Archive for October, 2010

Comments on “Scary New Wage Data”

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Over at tax.com, David Cay Johnson follows up on a Social Security Administration report with some “Scary New Wage Data“:

“Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar … Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.”

“Not a single news organization reported this data when it was released October 15, searches of Google and the Nexis databases show. Nor did any blog, so the citizen journalists and professional economists did no better than the newsroom pros in reporting this basic information about our economy.”

Ouch.

Corroborating this Scary New Wage Data is the chart on Page 21 of the National Economic Trends report put out monthly by the St. Louis Fed (a small PDF: http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/net/page21.pdf )

Proprietors’ Income and employee “Compensation”, as a share of GDP, have been in decline. Only corporate profits have increased as a share of GDP. The latter have returned to pre-crash historically high “bubble” levels. Compensation is approaching series lows last set in 2006. Proprietors’ Income is declining from a peak in 2004-2005, which may reflect the heyday of many small housing bubble businesses. But it is still above historical norms.

I share David Cay Johnson’s (that is, the original author’s) concern that this information received minimal media coverage. But I suppose that one cannot expect corporate media, funded by corporate advertisers, to publish news which would suggest that actions should be taken to rebuild wages and proprietor’s income at the expense of corporate profits?

It would also appear that the Obama administration has been a great friend to business, given that corporate profits as a share of GDP have increased nearly 4% since he took office.

Mean reversion of corporate profits/GDP to historical norms is to be expected, and implies a 30-50% reduction in the ratio (with magnified impact on equity prices since P/E ratios will contract as well) … but by what mechanism?

Do NOT Feed The Squid!

Friday, October 15th, 2010

I’d like to welcome my readers (all 2 of them?) from my other blog, Do Not Feed The Squid!  “DNFTS” was a great idea (and still is, so I’ve put it in the tagline above!) but I do not have time to keep up two blogs.  Also, the idea behind “Do NOT Feed The Squid”, that we’re going to have to take personal actions to stop the large financial corporations from continuing to abuse the legal system and destroy the public trust, is no longer as politically radical as it used to be.  It’s no longer a distraction from the “Ethical Investing” and “Sustainable Gains” themes here.  In fact, it’s pretty clear that investors in the mortgage lending apparatus have failed to invest ethically and are discovering that their fraudulent gains are not sustainable.  (Whether they continue to succeed in ripping off the taxpayers, only time will tell… but hopefully the public will not put up with this any longer!)

The 6 posts from “Do NOT Feed the Squid” have been moved over here verbatim, without any updates to their timestamps.

For those who may not have reviewed the “Do NOT Feed The Squid” site, here’s a list of the 6 posts in, reverse chronological order:

Post-Squid Investing Attitude Shift

Squid-Free Investing (small victories)

Preventing the Next Crisis? Automatic Stabilizers?

Restoring the Federal “Reserve”

A Quick Guide to Squid-Free Banking

What is the Squid?

More Mouths to Feed, Fewer Workers

Friday, October 8th, 2010

A recent post by Calculated Risk reminded me to comment that the Federal Reserve’s “EMRATIO” metric is worse than it looks (and it looks bad already).  EMRATIO is frequently misreported as being “the employment to population ratio”. Sometimes the writer aims to be less inaccurate and says it’s the “fraction of adults who are employed”.  EMRATIO is really meant to measure how much of the potential labor force is currently working, and typically runs around 0.6, meaning 60% of the “adult population” is “employed”. EMRATIO has recently been declining as a result of job losses during the recession, which is bad enough.  But there is a demographic issue in play as well, because of the aging population, and EMRATIO doesn’t capture this very well.  In EMRATIO, the “population” not only excludes children, it also excludes “institutionalized” adults (who still need to be fed … and many of whom could be productive).  EMRATIO doesn’t include the military – it’s just “civilian” employment. And EMRATIO also appears to include working teens in the employment number, but not in the “adult population” number.  So EMRATIO is really an approximate “civilian employment to adult workforce ratio”.  Which is fine, but not if everyone thinks it’s the actual employed workforce divided by the total population… because that number is substantially lower!  The employed workforce has to feed not only the unemployed adults but also the children, the military and the “institutionalized” adults (including criminals and more).

So EMRATIO is useful, but misleading.  I think what really matters is the “Mouths To Feed Ratio”, that is the number of “mouths to be fed” divided by the “number of workers” – and there’s a way to generate that using the Federal Reserve’s FRED graphs database:
More Mouths to Feed

What this shows is that during the Baby Boom years of the 50’s and 60’s, when there were a lot of single-worker households and a lot of children, there were 2.6 to 2.8 people per worker.  From the early 60s until 2000 or so, that number trended down.  Each worker had fewer and fewer mouths to feed, as demographics became more and more favorable.  But that situation has reversed.  The 2003-2008 boom failed to bring in enough workers to bring the MTF ratio back down, and the Great Recession’s job losses, together with older workers retiring, have sent the MTF ratio back up to levels last seen in the early 1980s.

In fact, if we invert the MTF ratio, we can compare it directly to EMRATIO, and we see that the MTF ratio is about 13% lower than EMRATIO.  I am surprised that this ratio isn’t smaller still, since there should be enough children to take it down 20-25%.  But clearly less than half of the nation is currently employed:

“EMRATIO” and the Actual “Civilian Employment” to “Total Population” Ratio

Finally, the last plot below shows the two components of the MTF ratio (but beware the suppressed zero in the graph).  Both have trended upwards and basically doubled in the past 60 years, but in the last decade the population growth has outstripped the employment growth.

Total Population and Civilian Employment

If population growth continues to exceed employment growth, there will be ever more Mouths To Feed per worker.  This in turn puts pressure on workers to lower their savings rates and defer retirement, or to lower their personal standards of living in order to support household dependents. It also creates pressure on both workers and employers to pay more in taxes, to maintain benefits for an increasing number of non-workers, via Social Security, Medicare, education and so on.  This will be a major challenge for public policy, and it also has major implications on the sustainability of economic growth and the current high level of corporate profits relative to GDP.

Footnote:  My data is from the FRED site; I would appreciate clarifications if anyone who reads this has some good links.