Can Montana Escape Recession Ravages?

The answer is evidently now “no”, but until recently the UofM’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research director Patrick Barkey thought so:

“As early as last summer we still thought Montana would escape this recession,” he said. “We knew the national economic climate was uncertain, but Montana had been doing pretty well in the previous two recessions. We now know this is a global recession, and it is a more severe recession, and it’s a recession that’s not going to leave Montana unscathed.”

Indeed, things aren’t as bad here as they are in a lot of other places – yet. Compare our housing prices to Florida’s:

MT vs FL house price indexes

On the other hand, our overall economic situation shows a bigger hit than some places with hard-hit housing markets. Here’s the Fed’s coincident index vs. California:

MT coincident index of economic activity

As one would expect, the construction and resource sectors are particularly hard hit by the double-whammy of housing bubble and commodity price collapse. In spite of home prices that seem to have held steady so far, new home construction has fallen dramatically:

MT housing

Interestingly, that hasn’t hit construction employment as hard as one would expect. Mining and resources employment has taken a similar hit, though you can hardly see it here because the industry is comparatively small (so why is its influence on MT politics comparatively large?).

MT construction & mining employment

So, where’s the bottom? For metro home prices nationwide, futures markets think it’s 10 to 20% below today, some time around the end of 2010. If the recession turns into a depression, that’s probably too rosy, and it’s hard to see how Montana could escape the contagion. But the impact will certainly vary regionally. The answer for Montana likely depends a lot on two factors: how bubbly was our housing market, and how recession-resistant is our mix of economic activity?

On the first point, here’s the Montana housing market (black diamonds), compared to the other 49 states and DC:

State home price index vs 2000

Prices above are normalized to 2000 levels, using the OFHEO index of conforming loan sales (which is not entirely representative – read on). At the end of 2003, Montana ranked 20th in appreciation from 2000. At the end of 2008, MT was 8th. Does the rise mean that we’re holding strong on fundamentals while others collapse? Or just that we’re a bunch of hicks, last to hear that the party’s over? Hard to say.

It’s perhaps a little easier to separate fundamentals from enthusiasm by looking at prices in absolute terms. Here, I’ve used the Census Bureau’s 2000 median home prices to translate the OFHEO index into $ terms:

State median home prices

Among its western region peers, a few other large states, and random states I like, Montana starts to look like a relative bargain still. The real question then is whether demographic trends (latte cowboys like me moving in) can buoy the market against an outgoing tide. I suspect that we’ll fare reasonably well in the long run, but suffer a significant undershoot in the near term.

The OFHEO indices above are a little puzzling, in that so many states seem to be just now, or not yet, peaking. For comparison, here are the 20 metro areas in the CSI index (lines), together with Gallatin County’s median prices (bars):

Gallatin County & CSI metro home prices

These more representative indices still show Montana holding up comparatively well, but with Gallatin County peaking in 2006. I suspect that the OFHEO index is a biased picture of the wider market, due to its exclusion of nonconforming loans, and that this is a truer picture.

Are We Slaves to Open Loop Theories?

The ongoing bailout/stimulus debate is decidedly Keynesian. Yet Keynes was a halfhearted Keynesian:

US Keynesianism, however, came to mean something different. It was applied to a fiscal revolution, licensing deficit finance to pull the economy out of depression. From the US budget of 1938, this challenged the idea of always balancing the budget, by stressing the need to boost effective demand by stimulating consumption.

None of this was close to what Keynes had said in his General Theory. His emphasis was on investment as the motor of the economy; but influential US Keynesians airily dismissed this as a peculiarity of Keynes. Likewise, his efforts to separate capital projects from ordinary budgets, balanced if possible, found few echoes in Washington, despite frequent mention of his name.

Should this surprise us? It does not appear to have disconcerted Keynes. ‘Practical men were often the slaves of some defunct economist,’ he wrote. By the end of the second world war, Lord Keynes of Tilton was no mere academic scribbler but a policymaker, in a debate dominated by second-hand versions of ideas he had put into circulation in a previous life. He was enough of a pragmatist, and opportunist, not to quibble. After dining with a group of Keynesian economists in Washington, in 1944, Keynes commented: ‘I was the only non-Keynesian there.’

