In search of the new normal
This hasn’t been your father’s recession.
Unlike other recent recessions which were relatively shallow and short lived, we won’t see a quick and full recovery from this one. A problem which, Sandra Pianalto, Cleveland Fed president, said yesterday, is one of the reasons that the recovery will be so long delayed. Read more
A good time to pay down your credit card
Interest rates are low. Consumer borrowing, however, is still expensive. So what are consumers doing?
Paying down their debt, says a report put out today by the St. Louis Fed. Households have reduced credit card debt by 3.5 per cent and mortgage debt by 2 per cent. The Economic synopses, written by William T. Gavin, St. Louis Fed Vice President, credits the spreads between interest paid on consumer savings (which is held down by low interest rates) and the cost of consumer borrowing (which remains relatively high.)
“Because interest rates on savings are so low, households have ‘saved’ by paying down credit card and mortgage debt.”
Of course, an alternative explanation is that the reduced mortgage debt (which has experienced its first year-on-year decline) is due to falling housing prices. Read more
As money pours out of money market funds, we ask whether equity levels are sustainable and if the return of property-backed debt is a cause for celebration. Food security is a rising international concern and Bill Clinton asks if we should use the unemployed to increase energy efficiency. Read more
That retail sales number
At the risk of stating the obvious, I don’t think the Fed was expecting August retail sales to come in quite as strong as they did. One month’s data is not going to change the forecast very much, as Bernanke’s comments at Brookings imply. Still, it is interesting to think about this in the context of the savings rate.
Most Fed officials think the savings rate will stick roughly where it is now – about 4.5 per cent. Some see a serious risk that the savings rate will move higher in the coming months; others are pretty confident it will stay about where it is now. None of them as far as I can see are expecting the savings rate to dip lower from here. If – and it is a very big if - a run of data suggested that was happening it would have a big impact on the way policymakers think about the outlook into 2010. Read more
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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
