Cramped quarters: As children postpone their departure, households get larger

[Greg Ip] IT IS hard to be an optimist about the housing market these days, but those so inclined like to note that as long as the population keeps growing, so should the demand for homes. But what if the larger population decides to share the same number of homes?

America’s census bureau has been publishing massive amounts of data from several, parallel surveys of the population in recent weeks. One of its more intriguing findings is that after shrinking for decades, households have started to grow. 

Read the full article at economist.com

US-China trade relations: Speak less softly, carry a stick

The Obama administration’s patience with China wears thin

Sep 23rd 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC

 [Greg Ip] CHINESE officials like to lecture their American counterparts that, when it comes to loosening their tightly controlled currency, pressure is counterproductive. Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, has resisted direct confrontation with China over the yuan’s value. Like his predecessors, he worries that overt pressure would undermine advocates of reform inside China, principally the People’s Bank of China, and erode co-operation on other issues such as Iran and North Korea. Read the article on economist.com

The brains trust dissolves: All the president’s economic principals are leaving, bar the treasury secretary

[Greg Ip] HISTORIANS may one day label the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency as the most activist in economic policy of post-war history. For that, credit both circumstance and the star-studded economic team Mr Obama assembled when he took office.

That team is now breaking up. On September 21st Larry Summers, the director of the National Economic Council and the president’s chief economic policy co-ordinator, said he would return to Harvard after the mid-term elections.

Read the article at economist.com.

The American economy: The great debt drag

America looks likely to avoid a second recession. But with households still overburdened by debt, years of slow growth lie ahead

Sep 16th 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC

[Greg Ip] IN THREE decades of selling cars in southern California, David Wilson has been through countless ups and downs. So when sales at his 16 dealerships, mostly around Los Angeles and Orange Counties, fell by a third in 2008, he naturally expected them to go up again. They still haven’t.

Mr Wilson now realises that his boom-year sales were a by-product of the state’s housing bubble. Dealers reckon that before the crisis a third of new cars in California were bought with home-equity loans. “Now there’s no home equity,” says Mr Wilson, “there’s no down-payment for cars.” He foresees no sales growth for another two to three years. “The country is not optimistic. If you’re not optimistic you don’t buy a new house or new car.”

He’s right: Americans are not optimistic. Official statistics say that the economy has been growing for nearly 15 months, but so sluggishly that most people seem to think it is still in recession. For a few months it looked as if the economy might even shrink again, as growth slowed to a mere 1.6% (at an annualised rate) in the second quarter, job creation almost stopped and home sales plunged.

The tax debate: Someone will pay

[Greg Ip] AMERICA’S mid-term elections are turning into a referendum on the role of the state, and George Bush junior’s tax cuts are the litmus test. Barack Obama has attacked Republicans for wanting the cuts for the richest 2% of families to be made permanent, robbing the government of the means to invest in the economy. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, is mulling a vote on making only the middle-class tax cuts permanent, virtually daring the Republicans to vote no.

From Zombie Banks to Zombie Mortgages?

Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal

• SEPTEMBER 10, 2010

Japan misallocated capital during its lost decade. How the U.S. can avoid its mistakes.

By Greg Ip

Japan’s recent demotion to world’s third-largest economy, behind China, triggered two distinctly different feelings in the United States.

One was Schadenfreude. At the end of the 1980s Japan was a contender for the No. 1 spot. It was the rich world’s fastest growing big country. Its companies dominated electronics, steel, automobiles and even banking. Its political and business leaders were paragons of long-term strategic thinking, while budget and trade surpluses left it rich with cash. Meanwhile, the U.S. was on the brink of recession, its corporate managers obsessed with short-term profits and its politicians incapable of mustering a coherent industrial strategy. “Japan has created a kind of automatic wealth machine, perhaps the first since King Midas,” Clyde Prestowitz wrote in 1988. The U.S. was “a colony-in-the-making.”

What happened next, of course, is history. Japanese property and stock prices cratered, its banking system seized up, and a decade (actually, two now) of economic stagnation followed.

The second feeling Japan’s misfortunes evoked is dread. The U.S. has gone through its own spectacular property crash and banking crisis and is now mired in a painfully weak recovery. Does it face a long period of stagnation as Japan did?

Economics Focus: War footing

Monetary and fiscal stimulus make a potent, if uneasy, combination

Sep 2nd 2010 |From the print edition

[Greg Ip] THE Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is the big event of the year for central bankers. But defining monetary policy is far harder than it used to be. In recent years central bankers have lurched ever closer to the realm of fiscal policy, mainly by buying government debt with freshly printed money. They can justify such “quantitative easing” (QE) on monetary grounds since they have already lowered short-term interest rates to, or close to, zero. But they also worry it is a slippery slope from QE to monetising government deficits and thence, inevitably, to inflation. When Phillip Swagel, then an official with the US Treasury, was asked why he attended the conference in 2008, he shrugged: “Fiscal policy, monetary policy—what’s the difference?”For central bankers this is an unsettling thought. Their mistrust of fiscal policy was nicely captured in a paper presented at this year’s Jackson Hole conference by Eric Leeper of Indiana University*. As central bankers have become more independent, they have increasingly based their policies on rigorous economic analysis. By contrast fiscal policy is deeply politicised, with haphazard methods and few, if any, defined goals.Much as central bankers would like to ignore fiscal policy, they cannot. “Fiscal alchemy can undermine monetary science,” says Mr Leeper. A wise monetary policy aims to keep prices stable, prudent fiscal policy to stabilise government debt. This division of labour works as long as the public believes that, after running a big deficit, the government will raise taxes or cut spending enough to keep debt under control. But, he argues, if the debt is so large that the government cannot credibly commit to these actions, the public assumes the central bank will inflate away the debt by printing money. Inflation expectations soar and the central bank loses control of prices.