Uncertainty About Slack

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1 July 2, 2014 US Economics Uncertainty About Slack There's a lot of uncertainty about the meaning of recent data surprises and seeming anomalies. Is Janet Yellen right that there is a lot of slack remaining in the economy? If data trends continue, the Fed may face some difficult choices going forward. MORGAN STANLEY & CO. LLC Vincent Reinhart Vincent.Reinhart@morganstanley.com Ellen Zentner Ellen.Zentner@morganstanley.com Ted Wieseman Ted.Wieseman@morganstanley.com John Abraham John.A.Abraham@morganstanley.com Source: Getty Images For important disclosures, refer to the Disclosures Section, located at the end of this report. 1

2 First, The Results From Our Recent Survey Are In We asked you to take our survey last week, and here is what you said: Our readers have a varied, yet well distributed, view of the FOMC s first rate hike. While the majority see the first hike coming in 2H2015, more than 1 in 4 see rate hikes coming after This mirrors the Fed s dots somewhat, but shifts to the longer term as only 3 of the Fed s 16 dots are in We look for an early 2016 rate lift-off, but the survey results are in line with market expectations. Our Fixed Income Strategy team's M1KE (months until 1st rate hike) indicator looks for a late 2015 hike (US Interest Rate Strategist: Deflated Expectations). Exhibit 1: When do you expect the first FOMC rate hike? Exhibit 2: What is your forecast for the long-run nominal funds rate? Source: Morgan Stanley Research, Survey June 20-27,2014 Source: Morgan Stanley Research, Survey June 20-27, 2014 There is little agreement on the long-run terminal funds rate, though. Nearly 29% believe the rate will be less than 3.25%, but in second place, 26% believe it will be between 3.50 and Taken together, more than half of our sample finds the long-run rate to be less than 3.5%, vastly different from the Fed s median dot at 3.75% and mean at 3.78%. We ve written extensively on the damage done to potential GDP growth since the crisis, marking it down a half point or so, fixing it in the 2-2.5% range. With that, expectations for the nominal fed funds rate should fall as well, in our view to near 3.50%. Data Raise Questions About Slack Recent economic data have raised questions about how much the trend in real potential GDP growth might have slowed. GDP growth in the first half is likely to be barely above zero, as surprisingly low consumer spending in May left Q2 growth tracking around +3.2% and a much larger-than-expected downward revision left Q1 at -2.9%. The PCE price index accelerated to 1.5% year/year in May, from 1.4% in April and 1.2% in March. Moreover, with the GDP revision, productivity looks to be running near -5.8% Q/Q (+0.4% Y/Y). A key question in trying to judge whether this recent acceleration in inflation is real or is just temporary noise that will soon be reversed is how much slack there is in the economy at present. If there is still a large margin of slack in the labor market and economy broadly, as Janet Yellen has argued, then recent acceleration in core inflation doesn t have a sustainable basis underlying it and should therefore soon be reversed. If, however, the level and trend growth rate of real supply have been damaged enough by the recession and persistent demand weakness in the recovery that there is not, in fact, a large margin of excess capacity in labor and product markets, then nominal demand will continue to run ahead of the damaged real potential supply 2

3 trajectory. In this case, we would expect that the uptick in inflation, which has been broadly based and not easily dismissed as quirky or one-off, might be more sustained. Smoothing Out The Data Doesn't Brighten the Picture Looking through recent data volatility, the emerging picture has not been at all encouraging for potential real growth. We now see Q2 growth tracking at 3.2%, reversing weather drags that left the underlying ex inventories and trade growth rate just above zero in Q1. A 3.2% rebound in Q2 would leave real GDP growth up 1.7% year/year. That would be below the FOMC s lowered 2.2% potential growth rate estimate and also short of our 2.0% estimate (Potential GDP and Its Implications). Exhibit 3: Contribution to Real GDP Growth Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Morgan Stanley Research We certainly don t think the economy really collapsed at a 3% annual rate in Q1. But we also now don t think it was nearly as strong as the 3.4% annualized growth reported for 2013H2. Large swings in the contributions from inventories and net exports appear to have artificially boosted the second half of last year, and then sharp corrections of that H2 upside in Q1 exaggerated the Q1 GDP weakness (See Exhibit 3). 3 Smoothing out these gyrations in inventory and net exports over the past three quarters points to an underlying trajectory of GDP growth from Q3 to Q1 of 2.2%, 1.5%, 0.2%, rather than the volatile reported 4.1%, 2.6%, -2.9%. With what looks to have been only 1.7% real GDP growth in the past year, and core inflation picking up 1.7% annualized year to date through this May, from 1.0% in the same period last year, it certainly does not suggest that the economy was growing significantly below potential in the past year. Why Is Unemployment Falling With Such Sluggish Growth? Meanwhile, with such seemingly sluggish growth, the unemployment rate has plummeted from 7.5% in 2013Q2 to 6.3% as of May, as job growth is averaging +200,000 a month, with no increase in the labor force, and almost no growth in labor productivity. From basic bottom-up accounting, if you have no labor force growth and no labor productivity growth, you have no aggregate supply growth. 3

