Category Archives: Economy & Markets

A 60-40 Portfolio Could Return Less Than A Savings Account

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My Comments: How fast will your money grow?

An expectation of growing money at an annual rate of 7% to 10% going forward is probably unrealistic.

Interest rates and inflation rates are relatively low, and global economic growth rates are likely to slow down over the next two decades. See my earlier posts to understand this: http://wp.me/p1wMgt-1Rp and http://wp.me/p1wMgt-1Qz

June 30, 2017 • Christopher Robbins

Over the next decade, the traditional 60-40 portfolio will post average lower annual returns than many online bank accounts do today, according to a web tool from Newport Beach, Calif.-based Research Affiliates.

A portfolio consisting of 60 percent equities and 40 percent bonds will post average annual real returns of just 50 basis points over the next decade, said Jim Masturzo, Research Affiliates’ senior vice president, asset allocation, on a Wednesday webcast.

“Investing is hard, and this market will kick you in the teeth,” said Masturzo. “The focus should be on how do we create portfolios well-positioned for the future that are able to meet our future spending obligations. For a majority of investors, risk is failing to meet their long-term spending needs.”

Masturzo explained that most of the firm’s assumptions lie on projections for 50 basis points of annual growth from large-cap stocks. The S&P 500 is projected to produce an average annual dividend yield of 2 percent and long-term earnings growth of 1.3 percent, but lose 2.8 percent in valuation annually.

By comparison, annual percentage yields of 1 percent or more are available in online savings accounts from Ally and Synchrony, and online checking accounts from Aspiration.

The low return estimate might come as a shock to some investors, admits Masturzo. In equities markets, earnings growth has failed to keep up with rising stock prices, while fixed-income returns will continue to be muted by low short-term interest rates and monetary tightening by central banks.

Yet a 60-40 portfolio had returned 4.9 percent net of inflation year to date through May 31, said Masturzo, with the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index yielding 1.2 percent, while U.S. large-cap stocks have returned 7.4 percent—a “spectacular rise in the markets.”

“The most common question we hear is: ‘Can this continue?’” said Masturzo. “I don’t know, but history tells us that it is unlikely.”

During the webcast, Masturzo used Research Affiliates’ newly updated Asset Allocation Interactive (AAI) tool to visually demonstrate the firm’s projections for future returns across asset classes, geographies and factors.

Research Affiliates predicts that there is a less than 1 percent chance that a traditional 60-40 portfolio will be able to post real returns of 5 percent or more over the next decade. The company assumes that the portfolio will generate a 2.4 percent average annual net yield, but an average annual valuation change of 1.9 percent.

A portfolio offering a 5 percent average annualized return is still possible, said Masturzo, but advisors would be better off optimizing returns through diversification and rebalancing than by adding risk.

Masturzo said that advisors and investors will have to think beyond traditional investments to generate yield and growth.

“Opportunities do exist beyond mainstream stocks and bonds to take advantage of asset classes with lower valuations or attractive cash flows,” Masturzo said. Yet most advisors are diversifying within highly correlated areas of the market and not across asset classes. Higher returns might be found in credit markets, commodities, REITs and private investment opportunities, and within non-U.S. markets.

Investors might also consider active strategies to produce differentiated returns, said Masturzo.

“Alpha is an important part of this discussion, especially when you’re talking about expensive asset classes,” he said. “We’re big believers in adding value through contrarian trading.”

At the heart of the tool is a scatterplot of risk and return demonstrating historical data or expectations from Research Affiliates projecting an efficient frontier defining a normal distribution around a portfolio’s probable returns.

The AAI tool is an interactive web tool that provides expected return data across more than 130 assets and model portfolios. The tool allows advisors to create and customize their own portfolios, or to blend existing portfolios to view expected and optimized returns and risk across five different currencies, and to discover correlations within their portfolios.

AAI also allows users to view cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratios across equity markets and compare them with each other, or compare current valuations against the historical range for each market.

During his demonstration, Masturzo used the AAI tool to show that, based on the Research Affiliates projections, increasing the volatility of a 60-40 portfolio by 14 percent by diversifying away from bonds and U.S. stocks is still not enough for it to reliably post 5 percent average annualized returns.

“Increasing volatility tolerance is a bad approach to achieving 5 percent real returns,” said Masturzo. “For those who want to do so, we believe you should approach a maverick approach to risk and add value beyond a passive approach by accessing contrarian advice within asset classes.”

