Joe Biden’s strategy for the US economy is the most radical departure from prevailing policies since Ronald Reagan’s free market reforms 40 years ago. With plans for public borrowing and spending on a scale not seen since the second world war, the administration is undertaking a huge fiscal experiment. The whole world is watching.
If Biden’s coronavirus recovery plans are vindicated, they will demonstrate it is possible to “build back better” from the pandemic and that advanced economies have been overly obsessed with inflation for the past 30 years. It will put government back at the heart of day-to-day economic management.
If the plan comes off, it will show that unnecessary timidity in recent decades has let millions suffer unnecessary unemployment, starved many areas of opportunities for improved living standards and widened inequalities.
But if the strategy fails, ending in overheating, high inflation, financial instability and the economics of the 1970s, the US experiment of 2021 will go down as one of the biggest own goals of economic policymaking since François Mitterrand’s failed reflation in France in 1981.
Biden’s $1.9tn borrowing and spending plans have not been dreamt up on university campuses but are the result of a delicate political balance in a divided Congress. Any new stimulus figure much lower than the planned 9 per cent of gross domestic product risks losing more votes from Democrats than it would gain from Republicans. “This is what he can get done when he has razor-thin majorities to deal with,” says Professor Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University.
The new administration is making the case that the stimulus plan is an extension of the “high-pressure economy” Janet Yellen advocated in 2016, when she chaired the Federal Reserve, which was a response to the insipid recovery after the financial crisis. The administration believes that this is the best way to ensure a full recovery from the Covid-19 crisis with few lasting scars. Now with Yellen as Treasury secretary, “act big” is the new slogan and the US economic policymaking establishment is on board.
Jay Powell, the current Fed chairman, stressed last week the need for “patiently accommodative” monetary policy, signalling that the US central bank was in no mood to take away the punchbowl by raising interest rates before the party got going.
Growth expectations
The plans have left economic forecasters in a quandary. The IMF and OECD have recommended looser fiscal policy to aid the recovery, but not so far on the scale planned by the US. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office forecasts, which included only the final Trump stimulus in its latest forecasts, already expected the US economy to grow sufficiently fast this year to regain the pre-pandemic level of output by summer. It also expected the US economy to recover all of the lost ground from the Covid-19 pandemic by 2025 with no permanent scars. If former president Donald Trump’s stimulus plans were sufficient to make up the lost ground, the question is what an additional stimulus of 9 per cent of national income will achieve.
The CBO has not yet given its view, but academics and private sector economists are increasingly taking a stance. Consensus Economics reports positively that independent forecasters have raised their expectations of US economic growth for 2021 and 2022 with barely any additional inflation.
Ellen Zentner, chief US economist of Morgan Stanley, argues that the high-pressure economy will raise US output by the end of next year almost 3 per cent above the level that she had pencilled in before the coronavirus crisis. She assumes the Fed would not seek to rein in the rapid growth rates. The contrast with the 2008-09 financial crisis is striking. In the decade after that crisis, the US economy, along with almost all other advanced economies, did not manage to return to the pre-crisis path of output.
In the halls of academia, the vast scale of the US experiment is much more controversial and has created shifts in allegiances within the economics profession that few could have predicted even a month ago.
There is little surprise that Paul Krugman, the economics Nobel laureate, would support the Biden plan, arguing that there was only weak evidence for the theory that low unemployment rates raise wages and then inflation. This view, he said, was “mostly wrong”, leading to policy being overly “constrained by the fear of a ’70s repeat”.
But his support for the Biden plan is matched almost as fully by Rogoff, who became famous during the global financial crisis for warning of the dangers of high levels of public debt. He says “we are in a different world today”, with much lower interest rates and a highly partisan politics. “I’m very sympathetic to what Biden’s doing,” Rogoff adds, even though there was a long-term cost to additional public debt and a risk of higher inflation. “Yes, there is some risk we have economic instability down the road, but we have political instability now.”
Sceptical voices
Among those looking enviously across the Atlantic are Europeans who worry that the eurozone will once again fall short of the US in terms of policy action and results. Erik Nielsen, chief economist of UniCredit, says that with the EU fiscal support around half the size of that in the US, Europe is now “frozen with fear”, which is likely to lead to “another three to five years of European growth underperformance relative to the US”.
Lined up on the other side of the argument are several economists who have been hitherto the most vocal supporters of public borrowing and spending. Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary who was one of Barack Obama’s leading economic advisers in the aftermath of the financial crisis, has spent much of the past decade warning about “secular stagnation”, the view that advanced economies were stuck in a semi-permanent rut and needed more stimulus. But now that stimulus is on the cards, he has warned it has gone too far and is likely to trigger “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation”, which would also limit the “space for profoundly important public investments”.
Olivier Blanchard, former IMF chief economist who ignited the global fiscal stimulus debate in 2019 with his presidential address to the American Economics Association, accepts that he is known to be supportive of higher public debt. Nevertheless, he warns that Biden’s “$1.9tn programme could overheat the economy so badly as to be counterproductive”.