4 Why have these developments been so dismal recently? There hasn t been a cyclical rebound in labor force participation, and sustained low levels of investment may be increasingly damaging trend productivity. The share of the working age population 'not in the labor force' but saying they 'want a job', a broad gauge of discouraged workers, was elevated at 2.6% in May versus a pre-recession average near 2.1%. That suggests there could be as much as a half point boost to the labor force participation rate over time as these people return to the labor market if they think job finding prospects have improved. Exhibit 4: Discouraged Workers and Labor Force Growth Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Morgan Stanley Research However, the flat labor force growth over the past year that has contributed to the rapid drop in the unemployment rate looks more permanent than cyclical. The number of people not in the labor force increased by 2.2 million between May 2013 and May 2014, but the number of discouraged workers (people not in the labor force who said they want a job but hadn t actively looked for one recently) fell by only 162,000 (See Exhibit 4). 4 Returning discouraged workers would likely have a limited impact on labor market dynamics. Data from the BLS on employment flows show that in a given month, people identified as unemployed for over a year have only about a 10% chance of being employed the next month. It seems unlikely that returning discouraged workers would have notably better prospects. Adding to that, the underlying demographic trend is moving the other way. The BLS estimates that the labor force participation rate will trend lower by 0.2pp a year from 2012 to 2022 (Labor force projections to 2022: the labor force participation rate continues to fall). Our baseline assumes that over the next year and a half, a cyclical rebound from returning discouraged workers just offsets the underlying demographic downtrend, and the participation rate holds steady. Once any cyclical rebound from returning discouraged workers is absorbed, however, a 0.2pp/year trend participation rate decline implies that trend growth in payrolls in the neighborhood of only 60,000 a month would be consistent with a stable unemployment rate. 4

5 Difficult Choices For the Fed In November, David Wilcox of the Federal Reserve Board's research and statistics division released a paper he co-authored exploring the dangers to the level and trend growth rate of labor and multifactor productivity from persistent cyclical weakness in capital spending and new business formations ( Aggregate Supply in the United States: Recent Developments and Implications for the Conduct of Monetary Policy ). Wilcox and his co-authors found an endogeneity of supply with respect to demand in the U.S. economy s post-recession performance. The largest loss has been in trend productivity, reflecting both a steep decline in capital accumulation and slower growth in multi-factor productivity, alongside some structural damage in the labor market which slowed growth in trend labor input and resulted in the sharp increase in long-term unemployment since the onset of the financial crisis and a possible reduction in the employability of affected workers. They estimated that potential real GDP growth had slowed to 1.3% in the five years through mid-2013 and to less than 1% in the year through 2013Q2, leaving the level of potential GDP 7% below the trajectory in place through the end of The most important driver of this slowdown has been persistent weakness in business investment in equipment and R&D and new business formations, initially a cyclical fallout of the severe recession but over time impairing the economy s trend growth potential as it continued year after year. Exhibit 5: Persistent Weakness in Business Investment in Equipment Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Morgan Stanley Research While these demand-induced capital deepening effects are presumably not literally permanent, they are likely to persist for many years given the substantial adjustment costs that characterize business investment. Wilcox sees years of pronounced weakness in new business formations, which play a disproportionate role in promoting innovation because they embody the latest technologies, and in R&D spending as having damaged the economy s trend multi-factor productivity growth the former was the focus of a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week by Professors Edward Prescott and Lee Ohanian ( U.S. Productivity Growth Has Taken a Dive ). 5

6 Exhibit 6: Ratio of Capital Services Inputs to Total Labor Hours Slows Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Morgan Stanley Research A lack of capital deepening over a prolonged period has also depressed trend labor productivity. Growth in capital per worker, the ratio of capital services inputs to total labor hours worked in the business sector, slowed to only 0.5% in 2010 before falling 0.9% in 2011 and 0.7% in 2012 (the latest available data; see Exhibit 6). 6 That matched the worst three-year period on record, previously seen from during the Great Inflation. In the aftermath of that prior episode, the 5-year annualized growth rate of labor productivity hit a record low 0.3% in mid Once all the data are in, the post-crisis period of weakness in capital deepening could be more pronounced and more extended than the 1970 s experience (see Exhibit 7). 7 After the decline in capital deepening in 2011 and 2012, continued depressed investment levels in 2013 and early 2014 don t point to much of a turnaround yet. The pace of real net equipment investment was flat at a low level in 2014Q1 versus 2012Q4. As a share of GDP, net equipment investment has been little changed at an historically weak level below 1% since mid-2011, after having turned negative in 2009 for the first time since

7 Exhibit 7: Growth Rate of Labor Productivity Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Morgan Stanley Research To be sure, there s a lot of uncertainty about the meaning of recent data surprises and seeming anomalies. It s certainly possible that Janet Yellen is right that there is a lot of slack remaining in the economy, the rapid drop in the unemployment rate in the past year has greatly overstated the improvement, and the extent of the recent pickup in inflation is just temporary noise soon to be reversed. But if data trends continue to suggest that potential GDP growth has fallen a lot more than the FOMC has recognized, and that there isn t a large remaining margin of slack in the economy continue, the Fed may face some difficult choices going forward. As Seen on TV Watch Ellen Zentner in Will Oil Ruin the Recovery? (July 1, 2014) 7

8 Other US Economics Research Business Conditions: A Jump in June (June 30, 2014) Yellen's Conundrum: Slow Wage Growth, Higher Prices (June 27, 2014) The Impact of Higher Oil Prices (June 20, 2014) US Economics Outlook: Bygones Are Bygones (June 9, 2014) On the Cusp: Core Inflation Turning Up (May 22, 2014) Where the Rubber Hits the Road: Wage & Salary Growth (May 5, 2014) Student Debt a Drag on the Economy (April 24, 2014) How levered is the US Economy? (April 7, 2014) 8

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