‘Economy’

I’ve been quiet for a while, going through a number of struggles that have left me without the — in the vernacular of my childhood, the ‘gumption’ — to keep writing frequently.  I’m trying really hard to get the spark back now, because I know in the long run the pocketmint project is important to me.

Here’s a little of what we’ve been dealing with: about three weeks ago, the big corporate monster suddenly chewed me up and unceremoniously spat me out.  By innocently mentioning what I thought was a widely obvious event, I apparently violated some unknown policy of the parent company (the details of which remain vague to this day) and in under 24 hours received my walking papers — no mercy, no appeal.

This abruptly cut our income by half.  Then, last week, Jak learned that due to staffing cutbacks at Microsoft his hours will be cut to half-time.  This means one-quarter income, and total loss of health insurance.

The bad news is that the mortgage alone on our house come to slightly more than Jak’s remaining half-salary, so we’re behind before we even start.  The good news is that the mortgage is the only debt we’re carrying — we paid off the last of our massive credit-card debt a couple years ago — and we have a pretty decent cash emergency fund. I’ve been putting aside at least 40% of our take-home for the last two years; some of that we’ve pulled out again for major house improvements and additional (Roth) retirement funding, but we’ve got almost $30k in cash savings.

We can put off all the remaining house projects and hunker down to the bare essentials, and make it for maybe 6-8 months like this. Hopefully it won’t come to that; salaried jobs may be rare right now but I should be able to pick up some freelance or contract work. And Jak’s employer will be working on his behalf to try and increase his hours again. Right now he’s burning PTO to keep the insurance going through December. We’re trying to make this work, and hopefully something will get better before it all gets a lot worse, but we’re definitely in a new era now.

We had a talk with the kids last night, resetting their expectations about our way of life — we won’t be going out for sushi anytime soon, or ordering pizza; we won’t be funding any more weekend out-of-town trips for Michaela to watch her school athletic teams. They took it pretty well; Claire immediately wanted to know how we could cut our costs. Someone else must have previously explained to her about the connection between lighting and your electricity bill, because Claire instantly morphed into Lightswitch Nazi, turning off every light in the house that wasn’t immediately necessary, scolding all the while. We were amused.

I also made the point, which I hope Michaela at least will remember, that this is exactly why it’s important to save a lot of what you earn for a real emergency. She tends to spend money as fast as she gets it, which concerns me in someone about to turn sixteen. But only the difference between us and all those people with ‘foreclosed’ signs on their houses is going to be our empty credit cards and our emergency savings account.

If you have a job now and aren’t saving most of your money for emergencies, please start. You may think this is an isolated incident, but I fear it’s not; if the collapsing economy hasn’t touched you yet, it will. Be prepared.

(Photo by sunchild_dd.)

The presidential candidates have finally figured out that the top concern of most Americans right now is our floundering economy, and predictably they’ve both claimed to have the best economic solution.

As I wrote before, I’m skeptical about how much influence the President has over the economy, especially in the short term. But I’m just a layperson. Wouldn’t it be great to know what a majority of professional economists think about the presidential candidates?

Scott Adams thought so too. The author of Dilbert says, “I found myself wishing someone would give voters useful and unbiased information about which candidate has the best plans for the economy. Then I realized that I am someone, which is both inconvenient and expensive.”

Also: awesome. Adams personally commissioned and paid for a survey of 523 economists, and then released the detailed data to the public. There’s a whole lot of raw information there I won’t go into; you can read the original source (.ppt) or an overview with commentary by Adams on CNN.

Back to our original question, though: in this survey 59 percent of the economists say Obama would be best for the long-term economy, while 31 percent prefer McCain. Only 10 percent believe that there would be no difference.

Two points come to mind: one, note the phrasing: long-term economy. No one here is expecting a quick fix, regardless of election outcome. And two, the question was asked on a seven-point scale, with the three points on either end representing a candidate, and only the middle point representing ‘no difference.’ This would tend to skew the responses toward picking either candidate over none; there was no reporting that separated the ‘major change’ voters (the 1s and 7s) from the ‘minor change’ voters (the 3s and 5s).

Another interesting fact is that economists (both in this study, and in the country at large) are predominantly Democrats. Don’t know why, but there it is. Among Independent economists, however, Obama is still favored, 49% to 37%. (The other 14% are in the ‘no difference’ camp.)