Some economists fear these sceptical voices will dissuade Europe from adopting the fiscal stimulus they think it needs to recover fully from the pandemic. Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, worries that fiscal conservatives in Europe will seize on any rise in inflation or signs of waste in the programme. “Delivery of good results doesn’t generate the same groundswell as a conservative warning,” he says. “I’d hate for [the Biden plan] to get a bad reputation abroad.”
Supporters of the plan, especially those looking at it from an international perspective, have worked hard to justify the scale of the fiscal stimulus. Core to the argument for “going big” is the evidence of the past decade that countries have much more room for economic growth and lower unemployment before there is any inflationary pressure. In the US, the unemployment rate fell to 3.5 per cent in early 2020 before the pandemic, its lowest in 50 years, without any sign of inflation rising.
The European Central Bank has struggled to raise inflation close to its 2 per cent target, leading many to think there has been insufficient fiscal stimulus. This suggests economists and policymakers have persistently underestimated the output gap, the economic concept that estimates the degree to which economies are functioning below a level that would keep inflation stable.
Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, which represents the world’s largest financial institutions, has run a campaign on what he calls “nonsense output gaps”, especially in southern Europe, estimated by the IMF and others. He says there was always more scope for expansionary fiscal policies without inflation and that the low output gap estimates have prevented growth and prosperity, further undermining countries’ public finances.
“Output gaps are a key input into whether and how much overheating we might get,” he says. While he believes the US debate on overheating is appropriate, Europe can afford much more stimulus without inflation. If it continues along existing lines and does not follow the US, he says: “Europe will get a repeat of sluggish recovery after the financial crisis.”
Alongside the potential for larger output gaps, another defence of big stimulus is that government spending, particularly on investment projects, can itself raise the speed limits of economies before they generate inflation.
If the Biden plan can demonstrate it has generated more capacity for higher and greener future growth rates, that would be the holy grail of government intervention, says Mariana Mazzucato, professor of economics at University College London. Do it right, she says, and there are huge benefits available.
“You’re not just flooding the system with liquidity, but reaching the real economy and creating a stronger industrial base,” she says. “That’s the kind of thing we want to see — expanding capacity and preventing inflation.”
The arguments in favour of the Biden stimulus plan are not disputed by most of those who have expressed concerns, but they say its size at up to 14 per cent of gross domestic product, including the stimulus signed into law by Trump in December, is simply unwarranted and might undermine the argument for using fiscal policy to help economies recover from the pandemic.
Jason Furman, former chair of Obama’s council of economic advisers, says the new administration is entirely justified in seeking to test the level of the output gap and the potential level of GDP that did not generate inflation. “The idea you test potential by year after year throwing logs on the fire is incredibly compelling, but that’s not the same as spending over 10 per cent of GDP in one year,” he says.
Few would worry about inflation rising to 3 per cent or even temporarily a bit higher, he adds, but the Fed would have to react if there was a sustained bout of inflation.
One danger cited by many economists is that if inflation becomes ingrained in an economy it can be difficult and painful to eradicate, with central banks having to raise interest rates and cause a recession and unemployment to bring it back down. If Krugman is right that the link between unemployment and inflation has become weaker, there is a fear that any action by the central bank to lower inflation will require a lot more unemployment than in the 1980s and 1990s to bring it down.
Poorly targeted
While some inflation is certainly seen as a benefit of the reform, helping to grease the wheels of a modern economy, there is also a debate whether inflation was, in any case, about to rise. Manoj Pradhan, founder of Talking Heads Macroeconomics, is concerned that the short-term inflationary dynamics of the Biden plan will combine with longer-term upward pressures on prices that will come from an ageing population consuming more and producing less.
“Even before [Biden announced his plan], the US looked like an inflationary place anyway,” Pradhan says. And what happens in the US tends to get exported, he adds. “Fiscal policy has led the stimulus and if inflation becomes acceptable in the US, it gives a green light to the rest of the world.”
Economists of all persuasions also worry that the Biden plan, with its heavy emphasis on sending cheques to families, is poorly targeted and not nearly as focused on improving the potential for future growth as they would like. Randall Kroszner, former Federal Reserve governor and now deputy dean of the University of Chicago’s business school, says the heavy fiscal stimulus in response to the pandemic is appropriate, but the debt created does have a cost.
“It does have to be paid back by future generations so it is very important to make sure there is a return to that spending,” he says.
If that was not difficult enough, others warn that Europe cannot simply ape what America is doing, partly because it does not have the same access to finance and partly because there is more scepticism that it is possible simply to “build back better” just by borrowing and spending.
Robert Chote, the recently departed head of the UK Office for Budget Responsibility, says the outlook for fiscal policy outside the US is likely to focus less on the stimulus debate and more “on the severity of any long-term scarring of the economy — which is hard to estimate with any confidence”.
He adds that the public finances are more complicated than thinking about stimulus. Governments, for example, would soon need to consider raising taxes, especially if they “feel the need to spend a permanently bigger share of national income on health and social care after the pandemic than before it, to build more resilience into the system”. These structural public finance questions will not go away easily once economies have recovered.
