President Obama and Big Business Get On Well – But When Will That Produce Jobs?
By Simon Johnson
President Obama is embarked on a major charm offensive with regard to the business sector, as seen for example in the appointments of Bill Daley (ex-JP Morgan; now White House chief of staff) and Jeff Immelt (still head of GE, now also the president’s top outside economic adviser). This should not be an uphill struggle – much of the corporate sector, particularly bigger and more global businesses, is doing well in terms of profits and presumably C-suite remuneration.
But when exactly will this approach deliver jobs and reduce unemployment? And it store up risks for the future?
Republican rhetoric over the past two years was relentless on one point – that the Obama administration was anti-business. Supposedly this White House attitude undermined private sector confidence and limited investment.
In reality, the opposite was the case.
Relative to any post-war recession, the rebound in profits during the Obama administration has been dramatic. To be sure, the end of 2008 was shocking to many entrepreneurs and executives – as credit was disrupted in much more dramatic fashion than they thought imaginable. Large and immediate cuts in employment followed.
But then the government saved the failing financial sector. The means were controversial but the end was essential – without private credit, the US economy would have fallen far and for a long time.
And profits rebounded almost at once. The financial sector recovered quickly on the back of implicit guarantees provided to our largest banks – really the only bad quarter was at the end of 2008 (hence the angst about bankers’ bonuses in 2009). But the nonfinancial sector has done even better. Profits for those private businesses fell by no more than 20 percent from top-to-bottom in the cycle and in 2010 through the third quarter (the latest available data in the BEA series) profits were back at the level of 2006. After the deep recessions of the early 1980s, for example, it took at least three times as long for profits to come back to the same extent. (I went through this comparison in more detail last week for the NYT’s Room for Debate).
And investment in plant and equipment has also recovered fast – this was the one bright part of the domestic economy in the past two years (with the other good relatively source of news being exports). Look around at the places you work and where you do business (or shop). Is there any indication they have cut back on information technology spending recently?
Overall, the policies of late 2008 and early 2009, including the much-debated fiscal stimulus, protected corporate sector profits to an impressive degree — despite the fact that this was the steepest recession of the past 70 years, profits fell only briefly and seem likely to be just as strong going forward as they were pre-crisis. Large global American-based companies, in particular, are well positioned to take advantage of growth in emerging markets such as India, China, and Brazil.
But the link between corporate performance — measured in terms of profit or executive pay for U.S. companies — and domestic employment has fundamentally changed in recent decades. At the very least, employment responds slower now than in previous cycles when output and sales recover. You should look immediately and regularly at this chart from the Calculated Risk blog. As the picture shows so vividly, we are still waiting for employment to turn back up decisively; compared with previous recessions, the delay is simply stunning.
Ideally, in a situation like this, we’d provide more stimulus to the economy in some form. But our monetary policy is already close to exerting its maximum efforts, and the scope for using fiscal policy was undermined by high deficits during the “boom” years of the 2000s – so there is no safe fiscal space for action (even if the politicians could agree on what to do.)
We are reduced to waiting for the private sector to recover enough to want to take on new employees. No one has a good answer for why this is so slow – perhaps because it is so easy and so cheap to hire workers in those very emerging markets that are now booming, or perhaps because the skill mix available at prevailing wages in some parts of the US is not exactly what employers want.
Or perhaps there are artificial barriers to entry at work, meaning that companies can effectively keep out new entrants – thus keeping profits artificially high and, at the sectoral level, limiting employment. The constraints on entrepreneurship in our post-credit crisis economy need careful scrutiny. Hopefully, the administration’s charm offensive will not prevent it from enforcing our anti-trust laws, which were more than slightly neglected in the Bush years.
Listening attentively to the nonfinancial sector makes sense in this situation; in return, corporate leaders need to focus on creating jobs in the United States.
But bending over backwards to accommodate the wishes of the financial sector is exactly what got us into this mess to start with. Allowing our largest banks to become even bigger and more dangerous would be a very bad mistake.
Written by Simon Johnson
January 27, 2011 at 7:00 pm
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