And finally, on the question of whether we should care about the opinions of economists, I’ll quote from Adams’ blog:

If a weather expert tells you what the weather will be on a specific day next year, you can safely ignore him. If he tells you a hurricane is heading your way, it’s a good idea to get out of the way, even if the storm ends up turning. That’s playing the odds.

Likewise, if an economist tries to tell you where the stock market will be in a year, you can safely ignore that. But if he tells you a gas tax holiday is an unambiguously bad idea, that’s worth listening to, especially if economists on both sides of the aisle agree.

If you think it is okay to ignore economists because they are so often wrong, you’re looking at the wrong questions. Economists are generally wrong with complicated models but right about concepts. For example, they know that additional domestic drilling won’t make much of a dent in the energy problem. And they know that free trade is generally good for all economies. (You can argue with my examples, but the point is that some things are generally known by economists while not being understood by the general public.)

By analogy, a mechanic knows that changing your oil is good for your engine, but he can’t tell you what problems you will have with your car next year. You shouldn’t ignore the mechanic’s advice on changing oil just because he doesn’t know when your battery will die, or because he didn’t personally perform any scientific studies on oil changes.

Personally, I’d love to see a Nobel Prize-winning economist as President. Sadly, this is not an option.

One way or another, though, it’s time to change the oil in our car.

Okay, so we’re all worried about the economy right now, for obvious reasons. And because it’s a Presidential election year, we’re hearing the usual promises from both candidates about how their administrations will improve it. There’s a lot of discussion about whether Obama or McCain will be better — for the national economy as a whole, or for a particular economic segment of the population.

Not many people, however, seem to be questioning the basic concept that the occupant of the Oval Office can even have a significant impact on the national economy. I’ve long harbored a suspicion that Presidents are taking too much credit for the good times and too much blame for the bad. So I’ve been looking around to see how much leverage professional economists believe the President actually has.

In an essay on exactly this topic from the last Presidential election season, professor Russell Roberts points out “two strange assumptions” implicit in these discussions:

The first is that the President “runs” the economy. The President hardly even runs the government. He certainly cannot direct the fortunes and failures of millions of workers, managers, investors and entrepreneurs.

The second implicit assumption is that the success or failure of the President depends on his ability to “stimulate” the economy, as if the economy were an engine that simply needed a different setting for its carburetor.

Roberts illustrates the silliness of trying to control the national economy with tax cuts and stimulus payments with a parable of a boy dipping water from the deep end of the pool and pouring it into the shallow end. I liked this, because it exactly illustrates my problem with the $600 check I received in the mail this summer.

(On the other hand, spending untold billions of dollars on the Iraq war has always seemed to me a lot like dipping water out of the pool and dumping it out in the middle of the desert. Perhaps I just lack a global perspective?)

On a similar note back in February, economics professor Tyler Cowen wrote in the New York Times that, “The public this year will probably not vote itself into a much better or even much different economic policy… It is already too late to stop an economic downturn.” The reasons are varied, but seem to boil down to two points:

• The globalized economy limits the changes any one country, even a very powerful one, can make on its own.
• Most of our economic policies and strategies are entrenched beyond the ability of our current legislative and political systems to reform them. “Democracy is a blunt instrument,” reminds Cowen. (Ouch.)

Newsweek weighs in with a quote from Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “[The President's] influence on the short-term macro economy is generally overestimated by voters.”

• In the short term, it may be a lot easier to do harm than good. Newsweek lists “notable [Presidential] policies that inflicted short-term damage” in the administrations of Jefferson, Grant, and Hoover.
• But most factors that influence the business cycle –”the end of the Cold War, the deflationary influence of an emerging China, the Internet … commodity inflation, a housing bubble and a weak dollar engineered by the Federal Reserve’s promiscuous policies, the demand-driven surge in oil” — would have occurred regardless of which person or party is in power.

On to Time Magazine, which noted that “The bigger issue for voters to wrestle with is … what the next President can do to the economy. Usually it’s not so much. But every once in a while, like when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and Reagan in 1980, the effect can be dramatic.” Cowen agrees: “The New Deal brought about a revolution in economic policy — but those were special circumstances.”

Are we in ’special circumstances’ once again? Not yet. Compared with 1932, 2008 is still looking pretty rosy. Could we wind up there eventually — next year, or the year after that? Answer hazy, try again later.