For now, however, all eyes are on the huge stimulus numbers coming from the US. Its new government is planning to borrow and spend and Yellen has called on the rest of the G7 to follow suit. As Rogoff says, the experiment is likely to be global. “If it goes wrong for the US, it goes wrong for everybody.”
OTTAWA – Canada’s unemployment rate held steady at 6.5 per cent last month as hiring remained weak across the economy.
Statistics Canada’s labour force survey on Friday said employment rose by a modest 15,000 jobs in October.
Business, building and support services saw the largest gain in employment.
Meanwhile, finance, insurance, real estate, rental and leasing experienced the largest decline.
Many economists see weakness in the job market continuing in the short term, before the Bank of Canada’s interest rate cuts spark a rebound in economic growth next year.
Despite ongoing softness in the labour market, however, strong wage growth has raged on in Canada. Average hourly wages in October grew 4.9 per cent from a year ago, reaching $35.76.
Friday’s report also shed some light on the financial health of households.
According to the agency, 28.8 per cent of Canadians aged 15 or older were living in a household that had difficulty meeting financial needs – like food and housing – in the previous four weeks.
That was down from 33.1 per cent in October 2023 and 35.5 per cent in October 2022, but still above the 20.4 per cent figure recorded in October 2020.
People living in a rented home were more likely to report difficulty meeting financial needs, with nearly four in 10 reporting that was the case.
That compares with just under a quarter of those living in an owned home by a household member.
Immigrants were also more likely to report facing financial strain last month, with about four out of 10 immigrants who landed in the last year doing so.
That compares with about three in 10 more established immigrants and one in four of people born in Canada.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information says health-care spending in Canada is projected to reach a new high in 2024.
The annual report released Thursday says total health spending is expected to hit $372 billion, or $9,054 per Canadian.
CIHI’s national analysis predicts expenditures will rise by 5.7 per cent in 2024, compared to 4.5 per cent in 2023 and 1.7 per cent in 2022.
This year’s health spending is estimated to represent 12.4 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. Excluding two years of the pandemic, it would be the highest ratio in the country’s history.
While it’s not unusual for health expenditures to outpace economic growth, the report says this could be the case for the next several years due to Canada’s growing population and its aging demographic.
Canada’s per capita spending on health care in 2022 was among the highest in the world, but still less than countries such as the United States and Sweden.
The report notes that the Canadian dental and pharmacare plans could push health-care spending even further as more people who previously couldn’t afford these services start using them.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
As Canadians wake up to news that Donald Trump will return to the White House, the president-elect’s protectionist stance is casting a spotlight on what effect his second term will have on Canada-U.S. economic ties.
Some Canadian business leaders have expressed worry over Trump’s promise to introduce a universal 10 per cent tariff on all American imports.
A Canadian Chamber of Commerce report released last month suggested those tariffs would shrink the Canadian economy, resulting in around $30 billion per year in economic costs.
More than 77 per cent of Canadian exports go to the U.S.
Canada’s manufacturing sector faces the biggest risk should Trump push forward on imposing broad tariffs, said Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters president and CEO Dennis Darby. He said the sector is the “most trade-exposed” within Canada.
“It’s in the U.S.’s best interest, it’s in our best interest, but most importantly for consumers across North America, that we’re able to trade goods, materials, ingredients, as we have under the trade agreements,” Darby said in an interview.
“It’s a more complex or complicated outcome than it would have been with the Democrats, but we’ve had to deal with this before and we’re going to do our best to deal with it again.”
American economists have also warned Trump’s plan could cause inflation and possibly a recession, which could have ripple effects in Canada.
It’s consumers who will ultimately feel the burden of any inflationary effect caused by broad tariffs, said Darby.
“A tariff tends to raise costs, and it ultimately raises prices, so that’s something that we have to be prepared for,” he said.
“It could tilt production mandates. A tariff makes goods more expensive, but on the same token, it also will make inputs for the U.S. more expensive.”
A report last month by TD economist Marc Ercolao said research shows a full-scale implementation of Trump’s tariff plan could lead to a near-five per cent reduction in Canadian export volumes to the U.S. by early-2027, relative to current baseline forecasts.
Retaliation by Canada would also increase costs for domestic producers, and push import volumes lower in the process.
“Slowing import activity mitigates some of the negative net trade impact on total GDP enough to avoid a technical recession, but still produces a period of extended stagnation through 2025 and 2026,” Ercolao said.
Since the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement came into effect in 2020, trade between Canada and the U.S. has surged by 46 per cent, according to the Toronto Region Board of Trade.
With that deal is up for review in 2026, Canadian Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Candace Laing said the Canadian government “must collaborate effectively with the Trump administration to preserve and strengthen our bilateral economic partnership.”
“With an impressive $3.6 billion in daily trade, Canada and the United States are each other’s closest international partners. The secure and efficient flow of goods and people across our border … remains essential for the economies of both countries,” she said in a statement.
“By resisting tariffs and trade barriers that will only raise prices and hurt consumers in both countries, Canada and the United States can strengthen resilient cross-border supply chains that enhance our shared economic security.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.
