given the fractured Republican caucus, it was not clear that Speaker McCarthy could get a bill passed in the House. French Hill, R-Ark., told Roll Call “The whole purpose of this is to compel the president to negotiate — and to demonstrate to Washington, D.C., that Kevin McCarthy has the votes to raise the debt ceiling.” Four House members defected and the vote barely squeaked by at 217-215. Although George Santos, R-NY, is facing prosecution for fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds, McCarthy has allowed him to keep his seat at a time when every vote is crucial.

In 2011, the Republican House balked at raising the limit but the only legislation they could pass was an affirmation that they would not raise the limit without some unspecified spending cuts. Republicans were unable to agree on terms that they could pass in the House. Despite that, President Obama made the mistake of negotiating with Speaker John Boehner, and the two struck a so called Grand Bargain. Lacking anything in written legislation from the House, a bipartisan committee in the Senate came up with a different proposal and Obama tried to negotiate a compromise between the two versions with Boehner. Boehner could not get any changes past the most conservative members in his caucus. According to Politico reporter Tim Alberta (2017), the staff of Jim Jordan, R-OH, had been working secretly with outside groups to sway enough House members to vote against Boehner’s bargain. Jordan apologized but the incident exacerbated tensions between the warring factions within the Republican House. As Vice-President at the time, Biden would have learned a valuable lesson. Get something in writing before starting negotiations.

In contrast to the growth of the public debt, the growth in household debt has decreased since the financial crisis and the housing bust. The chart below compares the two types of debt, public and household, in two 13 year periods before and after the financial crisis.  

From 1994-2007, the public debt (GFDEBTN) grew 5% per year while household debt rose 8.7% annually. As a percent of disposable income, household debt jumped from 78% at the end of 1994 to 124% at the end of 2007. Chiefly responsible was the doubling of mortgage debt (HHMSDODNS) during the first seven years of the 2000s. Lax underwriting standards allowed families with poor credit scores of less than 620 to secure mortgages. Millions lost their homes during the housing bust, banks tightened lending standards and Americans were forced to go on a credit diet.

Since the financial crisis, American household balance sheets have improved. Household debt has grown by only 2.2% per year, about half the growth rate of personal income (DSPI). As a result, debt as a percent of disposable income had fallen to 91% at the end of 2022. The public finances have not fared as well. Although federal tax receipts, including FICA taxes, have increased 8% annually, expenditures and social benefit payments have outpaced tax receipts, resulting in a 7.2% annual increase in the public debt since the end of 2009.  

This week David Leonhardt (2023) with the New York Times presented a graph of voter policy preferences derived from recent polls. The fiscal liberals in both parties outweigh the fiscal conservatives, a trend sure to promote the growth of the public debt. In the 2011 debt limit duel, Republican leaders like Paul Ryan championed privatization of Social Security and cutting back on benefit programs. In the decade since, neither of those proposals are popular with the party’s base. Instead McCarthy will appeal to the social conservatives in the party and insist on work requirements for benefit programs. As Leonhardt notes, the fight for Democrat and Republican swing voters is taking place in the quadrant of voters who are socially conservative but fiscally liberal, nicknamed the “Scaffles.”

The government’s spending becomes household income in some form or another, an accounting identity that joins the growth in public and household debt. Our economy, laws and regulatory framework promote financial crises and exacerbate social problems. Policymakers, economists and social scientists can debate the causes, extent and severity of the problems but acknowledge the reality.  We may discover that our experiment in governance does not scale as our population grows and congregates in cities, as our technology advances and we become accustomed to greater energy use. The spread of mass communication and social media since World War 2 has exacerbated rather than resolved our ideological and cultural differences. The growth of our public debt indicates that we expect more from our government than our economy or political framework is able and willing to pay for. Like a crack in our windshield, it will continue to grow.

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Photo by Ivan Vranić on Unsplash

Keywords: public debt, household debt, mortgage debt, debt limit

Alberta, Tim. 2017. “John Boehner Unchained.” POLITICO Magazine. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/29/john-boehner-trump-house-republican-party-retirement-profile-feature-215741/ (September 27, 2022).

Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (2023, May). Quarterly report on household debt and credit. https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/interactives/householdcredit/data/pdf/HHDC_2023Q1

The various FRED data series used in this post were HHMSDODNS Mortgage Debt, HCCSDODNS Consumer Credit Debt, GFDEBTN Public Debt, DSPI Disposable Personal Income.