FT.com, In the long run we are all dependent on Keynes

This got me wondering about the theoretical underpinnings of the stimulus prescription. Economists are talking in the language of the IS/LM model, marginal propensity to consume, multipliers for taxes vs. spending, and so forth. But these are all equilibrium shorthand for dynamic concepts. Surely the talk is founded on dynamic models that close loops between money, expectations and the real economy, and contain an operational representation of money creation and lending?

The trouble is, after a bit of sniffing around, I’m not seeing those models. On the jacket of Dynamic Macroeconomics, James Tobin wrote in 1997:

“Macrodynamics is a venerable and important tradition, which fifty or sixty years ago engaged the best minds of the economics profession: among them Frisch, Tinbergan, Harrod, Hicks, Samuelson, Goodwin. Recently it has been in danger of being swallowed up by rational expectations, moving equilibrium, and dynamic optimization. We can be grateful to the authors of this book for keeping alive the older tradition, while modernizing it in the light of recent developments in techniques of dynamic modeling.”
’”James Tobin, Sterling Professor of Economics Emeritus, Yale University

Is dynamic macroeconomics still moribund, supplanted by CGE models (irrelevant to the problem at hand) and black box econometric methods? Someone please point me to the stochastic behavioral disequilibrium nonlinear dynamic macroeconomics literature I’ve missed, so I can sleep tonight knowing that policy is informed by something more than comparative statics.

In the meantime, the most relevant models I’m aware of are in system dynamics, not economics. An interesting option (which you can read and run) is Nathan Forrester’s thesis, A Dynamic Synthesis of Basic Macroeconomic Theory (1982).

Forrester’s model combines Samuelson’s multiplier accelerator, Metzler’s inventory-adjustment model, Hicks’ IS/LM, and the aggregate-supply/aggregate-demand model into a 10th order continuous dynamic model. The model generates an endogenous business cycle (4-year period) as well as a longer (24-year) cycle. The business cycle arises from inventory and employment adjustment, while the long cycle involves multiplier-accelerator and capital stock adjustment mechanisms, involving final demand. Forrester used the model to test a variety of countercyclic economic policies, commonly recommended as antidotes for business cycle swings:

Results of the policy tests explain the apparent discrepancy between policy conclusions based on static and dynamic models. The static results are confirmed by the fact that countercyclic demand-management policies do stabilize the demand-driven [long] cycle. The dynamic results are confirmed by the fact that the same countercyclic policies destabilize the business cycle. (pg. 9)

It’s not clear to me what exactly this kind of counterintuitive behavior might imply for our current situation, but it seems like a bad time to inadvertently destabilize the business cycle through misapplication of simpler models.

It’s unclear to what extent the model applies to our current situation, because it doesn’t include budget constraints for agents, and thus doesn’t include explicit money and debt stocks. While there are reasonable justifications for omitting those features for “normal” conditions, I suspect that since the origin of our current troubles is a debt binge, those justifications don’t apply where we are now in the economy’s state space. If so, then the equilibrium conclusions of the IS/LM model and other simple constructs are even more likely to be wrong.

I presume that the feedback structure needed to get your arms around the problem properly is in Jay Forrester’s System Dynamics National Model, but unfortunately it’s not available for experimentation.

John Sterman’s model of The Energy Transition and the Economy (1981) does have money stocks and debt for households and other sectors. It doesn’t have an operational representation of bank reserves, and it monetizes the deficit, but if one were to repurpose the model a bit (by eliminating the depletion issue, among other things) it might provide an interesting compromise between the two Forrester models above.

I still have a hard time believing that macroeconomics hasn’t trodden some of this fertile ground since the 80s, so I hope someone can comment with a more informed perspective. However, until someone disabuses me of the notion, I have the gnawing suspicion that the models are broken and we’re flying blind. Sure hope there aren’t any mountains in this fog.

