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Yesterday morning I testified to a Joint Economic Committee of Congress hearing (update: that link may be fragile; here’s the JEC general page). The session discussed the latest GDP numbers, the impact of the fiscal stimulus earlier this year, and whether we need further fiscal expansion of any kind.
I argued that a global recovery is underway and in the rest of the world will likely be stronger than the current official or private consensus forecast, but growth remains fragile in the United States because of problems in our financial sector. While our situation today is quite different in key regards from that of Japan in the 1990s, the Japanese experience strongly suggests that fiscal stimulus is not an effective substitute for confronting financial sector problems head on (e.g., lack of capital, distorted incentives, skewed power structure).
We are well into the adjustment process needed to bring us back to living within our means. Although such a process always involves an initial fall in real incomes, growth can resume quickly as the real exchange depreciates. The idea that we necessarily are in a "new normal" scenario with lower productivity growth seems farfetched, but continuing failure to deal effectively with the "too-big-to-fail" banking syndrome delays and distorts our adjustment process—it also makes us horribly vulnerable to further collapses.
The fiscal stimulus enacted in early 2009 had a major positive impact, particularly as it was coordinated with other industrial countries—this prevented the global recession from being even deeper (disclosure: I testified to the need for a major fiscal stimulus in October 2008). But a further broad stimulus at this time is not warranted and the first-time homebuyers’ tax credit should be phased out. We should extend unemployment insurance and focus our future efforts on improving the skills of people with less education, e.g., through strengthening community colleges.
Like all industrialized countries, we also need to look ahead to "fiscal consolidation" in order to stabilize our debt-GDP levels (and pay for the rising cost of Medicare). The large contingent government liabilities implied by the existence—and potential collapse—of big banks are a major risk to medium-term outcomes.
My written testimony (with some small updates indicated) is available here . This is now our revised Baseline Scenario.
Prepared by Simon Johnson, Peter Boone, and James Kwak. Also posted on Simon Johnson’s blog, Baseline Scenario.
