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Return to Frugality Is a Dangerous Transition: Chris Farrell
Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) -- "Transitions are dangerous," said the late Charles Kindleberger, an economic historian with a vast knowledge of financial manias, panics and crashes, in 1983. That was No. 9 of 10 lessons he summarized from 1929.
He noted that pursuit of smart public policy in the tumultuous early years of the Great Depression was handicapped by three transitions: The 1928 death of Benjamin Strong, the forceful head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, led to power passing to the Federal Reserve in Washington, a more timid group of central bankers; the electoral victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt over the incumbent Herbert Hoover; and the difficult transition of international economic hegemony from the world of Pax Britannica to Pax Americana.
Since economist James Tobin got the Nobel Prize in 1981 for stating "Don't put all your eggs in one basket," Kindleberger said he planned on submitting to the awards committee his one- sentence insight: "Be very careful if you have to change horses."
Kindleberger never got the nod from Oslo, but his admonition rings true a quarter century later. The midterm election is over and the results have changed the balance of power in Washington, with the Republican Party picking up at least 60 seats in the House -- the biggest sweep since 1948. Democrats held on to the Senate, but with a slimmer majority after Republicans picked up at least 6 seats.
Grim Statistics
Voters are understandably angry over the lack of jobs and economic growth. And the news remains grim on the employment front. The 15th month of joblessness over 9.5 percent is the longest such period since government statisticians started collecting the numbers in 1948.
Indeed, the major force behind the slow recovery isn't going away anytime soon: America is turning away from debt and embracing thrift, and the epicenter of change is the household. History suggests that the transition toward a high-saving less- debt balance sheet will be long and painful before vibrant growth resumes.
The Federal Reserve is smartly trying to bolster the economy during the transition from profligacy to thrift with its latest round of quantitative easing, QE2 (a fancy term for printing money). The Fed announced on Nov. 3 that on top of its existing program of reinvesting the proceeds of its portfolio, it will buy $600 billion of long-term government bonds -- $75 billion a month -- by the middle of 2011.
The Great Deleveraging
In the meantime, the message for Capitol Hill and the White House is at minimum "do no harm" while the Great Deleveraging run its course.
Considering the well-publicized extravagance of many CEOs, it's underappreciated just how much money Corporate America has been hoarding during the downturn. Corporations have accumulated almost $1 trillion in cash and equivalents, up 22 percent since 2008, according to an Oct. 27 report by Moody's Investors Service.
Apple Computer Inc. has $51 billion on its balance sheet alone. "The investment opportunities are more limited and most can wait until management is more confident about demand," says Charles Roxburgh, the London-based director of the McKinsey Global Institute.
The recent corporate embrace of cash is really part of a longer-term trend. It started after the economic trauma of the 1970s when companies were battered by one shattering experience after another, from double-digit inflation and interest rates to the two OPEC oil embargos to the U.S. government abandoning the gold standard.
Raising Cash
Even with all the headlines devoted to leveraged buyout buccaneers in the 1980s and private equity financiers in the 2000s, the average cash-to-assets ratio for U.S. industrial firms increased by 129 percent from 1980 to 2004, according to scholars Thomas Bates and Kathleen Kahle of the University of Arizona, Tucson and Rene M. Stulz of Ohio State University.
In "Why Do U.S. Firms Hold So Much More Cash Than They Used To?," the scholars wrote that the creation of the cash hoard has been so dramatic that "on average, American firms could have paid off their debt with their cash holdings."
Now that's thrifty. Many factors combine to create such a degree of corporate frugality, but the most important are the unsettling combination of changing technology, the gale winds of deregulation, and increasingly tough competition from emerging- market companies.
"As economies have become more dynamic the ability of profitable corporations to say five years from now they will still be highly profitable has declined," says Jay Ritter, finance economist at the University of Florida, Gainesville. What's more, companies aren't going to risk that money anytime soon.
Less Household Debt
Now, it's the household's turn to be thrifty. People learned the hard way how financially insecure they had become when the debt bubble burst. There has been progress: According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, U.S. households have reduced their debts over the past seven quarters. In the second quarter of this year households owed $11.7 trillion, down 6.5 percent from the peak reached in the third quarter of 2008. (The next report on total household debt is released on Nov. 8.) The personal savings rate as a percent of disposable income in September was 5.3 percent, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said on Nov. 1. That's significantly higher than the low of 0.8 percent reached in April 2005.
Still Not Healthy
Still, Americans have a long way to go before their personal finances are healthy. For instance, total household debt equaled 118.4 percent of after-tax income in the second quarter of 2010, according to Christian Weller, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a progressive-oriented think tank in Washington. That's down from a record high of 130.2 percent in the first quarter of 2008 but well above the 100 percent figure of the early 2000s, let alone the 60 percent to 80 percent of the late 1950s to the early 1990s.
Of course, there is no magic debt ratio. Nevertheless, a recent study published in the September 2010 BIS Quarterly Review is suggestive. A look at private sector debt after 17 of the 20 systemic banking crises examined Gary Tang and Christian Upper of the Bank for International Settlements suggests that the trend toward deleveraging the U.S. household at best may be only one quarter complete.
It's also why the pressure on government to reduce its debt won't go away. The Republican resurgence and fulfilling a major campaign promise is one factor, of course. But an even more important reason is that households are struggling for greater thrift. They will insist that government also embrace a new frugality.
Beyond Austerity
Even economists that scorn calls for government austerity at the moment call for reduced debt levels tomorrow. "The deleveraging still has a long way to go for consumers," says Roxburgh. "The U.S. government's deleveraging hasn't started yet."
The return to frugality isn't fun. The transition is definitely painful. Yet an economy with a healthier savings cushion and a greater reliance on equity financing is a society with the financial wherewithal to take greater risks. The great deleveraging offers the prospect that thrifty companies, households and government will create the foundation for a more prosperous, innovative economy.
Yet, as Kindleberger noted, transitions are dangerous. Washington can ease the burden of the great deleveraging by heeding the sage's Lesson No. 8: "Formalism, politics and ideology impede crisis-solution."
Forget calls to default on the government's debt when the debt limit ceiling is reached in coming months. Gridlock is not good public policy. The time for posturing is over. And the opportunity for devising a realistic plan for bringing down the federal debt over time comes when the Bipartisan Policy Center's Debt Reduction Task Force releases its suggestions on Nov. 17.
And any debt-reduction blueprint policy makers embrace should keep in mind that the American household is deleveraging, but it going to take time -- a long time to reach a better balance.
(Chris Farrell is a Businessweek.com columnist. A version of this column appears on Businessweek.com. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Chris Farrell at cfarrell@mpr.org .
To contact the editor responsible for this column: William Andrews in New York at wandrews7@bloomberg.net
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