With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers.
[snip]
The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.
As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”
Until the last year, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by the rising value of benefits, especially health insurance, which caused overall compensation for most Americans to continue increasing. Since last summer, however, the value of workers’ benefits has also failed to keep pace with inflation, according to government data.
At the very top of the income spectrum, many workers have continued to receive raises that outpace inflation, and the gains have been large enough to keep average income and consumer spending rising.
Translation: The outrageous pay packages of senior executives are masking how the average worker is getting screwed.
polls show that Americans are less dissatisfied with the economy than they were in the early 1980’s or early 90’s. Rising house and stock values have lifted the net worth of many families over the last few years, and interest rates remain fairly low.
But polls show that Americans disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the economy by wide margins and that anxiety about the future is growing. Earlier this month, the University of Michigan reported that consumer confidence had fallen sharply in recent months, with people’s expectations for the future now as downbeat as they were in 1992 and 1993, when the job market had not yet recovered from a recession.
“Some people who aren’t partisans say, ‘Yes, the economy’s pretty good, so why are people so agitated and anxious?’ ” said Frank Luntz, a Republican campaign consultant. “The answer is they don’t feel it in their weekly paychecks.”
[snip]
In the first quarter of 2006, wages and salaries represented 45 percent of gross domestic product, down from almost 50 percent in the first quarter of 2001 and a record 53.6 percent in the first quarter of 1970, according to the Commerce Department. Each percentage point now equals about $132 billion.
Total employee compensation — wages plus benefits — has fared a little better. Its share was briefly lower than its current level of 56.1 percent in the mid-1990’s and otherwise has not been so low since 1966.
Over the last year, the value of employee benefits has risen only 3.4 percent, while inflation has exceeded 4 percent, according to the Labor Department.
[snip]
For most of the last century, wages and productivity — the key measure of the economy’s efficiency — have risen together, increasing rapidly through the 1950’s and 60’s and far more slowly in the 1970’s and 80’s.
But in recent years, the productivity gains have continued while the pay increases have not kept up. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent, according to Labor Department statistics analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Benefits accounted for most of the increase.
“If I had to sum it up,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the institute, “it comes down to bargaining power and the lack of ability of many in the work force to claim their fair share of growth.”
Nominal wages have accelerated in the last year, but the spike in oil costs has eaten up the gains. Now the job market appears to be weakening, after a protracted series of interest-rate increases by the Federal Reserve.
Unless these trends reverse, the current expansion may lack even an extended period of modest wage growth like one that occurred in the mid-1980’s.
The most recent recession ended in late 2001. Hourly wages continued to rise in 2002 and peaked in early 2003, largely on the lingering strength of the 1990’s boom.
Average family income, adjusted for inflation, has continued to advance at a good clip, a fact Mr. Bush has cited when speaking about the economy. But these gains are a result mainly of increases at the top of the income spectrum that pull up the overall numbers. Even for workers at the 90th percentile of earners — making about $80,000 a year — inflation has outpaced their pay increases over the last three years, according to the Labor Department.
Actually, those workers not in that top 10 percent DO feel it in their weekly paychecks, though because of the rising value of their homes in recent years, people have been able to mask their declining economic condition by tapping their home equity. However, that particular gravy train has now left the station as well.
Global economist Noriel Roubini paints a picture of the recession that's coming as a result of the bursting of the housing bubble that is going to be extremely ugly. Americans have been propping up the economy with home equity masquerading as income and ever-spiralling amounts of debt. But the party's over. The hard landing is as inevitable now as Hurricane Katrina was if you lived on the Gulf Coast a year ago, and it's going to hit you whether you own a house or not. Nothing can prevent it now, and it's going to be nasty, brutish, and long:
The current slump in housing will have a much more severe effect on the economy than the tech investment bust of 2000 for several reasons. The wealth effect of the tech bust was limited to the elite of folks who had stocks in the NASDAQ. The wealth effect of now falling housing prices affects every home-owning household. The link between housing wealth rising, increased home equity withdrawal (HEW) and consumption of durable and non durables is very significant (see RGE’s Christian Menegatti brief on this), much more than the effect of the tech bubbles of the 1990s. This is exactly what San Francisco Fed President Yellen worried about in her speech last week. Last year, out of the $800 billion of HEW at least $150 or possibly $200 billion was spent on consumption and another good $100 billion plus went into residential investment (i.e. house capital improvements/expansions). It is enough for house price to flatten – as they started to do recently – let alone start falling as they are doing now since they are beginning to fall in major markets – for the wealth effect to disappear, the HEW dribble to low levels and for consumption to sharply fall.
A housing slump is a triple whammy for the economy. First, the 6.3% fall in residential investment in Q2 will be followed for the next few quarters by a much larger fall, at least 10% and possibly 15% in such investment. Second, the effects on consumption of housing will be severe: already in Q2 durable consumption is falling as falling home purchases lead to lower purchases of furniture, home appliances and other housing-related durable goods. Third, the employment effects of housing are serious; up to 30% of the employment growth in the last three years was due – directly or indirectly – to housing. As housing slumps, the job and income and wage losses in housing will percolate throughout the economy.
The bills are due, folks. I'm no economist, but recent insecurity at my own workplace led me six months ago to work hard at eliminating all of my non-discretionary debt. So pay off those credit cards NOW if you can, and forego whatever luxuries you can in order to pay them off. Those who have tapped all their home equity to turn their ranches and cape cods into McMansions, or to buy new SUVs and plasma TVs, and those who bought houses with ARMs and interest-only mortgages in the last year and took out extra cash to remodel the house just the way they wanted it are basically screwed.
It would be easy for people like Mr. B. and Your Humble Blogger, who bought in 1996, refinanced three times as rates dropped, and haven't done anything to the house that couldn't be done with ready cash, to be smug. But if you too fall into this category, hold the schädenfreude, because what's coming is going to affect us too.
So when Republicans talk this fall about how great the economy is doing, just keep in mind that they're just whistling past the graveyard.
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