Protectionists Are Wrong About Unemployment

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My Comments: This doesn’t tell the whole story. But it helps. And, yes, this does have political implications.

Make America Great Again is a very complicated matter. What a surprise. And you thought it would be easy and would happen overnight after we drained the swamp. Well…

Donald Boudreaux is a senior fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Mercatus Center Board Member, a professor of economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University. He writes:

What I think is missed is the average income for those employed. We know there is an increasing disparity between those at the top and those at the bottom. We have to find a way to turn this around, or there will be more than just rioting in the streets. It’s in our best interest to do this, not just for those in the middle and the bottom, but also for those at the top. If no one can afford what those at the top are offering, no one will buy it.

The following quote is from pages 30-31 of my Mercatus Center colleague Daniel Griswold’s excellent 2009 volume, Mad About Trade (footnotes excluded):

In the past four decades, during a time of expanding trade and globalization, the U.S. workforce and total employment have each roughly doubled…. Since 1970, the number of people employed in the U.S. economy has increased at an average annual rate of 2.22 percent, virtually the same as the 2.25 percent average annual growth in the labor force. Despite fears of lost jobs from trade, total employment in the U.S. economy during the recession year of 2008 was still 8.4 million workers higher than during the 2001 recession, 27.6 million more than during the 1991 recession, and 45.8 million more than the 1981-82 downturn.

Nor is there any long-term, upward trend in the unemployment rate. In fact, even counting the recession year of 2008, the average unemployment rate during the decade of the 2000s has been 5.1 percent. That rate compares to an average jobless rate of 5.8 percent in the go-go 1990s and 7.3 percent in the 1980s.

After decades of demographic upheaval, technological transformations, rising levels of trade, and recessions and recoveries, the U.S. economy has continued to add jobs, and the unemployment rate shows no long-term trend upward. Obviously, an increasingly globalized U.S. economy is perfectly compatible with a growing number of jobs and full employment.

The Next Recession

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My Comments: It’s a given there will be a ‘next recession’. People much smarter than me say it’s not many months away. It’s a normal event and we’ll most likely survive.

What we may not survive, however, apart from a random collision with an asteroid, are the effects of income inequality across the planet and the massive debt overhang facing us in this country. Combine those two forces and you know there’s going to be chaos down the road.

Olivier Garret, Forbes Contributor / Jun 26, 2017

In the coming years, we will have to deal with the largest twin bubbles in history. It’s global debt (especially government debt) and the even larger bubble of government promises.

Together, these twin bubbles make up what investor John Mauldin calls “The Great Reset.” Nobody can tell how this crisis will play out, but one thing is for sure, it will affect everyone in a big way.

The Debt Burden Is at a Breaking Point

The mere existence of these bubbles has profound economic implications, as research shows high debt levels weigh heavily on economic growth.

The total debt-to-GDP ratio is at 248% today. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects it will rise to 280% by 2027. And that’s assuming nominal GDP grows at 4% per annum.

Despite the post-election optimism, nominal GDP growth in 2016 was just 2.95%—making it the fifth-worst year on record since 1948. There are no signs it will pick up soon either.

That means the reality may be even gloomier than what the CBO projects.

If a higher debt burden means lower growth, the recovery from the next recession, whenever it arrives, will be even slower than the last.

Now Count in Government Promises

Those sky-high debt-to-GDP ratios don’t factor in the unfunded liabilities—pensions, Medicare, and Social Security, which the US Government has promised to millions of Americans. Those total about $100 trillion today.

The chart below shows that by 2019 those unfunded liabilities, along with defense and interest, will consume ALL tax revenue:

Last year, the first baby boomers turned 70. The average boomer has just $136,000 in retirement savings. If that individual lives for 15 years after retirement, his annual income comes to just $9,000.

Because boomers are living longer and need income, they’re staying in the job market longer. The fastest employment growth now is among people 65 and older.

However, with 1.5 million boomers turning 70 every year for the next decade, a huge strain will be put on government finances in the form of pensions and Social Security.

But the pension crisis isn’t just in the US.

A Citibank report shows that the OECD countries face $78 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities. That is at least 50% more than their total GDP.