After all this reading, I’ve come away with four points of general agreement:

• There are no short-term solutions. The economy is an ocean liner, not a speedboat; course corrections take time.
• Rearranging resources is never the answer. Government ’stimulus’ doesn’t work because the resources used to do the stimulating are just water from the other end of the pool.
• A President may subtly set the tone of his administration but in most cases his direct power is limited at best. Congress and the Federal Reserve both have a greater effect on economic policy.
• The most important economic role of the President may be the ability to impact the mood of the citizenry in general. Franklin Roosevelt famously restored public confidence with the first of his “Fireside Chats”, halting the run on deposits that had flattened the entire banking system.

Newsweek again:

The most troublesome economic data points aren’t necessarily the rising unemployment rate and plunging home prices. Rather, they’re the miserable consumer-confidence numbers, which have hit a 16-year-low, and the high percentage of Americans who believe the nation is on the wrong track.

I could use a little clear, plainspoken communication right about now — what about you?

Sources:
Presidential Economics: What Leaders Can and Cannot Do about the State of the Economy, The Library of Economics and Liberty
It’s an Election, Not a Revolution, New York Times
Why the President Can’t Fix the Economy, Newsweek
The New President’s Economy Problem, Time Magazine

Sorry for the recent silence; I’ve been having a rough couple of weeks on the Life front. No financial crises, though, at least not yet! Thanks for all the recent comments — it cheers me up to see so many people reading.

This week got off to an interesting start for us with the early-buzzard circling of Washington Mutual.  WaMu has been my primary bank for over a decade, and currently holds all of our liquid assets — currently around $30,000 in checking and savings.

Now, all of that money is covered by FDIC insurance, so I’m not worried about a possible bank failure costing me money in the long run. But what about the short run?

Marc Hedlund posted to the Wesabe blog Wheaties for Your Wallet yesterday with an explanation for “What happens to your money if your bank closes?”.  Most of it is based on the experiences of one NetBank customer who reported a delay of two to three weeks before he had access to his money after the FDIC shut NetBank down.

This was … alarming, in our circumstance.  But it didn’t match what I remembered hearing from my friend Stacy, also a NetBank checking customer when it folded.  To be certain, I phoned her up and grilled her on her post-closure financial access.  Here’s what she said:

• She never lost access to her money. Debit cards continued to work uninterrupted for purchases and at ATMs.
• She lost online account access for two days, over the weekend. By Monday morning everything was available online again. In the interim, phone support and balance queries remained functional.

I have no idea why her experience was so different from Wesabe’s informant, but that’s an almost unnoticable blip in service. I’ve been more inconvenienced by Comcast going on the fritz.

So I’m not going to rush off and open up a new non-WaMu checking account for bet-hedging purposes. But I think I will be making one other change …

Yesterday I heard an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered with Hurricane Ike refugees in Houston. I was struck particularly by two things: one, that stores in Houston were running out of food.  Wha? I mean, it’s not Manhattan Island here, we’re talking about one of the great highway hubs of the nation, and they can’t truck in nonperishables to restock?  And two, that all purchases were cash-only.  I couldn’t tell from the report whether this was because of logistical reasons (like power outages) or emotional ones, but it did give me pause.  Jak and I typically have no more than $40 cash between us, and often none at all.  Seattle is a lot safer than the Gulf Coast, but there’s always the chance of, say, a really big earthquake.

So on the list for this week is pulling about $200 out of our WaMu accounts into a Cash Stash. Our biggest problem then becomes keeping it out of the hands of the teenager, who keeps losing her debit card and thinks that we should be her personal ATM.

(Photo by zephyrbunny.)

If you’re not a regular listener of This American Life, you may have missed the May episode entitled “The Giant Pool of Money”. It explains why what we have now isn’t just a ‘sub-prime mortgage lending crisis’ but a ‘worldwide credit crisis.’ It’s masterfully written, taking all the jargon and translating it into plain, often witty English:

Alan Greenspan: The FOMC stands prepared to maintain a highly accommodative stance of policy for as long as needed to promote satisfactory economic performance.

Adam Davidson: You might not believe me, but that little statement: that is Central Banker-speak for “Hey, global pool of money — screw you.”

Alex Blumberg: Come on, that’s not what he said.

Adam Davidson: It is! I speak Central Banker and that’s what he’s saying.

Anyone interested enough in the economy to be reading a personal finance blog — this means you! — absolutely should not miss this episode. Clear an hour to listen to the show, or you can read the transcript instead.

(Photo by Jeff Belmonte.)