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From NewYork Times
December 22, 2001
Since the beginning of the year, the Federal Reserve has slashed short-term interest rates more aggressively than ever before. Oil prices have fallen to under $20 a barrel. The stock market has rebounded, companies have slimmed down their bulging warehouses and consumers can look forward to lower tax rates next year.
So it’s clear sailing ahead, right? Not necessarily. As it turns out, some of these signs are not as favorable as they sound, and lurking behind them are financial imbalances that threaten to retard the recovery.
Indeed, while many on Wall Street are counting on a solid rebound next year, Main Street is still looking for signs of improvement. Take Rodney McMullen, an executive vice president at Kroger, the nation’s biggest grocer-retailer. He said purchases of discretionary items, like flowers and jewelry, had stopped sliding but showed no hint of a revival. Because those items are not necessities, their sales tend to be the most sensitive to buyers’ finances.
Consumers, it appears, have not felt the full impact of all those supposedly positive factors.
For starters, the deterioration of the federal budget outlook may have neutralized much of the Fed’s rate-cutting. “On net, those two wash out,” said David Romer, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley.
The cushy surpluses once projected for the next few years have virtually disappeared, thanks to income-tax cuts, depressed tax revenues and billions in unexpected spending on disaster relief, domestic security and the war in Afghanistan. If the government issues more debt to pay for these things, businesses will have to offer higher interest rates to compete for investors’ financing.
“Long-term rates have not fallen, even though short-term rates have come way down,” Professor Romer said. In past recessions, the two have tracked more closely. This time long- term rates took a while to respond, then fell, but have since begun to climb again. Since the Fed began cutting rates in January, its key short-term rate has fallen from 6.5 percent to 1.75 percent. Meanwhile, 10-year bond yields, which closed at 5.08 percent yesterday, are little changed from January levels. Long- term interest rates generally have to fall to convince businesses to ramp up investments.
That is not to say that the Fed’s actions had no effect. “Monetary policy is a powerful tool, and that’s still true,” Professor Romer said. “If we hadn’t had the monetary policy, long- term rates might be a lot higher than they are.”
Cheaper oil may also offer a disappointingly small jolt to the economy. “Certainly it’s good news,” said James Hamilton, an economist at the University of California in San Diego. But he warned that oil prices’ capacity to spur growth had little to do with how much they had apparently stifled it in the past. “Oil prices have much more potential to disrupt the economy when they go bad,” he said.
An even deeper problem for the economy, however, could arise as businesses and households come to grips with their balance sheets.
“Businesses are not wanting to take on some more debt even though the rates are lower, unless they’re refinancing something they already have,” said Patricia Marquez, a business banker at Wells Fargo (news/quote) in El Paso, Tex.
Since April, for example, El Paso has been battling a cash shortage among new businesses with a federally supported program that injects low-interest seed money to back up commercial loans. Ms. Marquez said that without the program, several businesses would not have been able to get loans.
And the full force of a credit crunch may be about to hit small businesses in the next few months, said Cap Willey, who owns an accounting firm in Rhode Island and chairs the economic development committee of National Small Business United, a lobby with more than 65,000 members. Mr. Willey said banks were likely to clamp down on lending after receiving their borrowers’ annual financial statements, which are typically due 90 or 120 days after the year ends. A sudden tightening would be a nasty surprise for those who expect the economy to recover in March or April.
The retrenchment comes less than a year after corporate borrowing reached its highest level in two decades. “After 1995, there was an expectation of ever-higher growth,” said Bill Martin, an economist with UBS Warburg. When the rosy future turned bleaker late last year, and companies seemed likely to have trouble meeting earnings expectations, the rationale for easy credit disappeared.
But it will still take a while before the gap between corporate spending and cash flow narrows enough to lay the foundation for revival, said John Youngdahl, an economist with Goldman Sachs (news/quote). He says the gap has already dropped to $170 billion from about $250 billion. “Progress has been made by the sharp cut in capital spending,” Mr. Youngdahl said, “but we still think there’s a way to go in 2002.”
In previous recessions, Mr. Youngdahl said, the gap typically closed to a level that would be equivalent to roughly $100 billion today before the economy revived.
To lay the groundwork for sustainable economic growth, households may also have to move away from borrowing to rebuild their savings. Like companies, consumers added about $250 billion to their debts in the last year. The trend away from saving has been going strong since the last recession ended in 1991. Back then, the situation was reversed: private saving exceeded borrowing by about $360 billion.
Saving could already be on the rise. In El Paso, Ms. Marquez said business had dropped in local restaurants. “People are staying home, they’re saving their money,” she said.
The behavior of Americans who received tax rebates also hints at more saving. “The fact that such a low percentage of those rebates were spent in the short term was a collateral signal that the saving rate was going up,” Mr. Youngdahl said.
At least initially, however, all that could be bad news for the recovery. Mr. McMullen of Kroger said he could not recall a recession when sales of durable goods — cars, refrigerators and the like — had not led the recovery. But Christopher D. Carroll, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, said the rise in saving virtually always went along with a fall in purchases of durables. “It seems very unlikely to me that we’ll see a big surge in durable goods spending to help pull the economy out of recession robustly,” he said.
Bill Dunkelberg, who conducts a monthly survey of small-business owners for the National Federation of Independent Business, which has about 600,000 members, was more hopeful. “To stop growth, you really need the consumer to give up the ship, and I don’t see that happening,” he said.
Hiding in the shadows of corporate balance sheets is another potential drag on the economy: the crippling of corporate pension funds by the stock market’s fall.
“The last time we had such a major dip in the stock market was 1973 and 1974,” said Ethan Kra, the chief retirement actuary at William M. Mercer. In the 1970’s, Mr. Kra said, holding half a portfolio in stocks was considered aggressive. “Today there are pension funds that are 70, 80, 90 percent equities,” he said.
The losses are severe. “We’re talking tens and tens of billions in the economy,” Mr. Kra said. “It’s hitting companies of all sizes.”
Disappointing returns spell danger for companies whose pension funds pay a fixed benefit to retirees. The companies will have to top off their pension funds using earnings.
Mr. Kra predicted that these unanticipated contributions would continue for years. That means the worst pension expenses might not surface until late in 2003.
Will these hindrances keep the economy from recovering on time? According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the unofficial arbiter of the business cycle, an average recession lasts about 11 months. On that schedule, the recession could end sometime in February. Yet this has been no average recession.
Professor Romer pointed out that unlike most recent recessions, this one had not resulted from the Fed’s efforts to head off inflation. “You would expect a different set of patterns in a recession that’s got a different cause,” he said.
“We know this is a very unusual recession,” Mr. Martin agreed. Since forecasters did a poor job of predicting the recession’s onset, he said, they should not necessarily be trusted to predict the timing or strength of a recovery.