EconomPic : devenir français ?

En raison d’une chute du nombre d’heures travaillées plus rapide que celle du PIB, le ratio du PIB par Heure travaillée s’envole.

Travaillez moins, soyez plus productif, et passez ce temps libre avec votre famille.

Bien que cela ne résulte pas nécessairement d’un choix, après avoir lu l’article de juillet 2005 de Krugman titré "valeurs familiales françaises", je me demande si nous sommes en train de devenir doucement (ou devrions devenir) français.

Krugman : valeurs familiales françaises (2005)

... a head-to-head comparison between the economies of the United States and Europe - France, in particular - shows that the big difference is in priorities, not performance. ... according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, productivity in France - G.D.P. per hour worked - is actually a bit higher than in the United States. ....

The French family, without question, has lower disposable income. This translates into lower personal consumption : a smaller car, a smaller house, less eating out.

But there are compensations for this lower level of consumption. Because French schools are good across the country, the French family doesn’t have to worry as much about getting its children into a good school district. Nor does the French family, with guaranteed access to excellent health care, have to worry about losing health insurance or being driven into bankruptcy by medical bills.

Perhaps even more important, however, the members of that French family are compensated for their lower income with much more time together. Fully employed French workers average about seven weeks of paid vacation a year. In America, that figure is less than four.

I’ve been looking at a new study of international differences in working hours by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, at Harvard, and Bruce Sacerdote, at Dartmouth. The study’s main point is that differences in government regulations, rather than culture (or taxes), explain why Europeans work less than Americans.

But the study also suggests that in this case, government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff - to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family ... And they even offer some statistical evidence that working fewer hours makes Europeans happier, despite the loss of potential income.

Krugman : leçons européennes

Europe has its economic troubles ; who doesn’t ? But the story you hear all the time - of a stagnant economy in which high taxes and generous social benefits have undermined incentives, stalling growth and innovation - bears little resemblance to the surprisingly positive facts. The real lesson from Europe is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim : Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.

...

Europe is often held up as a cautionary tale, a demonstration that if you try to make the economy less brutal, to take better care of your fellow citizens when they’re down on their luck, you end up killing economic progress. But what European experience actually demonstrates is the opposite : social justice and progress can go hand in hand.

La récession transforme le mode de vie des américains

Because of the Great Recession, a recent New York Times/CBS News poll has found, nearly half of Americans said they were spending less time buying nonessentials, and more than half are spending less money in stores and online.

But Americans are not just getting by with less. They are also doing more.

Some are working longer hours, but a larger proportion, the poll shows, are spending additional time with family and friends, gardening, cooking, reading, watching television and engaging in other hobbies.

Johann Hari : en finir avec la culture du surtravail

....

the treadmill is whirling ever-faster. This isn’t our choice : virtually every study ... finds that huge majorities of people say they want to work less and spend more time with their friends, their families and their thoughts. We know it’s bad for us. Professor Cary Cooper, who has studied to effects of overwork on the human body, says : "If you work consistently long hours, more than 45 a week, every week, it will damage your health, physically and psychologically." You become 37 per cent more likely to suffer a stroke or heart-attack if you work 60 hours a week - yet one in six of all Brits are doing just that.

We don’t stop primarily because we are locked in an arms race with out colleagues. If we relax and become more human, we fall behind the person in the next booth down, who is chasing faster. ...

Under Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the 1990s, the French discovered the most elegant way out of this .... They insisted that everyone work a maximum of 35 paid hours a week. It was a way of saying : in a rich country, life is about more than serving corporations and slogging. Wealth generation and consumerism should be our slaves, not our masters : where they make us happy, we should embrace them ; where they make us miserable, we should cast them aside. Enjoy yourself. True wealth lies not only in having enough, but in having the time to enjoy everything and everyone around you.

It was the equivalent to an arms treaty : we all stop, together, now, at the 35 hour mark. The French population became fitter, their relationships were less likely to break down, their children became considerably happier, and voluntary organisations came back to life. According to the national statistics agency Insee, the policy created 350,000 jobs, because so many people moved to job-shares to ensure their post was filled five days a week. ...

From the unlikely pairing of Salt Lake City and Paris, a voice is calling. It is telling us that if we leave our offices empty a little more, we can find a happier, healthier alternative lying in the great free spaces beyond.

La situation de l’emploi continue de se dégrader aux USA avec 85 000 emplois perdus en décembre.

