We need to drop money from helicopters – Part I

  

My former economics professor Milton Friedman’s greatest work is an 800-page tome called “A Monetary History of the United States”, which he wrote with Anna Jacobson Schwartz. The book makes the argument that the primary cause of economic fluctuations, even the Great Depression, has been fluctuations in the supply of money, which have almost always (especially since the formation of the Federal Reserve in the early 1900s) been under the control of government bodies.

The most important chapter of that book (which was later published as a standalone book) is called “The Great Contraction”. In that chapter, Friedman makes the case that it was a failure of nerve by the Federal Reserve – and especially an internal shift in power from the New York Federal Reserve Bank to the Federal Reserve Board in Washington DC – that allowed what should have been an ordinary recession in 1929 (exacerbated, but not caused, by the stock market crash in that year) to become the Great Depression.

The thesis of the entire book is that, in order to ensure stable growth, the government should keep the money supply steady in good times and bad - not exactly steady, but increasing at the long-term growth rate of the economy (usually 2-3%). This might not seem like a lot of growth since it’s often been higher than that, but it’s certainly often been a lot lower (i.e. negative), as is the case in spades this year. If we could have stable 2-3% growth, we’d be much better off in the long run and our children and grandchildren would be even better off.

What exactly was the failure of nerve by the Fed? It was that they not only didn’t maintain 2-3% growth in the money supply during the period 1929 to 1933 (when banks failed and unemployment rose to about 33%); they actually let it fall by about one third – by far the largest drop (by a factor of three or so) in the money supply in US history. This happened for two reasons, although they’re pretty much the same:

1.       They didn’t open the discount window and let banks borrow all the money they needed to keep afloat, instead letting them crash and saying this was a result of poor banking practices.

2.       They didn’t encourage the Federal government itself to run a deficit, so that they could fight the recession using the tools we think of as commonplace today: unemployment insurance, cash payments to individuals, etc. Instead, president Hoover and his administration reacted the way an individual household does when there are economic troubles – they cut back their spending to try to match their declining revenues. Of course, that caused revenues to decline further, which led them to cut back spending even more, etc…obviously a completely self-defeating course.

Of course, it’s hard to blame any particular individuals for these reactions, since these measures would have been totally unprecedented – but the fact remains that it’s because these people didn’t do these things that a garden-variety recession turned into the Great Depression.

Which brings me to today. The federal government has already spent (or committed to spending, anyway) over $3 trillion fighting the recession caused by the novel coronavirus. Now there are many – including the White House and many Congressional Republicans (and some Democrats, truth be told) – who say this is enough for now. Let’s wait and see if things turn around. Well, we don’t have to wait – we have plenty of indicators to show there’s a serious crisis, which isn’t going to fix itself anytime soon:

• Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said on Wednesday that the US is “experiencing an economic hit ‘without modern precedent,’ one that could permanently damage the economy if Congress and the White House did not provide sufficient financial support to prevent a wave of bankruptcies and prolonged joblessness.”
• Kevin Hassett, the chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, said two weeks ago that the unemployment rate would reach 20% in June (it’s 14.7% now). This is pretty much baked into the cake already, since new unemployment claims indicate that if anything that’s a low estimate. Of course, either way this will be the highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression.
• At least 15% of American children are going hungry regularly, which is perhaps why you see mile-long lines at food banks.
• States and municipalities – who can’t run deficits very long without terrible consequences – are now looking at significant layoffs of teachers, firefighters, police…even health care workers. This at a time when we need more of these, not fewer. Yet Mitch McConnell doesn’t want to give more money to states, which he calls a “blue state bailout”. Earth to Mitch: Guess which state now has the highest unemployment relative to its workforce, and so is under significant financial pressure? Kentucky (which I guess is a blue state, because it has a Democratic governor. Keep up what you’re doing, Mitch, and there will be a Democratic Senator in your seat next year).
• Trump of course wants to open the economy completely back up, but a big majority of Americans says it’s way too soon to do that. They need to feel safe that they won’t catch Covid-19 when they go back to work. Until they see numbers that make them feel safe, they’re not going to go back – unless they’re forced to by the end of unemployment benefits.
• The other main reason people don’t want to go back to work is that schools are closed, and of course there’s almost no safe and affordable day care available. Yet they don’t want to gamble with the lives of their children by sending them back to school, when there’s a small but real chance that they’ll catch Covid-19 at school and die.

And remember, these are the early warning indicators of what could turn out to be a depression on the scale of the 1930s. Then the indicators that were ignored were bank failures, which aren’t happening now, mainly because of deposit insurance. But just because the indicators are different, they’re here nonetheless – and they’re flashing bright red.

The numbers

I’m not doing my usual table with projections of deaths today, since new deaths yesterday were almost exactly what they were the previous day (1,606 vs. 1,595), meaning the projected numbers hardly changed at all. The actual numbers below are updated, of course. I do want to point out that the US has now surpassed 90,000 in total Covid-19 deaths.

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 90,113

Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,606 (vs. 1,595 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 2% (vs. 2% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 13% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above)

II. Total reported cases

I no longer pay any attention to the reported case number. It is a huge underestimate of actual cases, which is at least 5-10 times what’s reported. This is because of the huge shortage of testing capacity. For reported cases to be anywhere near actual cases, we would need to be doing millions of tests a day. I believe the US has done fewer than 7 million tests since the start of the pandemic.

Total US reported cases: 1,4507,798

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 21,886

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 1%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 12%

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 339,232

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 90,113

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 21% (vs. 21% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 21% of them have resulted in death. Compare this with the comparable number from South Korea, which is below 3%. China’s is 6%. The reason this number is so high is that total reported recoveries are so low. I’ve been assuming since March 26, when the recoveries number was first published, that it would rise, so that this percentage (which was 41% on March 26), would be far lower than it is now. But it still has to drop a long way, in order for the US to have anything less than millions of death over the course of the pandemic – since we seem to have given up on controlling total cases in any meaningful way.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com