macroeconomics, Meta Intelligence

Penn Wharton: U.S. Budget Model

The U.S. Fiscal Imbalance: June 2022

[from Penn Wharton, University of Pennsylvania]

We estimate that the U.S. federal government faces a permanent fiscal imbalance equal to over 10 percent of all future GDP under current law where future federal spending outpaces tax and related receipts. Federal government debt will climb to 236 percent of GDP by 2050 and to over 800 percent of GDP by year 2095 (within 75 years).

We estimate that, under current law, the U.S. federal government faces a permanent present-value fiscal imbalance of $244.8 trillion, or 10.2 percent of all future GDP. This imbalance is equal to 52.7 percent of all future government receipts, 35.6 percent of all future expenditures, or some combination of both.
Even ignoring the negative macroeconomic feedback effects of rising debt on GDP in these “conventional” estimates, government debt climbs to 236 percent of GDP by 2050. Thereafter, debt continues to climb and exceeds over 800 percent of GDP within 75 years, by the year 2095.
Under the alternative “no-sunset” policy—where sunsets in 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are not enforced—the fiscal imbalance increases to $276.4 trillion, or 11.5 percent of all future GDP.
For the major entitlement programs—including Social Security, Disability and Medicare Part A—about one-half (54 percent) of the fiscal imbalance in perpetuity comes from past and current generations receiving more in benefits than they paid in taxes.

Read the full analysis [archived PDF].

View the data [archived XLSX].

Brief based on work by Agustin Diaz, Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters. Prepared by Mariko Paulson.

World-Watching: Germany Bundesbank: What Moves Markets?

[Deutsche Bundesbank discussion paper 16/2022 by Mark Kerssenfischer & Maik Schmeling]

Non-technical summary

Research question

A key question in the macro-finance literature concerns the drivers of asset prices. Are asset prices mainly driven by news, or by changes in sentiment and other factors unrelated to economic fundamentals? In most asset pricing models, news play a dominant role. But in empirical investigations, the explanatory power of news is often quite low.

Contribution

We study the explanatory power of news by building a large, time-stamped event database covering a wealth of news related to the macroeconomy, including macroeconomic data releases, central bank announcements, bond auctions, election results, sovereign rating downgrades, and natural catastrophes. We combine this event database with high-frequency stock price and bond yield changes, both for the U.S. and the euro area, going back to 2002.

Results

We find that roughly half of all stock and bond price movements in the U.S. and euro area occur in tight windows around clearly identifiable news and in this sense can be explained by those news. On the positive side, this share is much higher than most previous studies found. However, our results still ascribe a large role to return variation that cannot be linked to news about economic fundamentals.

Read the paper [archived PDF].

Essay 49: Postdicting the 2008 Great Recession: Macro and Finance

Prof. George Akerlof (2001 Nobel) shows how macroeconomics overlooked the issue of financial stability as a pillar. He argues that Rajan’s 2005 paper and talk were uniquely prescient on this.

This is why we find thinking about, say, the Panic of 1873 so instructive especially when one adds an “omnidirectional” analysis: In 1873, we get Around the World in Eighty Days with the transport revolutions that make winning this bet about circling the world in eighty days, at all possible: railroads, steamships, etc. London is shown to have emerged as the world money center, as described in Walter Bagehot’s classic Lombard Street. The opening line of The Magnificent Ambersons is (in paraphrase): “The financial crisis of 1873 destroyed the fortunes of most people but made the Ambersons and this was the basis of their magnificence.”

The novel The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, set in the 1870s, shows the financial shocks of 1873 as a major player in the story.

Prof. Adam Tooze of Columbia published in 2018 a masterful account of finance and macro and politics relevant to our 2008 fiasco in his Crashed:

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

Hence Akerlof’s depiction, in the current Journal of Economic Perspectives, of how macroeconomics became separated from financial instability analyses is key:

“The Keynesian–neoclassical synthesis that had emerged by the early 1960s put constraints on macroeconomics. Foremost, it divorced macroeconomists from working on financial stability. Luckily, after the crash of 2008, the prior work of finance economists has been belatedly acknowledged, and the subfield of macro stability has also emerged as quite possibly the most vibrant research frontier in economics. Nevertheless, macroprudential concerns remain as back matter in the textbooks. Correspondingly, macroprudential policy is undervalued in the councils of government. Yet its importance remains, given the likelihood of another crash.”

In this context, little damage could be done by macro models lacking the details of the financial system. But exclusion of such detail (with the attendant possibility of financial crash) from standard macroeconomics could be a problem in a different context: if the financial system changed in fundamental ways. That was exactly the topic of Rajan’s (2005) Jackson Hole talk, “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” [PDF] which did predict the crash of 2008 as it actually happened. In terms of the skeletal model, had that “financial development” beyond a well-supervised banking system with deposit insurance driven the financial system out of the safe region of always hold? In September 2008, the answer to Rajan’s question became clear: “yes, it had.”

Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 33, Number 4—Fall 2019—Pages 171–186

What They Were Thinking Then: The Consequences for Macroeconomics during the Past 60 Years [PDF] by Prof. George Akerlof.