Taux de chômage

Population active/population en âge de travailler

Comparaison de l’évolution du chômage durant les récessions

La décennie perdue

Progression du PIB et du patrimoine net des ménages par décennie entre 1940 et 2000.

source

Lire aussi :

  Washington Post : The lost decade for the economy

  Krugman : Zéro pointé

from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. ... It was a decade with basically zero job creation. ... It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

Le taux d’épargne net aux USA est négatif pour la première fois depuis la dépression des années trente

Le taux d’épargne des ménages est redevenu positif, mais l’endettement global, tous secteurs confondus, continue d’augmenter.

source

Bloomberg : Government deficits have caused the U.S. savings rate to turn negative for the first time since the Great Depression, and the gap is widening even as households and companies put away more money than ever before.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows net savings, adjusted for depreciation and changes in the value of business inventories, as a percentage of gross income. This rate is provided by the Commerce Department on a quarterly basis since 1947, when the chart begins. Annual figures go back to 1929.

La dette américaine ne sera jamais remboursée à sa valeur actuelle.

La relation chômage/inflation et le NAIRU mis à l’épreuve des faits

Roger Farmer "Farewell to the natural rate : Why unemployment persists." argues that "the relationship between unemployment and inflation is more complicated than that suggested by simple new-Keynesian models that incorporate a “natural rate” of unemployment."

Extrait : Most policymakers subscribe to the theory of the existence of a natural rate of unemployment. The data suggest that this theory is unconfirmed at best. To make the theory consistent with data, one must posit that the natural rate changes between recessions in unpredictable ways. This version of natural rate theory is difficult or impossible to refute. It is religion, not science.

Rappelons que ce modèle que Farmer qualifie de croyance religieuse sert de règle de base à tous les banquiers centraux.

Une étude réalisée pour le Pentagone, obtenue par MSNBC, clarifie la stratégie de contre insurrection en Afghanistan

Dynamic Planning for COIN in Afghanistan

Le document contient une trentaine de pages de spaghettis du même acabit.

MSNBC : what is the actual surge strategy ?

According to an unclassified military document from the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff obtained by NBC News, the COIN strategy has a basic goal. The document says to successfully conduct a counterinsurgency, U.S. and NATO forces "must accomplish three tasks simultaneously"...

The slide is undoubtedly overwhelming. For some military commanders, the slide is genius, an attempt to show how all things in war .... But for others, the diagram represents a fool’s errand that the United States has taken on in the name of national security.

Document : MSNBC (pdf)

Le futur de la dette, selon le FMI

The IMF forecasts that gross government debt among advanced economies will continue to rise until 2014, reaching 114% of GDP, compared to just 35% for developing nations.

NYT : Goldman Sachs a parié sur la faillite des clients de ses CDO

...

Goldman was not the only firm that peddled these complex securities - known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s - and then made financial bets against them, called selling short in Wall Street parlance. Others that created similar securities and then bet they would fail, according to Wall Street traders, include Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc., an investment company whose parent firm was overseen by Lewis A. Sachs, who this year became a special counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

...

While the investigations are in the early phases, authorities appear to be looking at whether securities laws or rules of fair dealing were violated by firms that created and sold these mortgage-linked debt instruments and then bet against the clients who purchased them, people briefed on the matter say.

One focus of the inquiry is whether the firms creating the securities purposely helped to select especially risky mortgage-linked assets that would be most likely to crater, setting their clients up to lose billions of dollars if the housing market imploded.

Some securities packaged by Goldman and Tricadia ended up being so vulnerable that they soured within months of being created.

...

From 2005 through 2007, at least $108 billion in these securities was issued, according to Dealogic, a financial data firm. And the actual volume was much higher because synthetic C.D.O.’s and other customized trades are unregulated and often not reported to any financial exchange or market.

...

Qu’à cela ne tienne, pour le Financial Times, le patron de Goldman Sachs est « l’homme de l’année »

ELIOT SPITZER, FRANK PARTNOY and WILLIAM BLACK : Faire la clarté sur AIG

...

A.I.G. was at the center of the web of bad business judgments, opaque financial derivatives, failed economics and questionable political relationships that set off the economic cataclysm of the past two years. When A.I.G.’s financial products division collapsed - ultimately requiring a federal bailout of $180 billion - those who had been prospering from A.I.G.’s schemes scurried for taxpayer cover. Yet, more than a year after the rescue began, crucial questions remain unanswered. Who knew what, and when ? Who benefited, and by exactly how much ? Would A.I.G.’s counterparties have failed without taxpayer support ?

