Lynx; Trump/Erdogan: compare and contrast
Productivity and wages: They’re connected, of course, but the extent of the connection requires nuanced analysis of wages at different percentiles and movements in labor’s share of national income.
There’s an interesting dichotomy here in how economists and people think about productivity and wages. For many economists, it’s the determinant of wage growth. For many people, it’s irrelevant, in that powerful forces divert productivity growth from paychecks to profits. The truth, especially once you get away from averages, lies in-between. Productivity matters a great deal, but it is not by itself sufficient to drive broadly shared prosperity.
Employment rates also matter a lot: They take the elevator down in recessions and the stairs up in recoveries. They also may carry some info about the arrival of next recession. Plus, their recent movements reveal the disproportionate benefits of full employment to the least advantaged.
Are politicians no longer listening to economists? You wish. In fact, they’re listening to the wrong ones telling them what they want to hear.
Now, a quick note on current events.
As regards the tanking of the Turkish lira, the business press is largely concerned with the contagion question: to what extent will Turkey’s problems spillover into European and American economies? The consensus is “not much,” based on Turkey’s size and financial markets’ limited exposure to Turkish debt, much of which is dollar-denominated, meaning it becomes more expensive to service when the Turkish currency depreciates.
That’s probably right, and Turkey has uniquely weak fundamentals among emerging market economies: “current account deficit of 6.3% of GDP, Corporate foreign exchange debt is 35% of GDP, inflation rate of 16%.” But the situation bears close watching, of course, and the strengthening dollar has important implications for the trade war, i.e., it pushes in the opposite direction of the tariffs (tariffs make imports more expensive; the stronger dollar makes them less expensive).
But another interesting aspect of the Turkish meltdown is how much Trump and Erdogan have in common. In one sense, that’s not surprising, as the strongman, faux populist playbook is pretty straightforward, and history is replete with examples.
In this case, Trump and Erdogan both pursue: reckless fiscal policy, muscling the central bank to keep rates down (though Trump doesn’t use anything like the muscle that Ergodan does), appointing family members to high places (sons-in-law, to be specific), vilifying other countries/media as the source of any woes (in a Trumpian flourish, Erdogan recently blamed “economic terrorists on social media” for spreading misinformation).
And yet, the economic outcomes, particularly via the currency and capital flows couldn’t be more different. In fact, the relative currency moves show foreign exchange traders are pulling out of the riskier emerging markets and buying dollars and U.S. debt.
It’s a reminder of the dominant size and durability of US economy, the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, and our still independent central bank. More broadly, there’s just a lot that insulates the U.S. economy from terrible leadership.
At least there is for now…
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Reposted from On the Economy