Pension obligations are growing faster than GDP in most, if not all, of those countries. Those obligations sit on top of a 325% global debt-to-GDP ratio.

Prepare in Advance

Politicians and central bankers could try to “fix” these problems in several ways.

They could default on the debt and pension obligations, or they could print money to fund them. There is no way of knowing ahead of time how these bubbles play out.
What we do know is the chosen approach will bring a different type of volatility and effect on the markets.

For investors, this will be a period of enormous volatility.

That’s why it’s essential to arm yourself with the knowledge of how to deal with this volatility ahead of time.

Growth Is Not Dead, But It Is Dying

My Comments: My post on May 26th last about Demographics and Money suggested reasons why economic growth in long established nations will be nothing to brag about going forward. Despite the current Administration suggesting a return to not just 3% annual growth for the US economy, but wait for it, 4% annual growth, it’s just not going to happen.

The tax plan outlined by the White House the other day makes the basic assumption that with high growth, tax revenues will grow to pay for everything. What is not said is that without significant growth, the hole we are in now will simply get deeper.

Right now the Federal deficit is almost $20T. That’s a staggering amount. Pretty soon, the annual cost to service that debt will be $1T per year. That money has to come from tax revenues, which means you and I. Are you prepared to pay your share when the top 1% get more tax breaks?

I’m far from a pacifist, but do we really need to keep paying more annually for our military than the next seven nation’s combined spending? Yes, some of that spending filters back into the economy and functions as a stimulus, but the Administration wants to spend more than we do now.

May 28, 2017 Lorenzo Fioramonti

Growth is dying as the silver bullet for success. Why this may be good thing

The idea that the economic “pie” can grow indefinitely is alluring. It means everybody can have a share without limiting anybody’s greed. Rampant inequality thus becomes socially acceptable because we hope the growth of the economy will eventually make everybody better off.

In my new book “Wellbeing Economy: Success in a World Without Growth” I point out that the “growth first” rule has dominated the world since the early 20th century. No other ideology has ever been so powerful: the obsession with growth even cut through both capitalist and socialist societies.

But what exactly is growth? Strangely enough, the notion has never been reasonably developed.

For common sense people, there is growth when – all things being equal – our overall wealth increases. Growth happens when we generate value that wasn’t there before: for instance, through the education of children, the improvement of our health or the preparation of food. A more educated, healthy and well-nourished person is certainly an example of growth.

If any of these activities generate some costs, either for us individually or for society, we should deduct them from the value we have created. In this logical approach, growth equals all gains minus all costs.

Paradoxically, our model of economic growth does exactly the opposite of what common sense suggests.

Negative values of growth

Here are some examples. If I sell my kidney for some cash, then the economy grows. But if I educate my kids, prepare and cook food for my community, improve the health conditions of my people, growth doesn’t happen.

If a country cuts and sells all its trees, it gets a boost in GDP. But nothing happens if it nurtures them.

If a country preserves open spaces like parks and nature reserves for the benefit of everybody, it does not see this increase in human and ecological wellbeing reflected in its economic performance. But if it privatises them, commercialising the resources therein and charging fees to users, then growth happens.

Preserving our infrastructure, making it durable, long-term and free adds nothing or only marginally to growth. Destroying it, rebuilding it and making people pay for using it gives the growth economy a bump forward.

Keeping people healthy has no value. Making them sick does. An effective and preventative public healthcare approach is suboptimal for growth: it’s better to have a highly unequal and dysfunctional system like in the US, which accounts for almost 20% of the country’s GDP.

Wars, conflicts, crime and corruption are friends of growth in so far as they force societies to build and buy weapons, to install security locks and to push up the prices of what government pays for tenders.

The earthquake in Fukushima like the Deep Water Horizon oil spill were manna for growth, as they required immense expenditure to clean up the mess and rebuild what was destroyed.

Disappearing growth

Against this pretty grim depiction, you may ask yourself: where is the good news? Well, the good news is that growth is disappearing, whether we like it or not. Economies are puffing along. Even China, the global locomotive, is running out of steam.

And consumption has reached limits in the so-called developed world, with fewer buyers for the commodities and goods exported by developing countries.
Energy is running out, particularly fossil fuels, and even if polluting energy sources were endless – as some supporters of shale gas, or fracking, suggest – global agreements to fight climate change require us to eliminate them soon.