Another Bailout MetaRoundup

More good stuff from my blog reader:

Real Time Economics – Secondary Sources: Rebutting Myths, King on Stability, Green Econ & Secondary Sources: Rates, Innovation, Recession, Suprime Lending

Greg Mankiw – More Commentary on the Financial Mess

Economist’s View – links for 2008-10-23 &  links for 2008-10-22

Marginal Revolution – Four myths of the credit crisis, again

Econbrowser – More Unhappy Numbers

Climate, the Bailout, and the Blame Game

I’ve been watching a variety of explanations of the financial crisis. As a wise friend noticed, the only thing in short supply is acceptance of responsibility. I’ve seen theories that place the seminal event as far back as the Carter administration. Does that make sense, causally?

In a formal sense, it might in some cases. I could have inhaled a carcinogen a decade ago that only leads to cancer a decade from now, without any outside triggers. But I think that sort of system is a rarity. As a practical matter, we have to look elsewhere.

Socioeconomic systems are at a constant slow boil, with many potential threats existing below the threshold of imminent danger at any given time. Occasionally, one grows exponentially and emerges as a real catastrophe. It seems like a surprise, because of the hockey stick behavior of growth (the French riddle of the lily pond again). However, most apparent low-level threats never emerge from the noise. They don’t have enough gain to grow fast, or they get shut down by some unsuspected negative feedback.

Continue reading “Climate, the Bailout, and the Blame Game”

Bailout MetaRoundup & Alternatives

MetaRoundup:

Several of the economics blogs I read have had useful roundups of bailout commentary. A few I find found useful:

Do we need to act now? on Economist’s View

9/26 Links on Economist’s View

NYT Economix’ analyst roundup

Greg Mankiw’s roundup of commentary

Update 9/29:

Real Time Economics’ Secondary Sources

Update 10/1: 

Greg Mankiw with more commentary

Alternative Plans:

Economists Against the Paulson Plan

Brad de Long on Krugman on the Dodd plan

WSJ Real Time Economics’ Text of Lawmakers’ Agreement on Principles

Thomas Palley on Saving the Financial System

Marginal Revolution on the Republican plan to rescue mortgages instead of buying mortgage assets

Marginal Revolution with a Modest Proposal (finding and isolating toxic assets)

Update 9/27:

Marginal Revolution with substitute bridges

Greg Mankiw with a letter from Robert Shimer with a nice analysis, including problems with Paulson, the lemons problem, and the Diamond, Kaplan, Kashyap, Rajan & Thaler fix

Update 9/28:

Real Time Economics on securitization

Brad deLong on nationalization (the Swedish model)

Update 9/29:

The Big Picture with Stop Targeting Asset Prices

Marginal Revolution asks, is the Sweden plan better?

Bailout without Representation

The NYT has the draft text and an explanation of the Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout proposal. It audaciously creates a budget authority almost as big as the federal government’s total discretionary spending and bigger than every on-budget agency, seven times the California state budget, without any checks and balances at all:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

We used to dump tea in harbors for things like this.

A New Method of Macarony Making, As Practiced at Boston

Continue reading “Bailout without Representation”

A modest bailout proposal

The Fed has just doled out over $300 billion in loans to bail out Bear Stearns and other bad actors in the subprime mortgage mess. It’s hard to say what fraction of that capital is really at risk, but let’s say 10%. That’s a pretty big transfer to shareholders, especially considering that there’s nothing in it for the general public other than avoidance of financial contagion effects. If this were an environmental or public health issue, skeptics would be lined up to question whether contagion in fact exists, whether fixing it does more harm than good (e.g., by creating future moral hazard), and whether there’s a better way to spend the money. Contagion would have to be proven with models, subject to infinite scrutiny and delay. Yet here, billions are doled out with no visible analysis or public process, based on policies invented ad hoc. Perhaps a little feedback control is needed here: let’s create a bailout fund, supported by taxes on firms that are deemed too big to fail by some objective criteria. Then two negative feedbacks will operate: firms that get too large will be encouraged to split themselves into manageable chunks, and the potential beneficiaries of bailouts will have to ask themselves how badly they really want insurance. Let’s try it, and see how long the precautionary principle lasts in the financial sector.

Update: Paul Krugman has a nice editorial on the problem.

And if financial players like Bear are going to receive the kind of rescue previously limited to deposit-taking banks, the implication seems obvious: they should be regulated like banks, too.