Rappel : Les représentants de Goldman ont siégé aux côtés des fonctionnaires du Trésor le jour où le sauvetage d’AIG a été décidé.

Nano-termisme

Narang is the head of Tradeworx, a hedge fund and financial-technology firm that makes purely automated trades ; all decisions are reached and acted on at near light speed by computers running preprogrammed algorithms. “Actually, we run two businesses,” he says. “The first trades in and out of shares in about a second and holds them for an average of two or three days. That’s the medium-speed fund. The high-speed fund could make thousands of trades a second and holds them for a matter of minutes.”

Combien de ménages US feront défaut sur leur emprunt ?

The last Mortgage Bankers Association report estimates that the total number of loans in some sort of delinquency, default, or foreclosure status to be about 8.2 million, or 14.41% of all loans. If the true number of Imminently at-risk loans is somewhere between 13 and 15 million, the default and foreclosure crisis is about 60% over.

The problem with the final 40% is that it crushes everyone other than Subprime households and likely happens over a longer period of time than the two-year Subprime Implosion.

In addition to the imminent defaulters, a large percentage will default for various unforeseen reasons tied to the macro. Throw in top strategic defaulters and we could easily see a situation over the next few years in which 20 MILLION homeowners are either delinquent, defaulted, or in the foreclosure pipeline.

Légendes :
  LTV : Loan to value, valeur de l’emprunt principal par rapport à celle du bien
  CLTV : valeur totale des emprunts et hypothèques
  03-07 : Année du prêt
  if only 33%... : Hypothèse : 1/3 des foyers ont des remboursements égaux à 50% de leurs revenus
  Approx limited doc : estimation du nombre de foyers ayant fait une déclaration de revenus sans apporter de justificatifs

L’agence Moody’s s’alarme de la perspective de troubles sociaux

In a sombre report on the outlook for next year, the credit rating agency raised the prospect that future tax rises and spending cuts could trigger social unrest in a range of countries from the developing to the developed world.

It said that in the coming years, evidence of social unrest and public tension may become just as important signs of whether a country will be able to adapt as traditional economic metrics. Signalling that a fiscal crisis remains a possibility for a leading economy, it said that 2010 would be a “tumultuous year for sovereign debt issuers”.

...

The report, which comes amid growing worries about Britain’s credit rating, said : “In those countries whose debt has increased significantly, and especially those whose debt has become unaffordable, the need to rein in deficits will test social cohesiveness. The test will be starker as growth disappoints and interest rates rise.”

...

A l’exception de la Chine, M2 se contracte

Krugman : le soutien du plan de relance va diminuer rapidement

Martin Wolf ne voit aucune relation entre inégalités et bulle financière

Questions/Réponses sur le blog de Martin Wolf

Q : How could a more equitable distribution of income be instrumental in solving the impact of this crisis ? Especially in the UK and the USA the top 20% has close to 50% of the net incomes which is one of the reasons for the bubbles on Wall Street and on the housing market.

Martin Wolf : I am not at all sure about the link between inequality and the bubble. I think that the growth of the financial sector played an important role in increasing inequality in the US and UK. It helped a very small proportion of the population to extract a large amount of rent. But I am not sure about the reverse causal relationship from higher inequality to the bubble. The argument would, I suppose, be that, lacking higher incomes, a large proportion of the population borrowed in order to sustain consumption. This is possible. But I do not know of any convincing arguments for the proposition.

L’accumulation des fortunes stratosphériques, trop importante pour s’employer dans l’économie réelle sous forme de consommation ou d’investissement productif, participe à l’inflation des actifs financiers, et représente une « fuite » dans le circuit des revenus.

C’est l’un des moteurs de la fuite en avant dans l’endettement et les actifs fictifs qui sont sa contrepartie, n’en déplaise à Wolf.

ENVIRONNEMENT

When Markets are Poison : Learning about Climate Policy from the Financial Crisis (pdf)

There are close parallels between the rampant financial innovations behind the current financial crisis and the innovations feeding carbon trading. ...

Carbon markets are the dominant official response to climate change - despite being part of the neoliberalism and financialisation now being questioned worldwide. ...

Carbon markets thus pose a challenge to progressive movements seeking a common response to the financial crisis and to official failures to address climate change. This briefing paper suggests concrete ways of holding both within the same strategic vision by proposing parallels between the rampant financial innovations that have contributed to the current crisis and the innovations feeding carbon trading. ...

The first section of the paper proposes that the enormous growth in the derivatives markets since the 1970s constitutes a wave of commodification of certainty/uncertainty countered by a Polanyian “counter-movement” of societal self-defence. ...

