First Principles

Well, it's been one heck of a week. With all of the insanity going on around us, sometimes it's best to take a step back and return to first principles. One of those is the Business Cycle - you know that thing that the Fed has supposedly abolished? The two questions that come to mind immediately are "why did the cycle exist?" and "how did the Fed get rid of it?"


The first one is easy. Economic cycles have existed throughout our history and always will exist as long as emotional humans are making economic decisions. The National Bureau of Economic Research has tracked US economic cycles going back to the mid-19th century. In the immediate postwar period, the cycles became more predictable as the Fed began to regulate them and induce the occasional recession to purge excesses before the market did it for them. During this period, it was discovered that the cycle could be manipulated though not controlled. The typical pattern was roughly three years of expansion, followed by a 12 month recession. The only major exception was the long expansion which lasted through most of the 1960s. The excesses from that one contributed to the really ugly decade that followed - and I'm not just talking about disco and afros for white guys either.

Unfortunately, other than Paul Volcker the Fed seemingly learned little from that experience. After Saint Paul imposed a painful but effective remedy for inflation, his successor Alan Greenspan embarked on a policy of continuous credit expansion. This has "worked" in the sense that economic growth was sustained over a long period, few setbacks were encountered and those were short and shallow. But the price was a crumbling economic foundation. Consumption became the dominant basis of the economy. Consumption growth was funded first with falling savings, then with growing debt. The major collapses in the savings rate came during the 1990s as it fell from 7% to 2% and again after 2002 when it went from 2% to negative.

We essentially outsourced the necessary but burdensome job of saving to Asia. Few economists seem to have drawn any connection between the outsourcing of manufacturing and of savings. Manufacturing requires investment and investment requires savings. It would seem reasonable that the nations which save and invest in the real economy (not just financial paper) would increase their manufacturing and that seems to be the case. The US is left with little savings, heavy debt, bad loans and a weakened manufacturing base. The cycle has not been abolished. It has simply been stretched and distorted beyond all recognition.