When will it ever end, aka, potential subscribers take note.
The market is currently abuzz with news that Robert J. Gordon, longtime member of NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee, has provided solid evidence supporting a tight link between the peak in initial claims and, dare we say it, the end of recessions.
Back on April 2, we sent this to our subscribers:
Here's a rare note of possible cheer: could the behavior of initial claims be signaling that an end to the labor market contraction is in the offing?
Graphed below is the yearly change in initial claims for unemployment insurance. Note that this measure typically peaks a little before the end of a recession. No surprise, perhaps. But what is a little surprising is how similar current behavior looks to earlier end-of-recession patterns.
And as the table below shows, the peak in claims growth occurs, on average, four months before the official NBER trough month, though the range is one to seven months. Note too that employment doesn't necessarily turn positive until a few months later, with the trough in yearly job growth typically coming five months after the peak in claims growth, and the trough in the employment level coming eight months after. In 1970s, yearly job growth hadn't picked up even a year after the peak in claims. But even then, the bottom was getting close.
| Months to Trough in Employment | Employment Growth, year-to-year | ||||||
| peak in claims, yty | cycle | level | growth | claims peak | year later | swing | |
| Dec 69-Nov 70 | Apr 70 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 1.8% | -0.4% | -2.3% |
| Nov 73-Mar 75 | Nov 74 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 0.4% | -0.7% | -1.2% |
| Jan 80-Jul 80 | May 80 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0.7% | 1.0% | +0.3% |
| Jul 81-Nov 82 | May 82 | 6 | 7 | 5 | -1.3% | -0.5% | +0.8% |
| Jul 90-Mar 91 | Feb 91 | 1 | 3 | 3 | -0.6% | -0.4% | +0.2% |
| Mar 01-Nov 01 | Oct 01 | 1 | 22 | 4 | -0.7% | -0.7% | +0.0% |
| average | 4 | 8 | 5 | 0.1% | -0.3% | -0.4% | |
Since there's a good chance that the job market in this cycle will resemble the slow recovery after the 2001 recession, it could be 2011 before employment starts growing again. But if we think of this as a sort of leading indicator of a leading indicator, we could start seeing signs of the recession's end by mid-summer. We hope.
The Fed Evokes Shakespeare
There's no shortage of reasons to worry about the health of the U.S. dollar: a still-huge trade deficit, a huge and swelling budget deficit, pervasive credit troubles, a serious recession that may linger, the threat of capital flight, etc. etc. Should we be worried about a currency crash?
That question is ambiguously phrased. It's quite possible the dollar could crash. But how bad would it be if it did? A surprising answer comes from a recent study by Federal Reserve economist Joseph E. Gagnon. The title lays out a broad hint: Currency Crashes in Industrial Countries: Much Ado About Nothing?. Gagnon's answer is basically, yeah.
Gagnon looks at 19 episodes of sharp currency depreciations-15% or more over four quarters-in 20 industrial countries since 1970. Factors that caused the crashes include inflationary policies, large current account deficits, capital outflows, and rising unemployment rates. Sometimes one factor was enough to cause the slide, sometimes it took several. But his surprising finding is that crashes were followed by poor outcomes-slow GDP growth, rising bond yields, and falling equity prices-only when inflationary policies prevailed. But the currency crash seemed not to contribute to poor outcomes-if anything, they mitigated them. The inflation did the damage, not the currency troubles.
The greatest danger from a currency crash came when the central bank was pegging a specific currency value despite inflationary policies. If the exchange rate is flexible or floating, there's considerably less trouble.
It's important to note that an inflation must be underway, and not merely expected, for a currency crash to be truly damaging. The threshold level of inflationary risk is a rate that's more than two standard deviations above the 20-country average, which works out to 7.2 percentage points.
Gagnon also finds that devaluations can successfully stimulate GDP growth and improve the foreign balance with little effect on inflation. He concludes: "Non-inflationary currency crashes uniformly had good outcomes: GDP growth was average to above average, bond yields fell, and real equity prices rose."
We're not conspiracy theorists, sad to say, but a word on what this paper might mean, aside from its interesting conclusions. There must be talk within the Fed about what would happen should the dollar fall hard-and maybe even if such a devaluation might be a good move for the U.S. Though no central banker or finance minister would ever let on that he or she is thinking this way, you can imagine the temptation. And from all this we'd conclude: avoid betting the farm on dollar strength. But if you lead a dollar-denominated life, you have little to fear from a devaluation. Things might look a little different in Beijing, but that's another story.