As a consequence, mitigating climate change forces industrial production to contract, thus limiting growth even further. What this means is that, on the one hand, growth is disappearing due to the systemic contraction of the global economy. On the other, the future of the climate (and all of us on this planet) makes a return of growth, at least the conventional approach to industry-driven economic growth, politically and socially unacceptable.

Window of opportunity for change

Even the International Monetary Fund and mainstream neoliberal economists like Larry Summers agree that the global economy is entering a “secular stagnation”, which may very well be the dominant character of the 21st century.

This is a disastrous prospect for our economies, which have been designed to grow – or perish. But it is also a window of opportunity for change. With the disappearance of growth as the silver bullet to success, political leaders and their societies desperately need a new vision: a new narrative to engage with an uncertain future.

In my new book, I argue that as we begin to recognize the madness behind growth, we start exploring new paths. These include: forms of business that reconcile human needs with natural equilibria; production processes that emancipate people from the passive role of consumers; systems of social organisation at the local level that reconnect individuals with their communities and their ecosystems, while allowing them participate in a global network of active change makers.

This is what I call the “wellbeing economy”. In the wellbeing economy, development lies not in the exploitation of natural and human resources but in improving the quality and effectiveness of human-to-human and human-to-ecosystem interactions, supported by appropriate enabling technologies.

Fulfilling lives

Decades of research based on personal life evaluations, psychological dynamics, medical records and biological systems have produced a considerable amount of knowledge about what contributes to long and fulfilling lives.

The conclusion is: a healthy social and natural environment. As social animals, we thrive thanks to the quality and depth of our interconnectedness with friends and family as well as with our ecosystems. But of course, the quest for wellbeing is ultimately a personal one.

Only you can decide what it is. This is precisely why I believe that an economic system should empower people to choose for themselves. Contrary to the growth mantra, which has standardised development across the world, I believe an economy that aspires to achieve wellbeing should be designed but those who live it, in accordance with their values and motives.

Source article: http://theconversation.com/growth-is-dying-as-the-silver-bullet-for-success-why-this-may-be-good-thing-78427

The Keys to American Growth

My Comments: Demographics is an economic force to understand. Without people, growth and prosperity will diminish. Neither children nor the elderly can be counted on to work the fields and build houses. That leaves people in the middle and unless we grow them at home, we have to import them from somewhere else. That means rational immigration laws and not walls.

May 01, 2017 | By Scott Minerd, Guggenheim Partners

After years of relying on monetary policy to stabilize the U.S. economy, policymakers have redoubled their commitment to stronger pro-growth fiscal policies. As post-election Washington sets its sights on growth-oriented reforms, policymakers should remember that economic growth in any nation is determined by the four basic factors of production—land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. These essential inputs to economic output are far from abstract concepts, but represent the basic, essential, and exclusive elements to growth. Every government policy decision affects them in one way or another, and success in maximizing economic output relies upon optimizing each input.

The first input to growth requires responsible use of our land and other natural resources. It is easy to understand how a nation rich in land, water, minerals, oil, gas, and timber, can benefit from the responsible use of these resources. The reemergence of the United States as the world’s largest energy producer is reducing the cost of living for consumers and creating millions of new jobs in resource-related industries. Nonetheless, sound policy decisions must include the sustainability of our natural resources by ensuring practical environmental regulation assures a safe and secure ecological balance. Our land and resources are precious and limited. We must ensure the growth pursued today does not damage the opportunities for development available to future generations.

Labor is the work that all employed people contribute to the production of goods and services. Essentially, a larger, more productive workforce delivers greater output. One of the greatest challenges facing American labor is a sharp slowdown in its growth rate. Overall U.S. population growth has slowed, reflecting a combination of declining fertility rates and slower net immigration inflows. As a result, the domestic labor pool is projected to increase by an anemic 0.5 percent per year over the next 20 years, compared to growth rates of over 2.5 percent in the 1970s. The U.S. population is also aging. In 1960, 38.6 percent of the U.S. population was below the age of 20 and poised to drive future labor force growth, and 23.2 percent was 50 or older. By 2040, just 22.9 percent of the population will be younger than 20, and 38.8 percent will be over 50. In 1960, there were 5.1 workers for every Social Security beneficiary. Today, the worker/beneficiary ratio is down to 2.8, and is projected to be 2.1 by 2040.