Leonhardt, D. (2023, May 25). Ron DeSantis and the “scaffle” vote. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/briefing/ron-desantis.html

Labor and Money Flows

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September 1st, 2013

On this Labor Day weekend, I’ll review some things that caught my attention this past week.

The employment picture has shown steady but slow improvement.  The weekly survey of new unemployment claims continues to show downward movement.  In a survey that is about 13 years old, called the JOLTS, the BLS gathers data on Job Openings, Layoffs and Turnovers.  A component of this survey includes the number of employees who have quit their jobs, referred to as the “JOLTS quit rate.” In the aggregate, it indicates a hive intelligence, the estimation of millions of people about the prospects of getting another job.  Decades ago, researchers asked a number of people to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar.  Each estimate has very small chances of getting close to the actual number, but the average of all estimates was found to be almost exactly the number of jelly beans in the jar.  I don’t know whether this experiment has been replicated but it is interesting.

After recent months of surging new orders for durable goods, July’s report, released Monday, showed signs of caution and a “return to the mean” of a positive upswing this year.

Although this past month’s data was negative, industrial production shows a clear uptrend.

In an analysis released a few months ago, the Federal Reserve examined data from the 2010 triennial (every 3 years) survey of households and estimated that inflation adjusted net worth per household (green line in the graph) has just climbed back to the level it was almost ten years ago.

 

On the positive side, average net worth is not less than it was ten years ago.  On the negative side for those nearing retirement, it is not more that it was ten years ago.

On Friday, the Personal Consumption and Expenditures (PCE) report showed a 1.4% year over year percent gain, indicating the tepid growth in household spending.  Below I’ve charted the percent gain in PCE vs the percent gain in GDP for the past thirty years.

We are still below the low points of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s.  The Federal Reserve is projecting GDP growth of 3 – 3.5% in 2014 but this may be another in a string of rosy forecasts by the Fed, who have repeatedly revised earlier rosy forecasts.  If the Fed were a contractor, it would be out of business due to poor estimating.  A $16 trillion economy is not a kitchen remodel by any means, but it does illustrate how difficult it is for the best minds to make even short term predictions of the economy from the vast amounts of sometimes conflicting data.  Consider then the folly of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the economic watchdog created by Congress and mandated by Congress to come up with ten year estimates of economic growth and the consequences of existing and proposed legislation.  Those in Congress continue to trot out these fantasy numbers to support or criticize policy and legislation.

Washington continues to vacuum in money and talent from the rest of the country.  Of the richest counties in per capita income in the U.S., the Washington metro area has two of the top three.  The other county in the top three is a stone’s throw from the metro area.  As Washington politicians convince the rest of us that they have the solutions, lobbyists and graduates flock to the concentration of power, jobs, money and influence.
 
Bond yields have increased more than 1% since the spring, meaning that the prices of the bonds themselves have fallen dramatically.  Most of this change has been a reaction to forecasts for stronger growth and a tapering of the Fed’s stimulus program called Quantitative Easing.  Washington is sure to get in the way of stronger growth for the economy as a whole.  Policy out of Washington is designed to promote strong economic growth for Washington.

The market research firm Trim Tabs regularly monitors money flows into and out of the stock and bond markets.  They  reported today that outflows from the stock market in August were half of the record inflows in July.

The blood spilled this year has been in the bond market.  Trim Tabs reports that outflows from bond funds and ETFs have totalled more than $123 billion in the past three months.  Flows into bond funds and ETFs were about $750 billion in 2012, almost a doubling from the $400 billion invested in 2011. (Fed Flow of Funds tables F.120, F.121)

While the prospect of higher rates may have been the trigger that caused a reversal of bond inflows, the underlying current is also an overdue correction of the surge of investment in bonds in 2012.

Households continue to shed debt in one form or another so that total liabilities continue to decline. However, every man, woman and child in this country is carrying, on an inflation adjusted basis, 2-1/2 times the amount of debt they carried thirty years ago.  This level of household liability will continue to put downward pressure on growth.

This next week will kick off with the ISM manufacturing report on Tuesday and finish the week with the monthly employment report.  Year over year percent gains in employment have been steady and guesstimates are for maybe 200,000 net job gains.  150,000 net jobs are needed to keep up with population growth.

The Fed meeting is coming up in mid-September so this employment report will be watched closely to guess the next steps the Fed will take.