After reviewing some of the basics of carbon markets, a second section explores some parallels between carbon and uncertainty markets :

  Both markets have seen the construction of similar abstract commodities, largely by centralised corps of “quants” and traders.
  Embedded in neoclassical economics and its over-ambitious institutions of calculation, both markets heighten systemic dangers, necessitating movements of societal self-protection.
  Both markets involve regressive redistribution and the destruction of crucial knowledge.
  Both are vulnerable to bubbles and crashes.
  Both erode notions of transparency and conflict of interest.
  Both call into question the assumption that all imaginable markets can be successfully regulated.

Les économistes utilisent le terme d’output gap pour désigner l’écart entre les niveaux actuel et potentiel de l’activité d’une économie.

Les consommateurs américains étaient dans la période récente la locomotive de l’activité mondiale. Aux USA, la consommation des ménages représentait près de 70% du PIB, chiffre bien supérieur à la moyenne en la matière.

Les graphiques suivants, réalisés par l’économiste américain Tim Duy, montrent clairement que la reprise qui s’amorce depuis peu s’effectue à un niveau sans comparaison avec celui d’avant la crise.

Certes, l’indice de confiance des ménages du Conference Board a progressé, passant de 48,7 en octobre à 49.5 en novembre. Mais sa valeur moyenne, durant les trente dernières années, était de 95, soit près du double. L’économie américaine est loin d’être tirée d’affaire.

Ventes de détail hors véhicules

Consommation des ménages

Variation annuelle de la consommation des ménages (gauche) et indice de confiance établi par l’université du Michigan(droite)

source : Tim Duy

Septembre 2007 - 4,6%

Septembre 2009 - 9,8%

(*)

Rappel : Le taux de chômage a atteint 10,2% en novembre, et le taux U6, qui comptabilise les temps partiels contraints et les chômeurs découragés de rechercher un emploi, est de 17,5%

(*) et non pas 8,5% comme l’affiche à tort l’animation dont ces images sont extraites.

Voir l’animation

Bureau of Labor Statistics : Alternative measures of labor underutilization (dont U6)

Un pirate informatique a diffusé sur internet un ensemble de mails et de documents qu’il affirme avoir dérobé sur le serveur du Climate Research Unit de l’université d’East Anglia en Grande Bretagne.

L’université a reconnu la réalité du piratage mais ne confirme pas pour l’instant l’authenticité des documents.

Toutefois, la structure et le contenu des messages publiés semblent indiquer qu’il s’agit bien d’originaux dans lesquels les chercheurs discutent et élaborent le contenu de leurs travaux et publications.

Les sites rassemblant les sceptiques quant à la réalité du changement climatique ont publié le contenu de quelques messages qui sont présentés comme apportant la preuve d’une volonté des scientifiques de dissimuler certaines données, et en particulier, un mail de Phil Jones, le directeur du centre, où l’on peut lire :

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Voici les précisions apportées par un rédacteur du blog scientique Real Climate :

The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”-see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

Andrew Freeman, du Washington Post, a interrogé l’historien des sciences Spencer Weart sur cette affaire.

What do you think this story reveals about the conduct of climate science ?

SW : Back around 2000 leading climate scientists talked to each other mostly about their science—debating one another’s data and analysis and negotiating travel, collaboration and other administration—and a little bit about policy. As time passed they have had to spend more and more of their time answering criticism of the scientific results already established, criticism mostly based on ignorance, fallacious reasoning, and even deliberately deceptive claims. Still more recently they have had to spend far too much of their time defending their personal reputations against ignorant or slanderous attacks.

The theft and use of the emails does reveal something interesting about the social context. It’s a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science : Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance.

Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers. In blogs, talk radio and other new media, we are told that the warnings about future global warming issued by the national science academies, scientific societies, and governments of all the leading nations are not only mistaken, but based on a hoax, indeed a conspiracy that must involve thousands of respected researchers. Extraordinary and, frankly, weird. Climate scientists are naturally upset, exasperated, and sometimes goaded into intemperate responses... but that was already easy to see in their blogs and other writings.

Sur le web :

Guardian : Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists

Real Climate : The CRU hack

Infographie NYT

Epargne de précaution : les réserves excédentaires conservées à la Fed par les banques US

Le bilan de la Fed

Source : New York Fed

Situation des USA

Le désendettement des ménages est amorcé...

Source Fed

Source Fed

La production industrielle remonte légèrement mais les capacités inutilisées restent très importantes...

Source Fed

Source Fed