To address these challenges, sound immigration policy should seek to attract young, foreign-born workers to the United States and incentivize them to stay. Deporting working-age immigrants who are making productive contributions to our country, or reducing the number of qualified immigrants allowed employment in our country, would hurt the already meager growth in our labor market, decrease total economic output, and reduce American and global living standards. An influx of young workers would help shore up our social welfare system to care for older Americans through incremental taxes and Social Security receipts while boosting total output of goods and services.

The third essential input to growing economies is capital. Capital investment turns money into economically productive assets like bridges, airports, roads, machinery, and equipment that serve to increase output. In the United States, infrastructure spending programs have the potential to fuel growth through direct construction spending and enhancing future efficiency. Imagine the productivity gains associated with improved mass transit or a 15 percent reduction in commuting time. Such ambitions, however, are not likely to be realized in any significant size without partnership from the private sector. In the persistently fiscally constrained environment, the government cannot foot the bill for meaningful infrastructure investment by itself. Hundreds of billions of dollars in private capital are already interested in investing in real assets, with trillions more sitting on the sidelines. Governments at all levels should incentivize private sector investment by reducing regulatory hurdles, developing new financing mechanisms, and offering attractive investment projects that meet the market rate of return expectations of private investors like pension funds and insurance companies.

The final factor of production, entrepreneurship, pulls the other factors together into a business enterprise that generates profits. Immigration policies can dramatically impact the quality of entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy. Immigrants account for a disproportionately high share of new business startups. Despite making up just 15 percent of the U.S. workforce, more than 35 percent of new businesses have at least one immigrant entrepreneur at the helm. The dynamic and creative entrepreneurs seeking to make their dreams come true in America provide economic benefits to all of society, and it is imperative that sound policies for work, education, and investment visas are developed with entrepreneurship in mind.

Policymakers would be wise to dust off their textbooks and review the basic inputs that support economic growth, the four factors of production—land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Sound policies for sustainable development, immigration, and public/private infrastructure investment will have the greatest impact on economic growth for the world’s largest economy, both today and for future generations.

Will Trumponomics Actually Work?

My Comments: No need to freak out here; it’s not written in a strange language. This is a short, understandable comment that appeared in a fundamentally sound forum about business and economics.

Unless we are happy being in debt to someone else, our primary effort is to spend less than we actually earn, since taxes also have to be paid. Some of what we earn is spent on food, shelter, transportation and health. Think of that as foundational capital. The rest is discretionary capital and we either save it (invest) or spend it. What we do individually is an example of micro-economics at work. What we do collectively as a nation is called macro-economics.

Tim Worstall, Contributor to Forbes / Apr 2, 2017

An interesting and useful observation here. It’s not really possible to cut taxes, increase public investment and also shrink the trade deficit. Not without at the same time massively increasing the savings rate within the US. Thus, without massively increasing the savings rate it’s not really going to be possible to increase that spending upon infrastructure, cut taxes and also cut the trade deficit.

Desmond Lachman explains this:
A basic truism of macroeconomics is that a country’s trade balance is determined by the difference between the rate at which it saves and the rate at which it invests. Should a country’s investment rate exceed its saving rate, the country will necessarily have a trade deficit.

Conversely, if it saves more than it invests it will necessarily have a trade surplus. This implies that there are only two ways that a country can improve its trade balance. It either has to increase its savings rate or it has to reduce its investment rate.

When we start talking about basic truisms we mean that there’s no way to avoid this little conundrum. To reduce that trade deficit we must either increase the savings rate or reduce investment – there is no other way.

By proposing large unfunded tax cuts and substantial increases in infrastructure and defense spending at a time that the country is close to full employment, Mr. Trump is pushing for policies that would significantly widen the US budget deficit and reduce US public savings.

That decline in savings in turn would inevitably lead to an increase in the US trade deficit irrespective of what might be done to clamp down on trade abuses by our trade partners.

That essential premise of Trumponomics, that we’re going to invest, and cut taxes, while also reducing the trade deficit, just isn’t going to work, is it? Because how are we going to increase the savings rate?

A Message for My Children and Grandchildren

Slow Economic Growth Will Be Around For A Long Time

My Comments: I have my doubts that Hillary Clinton could have fixed this, but with 45 in the WH, there is virtually NO chance this problem will be fixed.

And the longer it takes to fix it, assuming it can be fixed, the very people who voted for 45 are going to be the ones first affected by our governments inability and unwillingness to find a remedy.

The headwinds faced by the next two generations are staggering. There is very little I can do to help those following in my footsteps to increase their chances of success. All I can do is write blog posts like this and hope there are a few people paying attention.

Steven Hansen on March 26, 2017

The Trump Administration has targeted 4% economic growth.

The consumer is tapped out, and trends show they cannot increase their contribution to GDP growth.

Does this mean the slack will be taken up by government and business spending?

The White House website reads:
To get the economy back on track, President Trump has outlined a bold plan to create 25 million new American jobs in the next decade and return to 4 percent annual economic growth

Elected officials have very shallow and misguided views of economic gearing. I have no problem with people setting goals pushing the limits of what MAY be possible. However, USA economic growth of 4% year-over-year is likely impossible without massive deficit spending. Economic dynamics are simply not there for the consumer segment of the economy to expand spending.

Life Cycle Spending

The life-cycle hypothesis says consumers save during earning years and dis-save when they retire. The logic of this hypothesis implies that retirees spend at the same rate as they did when they were working. This ain’t true. Good posts on this subject were published by the Richmond Fed.

One assertion:
Consumption may be lower for young people than the model predicts if they are credit constrained. They may wish to borrow against expected higher future earnings but can do so only if lenders extend the credit to them. Uncertainty may play a role as well. Since young individuals don’t know exactly what their future earnings potential will be, they may hesitate to accumulate a lot of debt for fear that they won’t be able to pay it off.

Uncertainty plays a role at the end of life as well. Since individuals do not know exactly how long they will live, it is hard for them to smoothly draw down their wealth throughout retirement. Retirees may also save more than predicted because they wish to leave some of their wealth to their descendants. Finally, the drop in consumption at the end of the life cycle could be due to “hyperbolic discounting.” Behavioral economists have advanced the idea that individuals have trouble planning for the future, which leads them to save too little to maintain their level of consumption after retirement.

No question millennials are saddled with significantly more education debt not faced by previous generations. There are now more than 75 million millennials, making it a larger demographic group than the boomers. Because our politicians have shifted the bulk of costs of university education to the students, millennials are now carrying $1.4T of student loans. Roughly this pulls $100 billion of spending from this group annually which is now used for student loan repayment. Just the effect of student loans are a 0.5% headwind on GDP.

Being a boomer, I get a front row seat to retirement issues. I have friends who thought they were going to get a pension after retirement. Most are getting less than expected due to cutbacks. The corporation I worked for never had pensions but actually a really good 401(k). I got to ride the markets where investing was brainless as it was real hard to lose. But just in time for many boomers retirement, there was the great market crash of 2008. Many thought their 401(k) or IRA was the engine for retirement income – the reality is that the retirement accounts themselves became part of retirement income. From my perspective, the majority of boomers are tapped out, with little or no ability to increase spending [and most likely are figuring out ways to shrink spending].

Saving or Lack Thereof

An even larger drag on the potential of ever seeing 4% growth comes from a historically low savings rate. Consider that consumers can only spend more if they make more money, borrow money, or save less. Median incomes have been stagnant for the last 17 years, and the saving rate is at the lowest level seen in the last 70 years. As far as borrowing money, where does the money come from to pay back the loan (if there is no additional income or little savings)?
• Before 2000, it was not uncommon to see 5% GDP growth. Since 2010, the USA was lucky to see 2.5% growth.
• Before 1980, consumers were saving over 10% of their income. Since 2000, savings have been averaging 5%.

Yet, the consumer portion of the economy has been growing (also meaning the business portion of the economy is contracting). The graph below plots disposable personal income portion of GDP. [note that consumer income and expenditures have historically grown at the same rate].

Note in the above graphic that there is significant variation from period to period. Most of this variation comes from changes in the savings rate from period to period. The graph below removes savings from disposable income.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note since 2000 that the consumer segment of the economy stopped growing – but between 1967 and 2000, the consumer was the growth engine for the economy. To get to 4% economic growth, one would need to get more money into the hands of the consumer.

How Can the USA More Than Double the Rate of Growth?

“___________________________ [fill in the blank]. The real question is NOT whether the USA needs to see 4% growth, but how to improve the quality of life for the median American.”