HOW LOSING POWER COULD SAVE THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY:

Fear undermines America’s recovery (Alan Greenspan, October 6 2010, Financial Times)

American households have shifted their cash flows from illiquid real estate and consumer durables to paying down mortgages and consumer debt. Commercial banks are exhibiting a similar reduced tolerance towards risk on partially illiquid lending. A trillion dollars of excess reserves remains parked, largely immobile, at Federal Reserve banks yielding only 25 basis points with little evidence of banks seeking higher returns through increased lending.

It is this rapid rise in aversion to illiquid risk that explains a large part of the anaemic recovery in the US. Construction outlays, almost all long-term, are down 43 per cent in real terms since their peak in 2006 and reflect the heaviest price discounting of any major fixed asset class. [...]

Most in the business community attribute the massive rise in their uncertainty to the collapse of economic activity, but its continuance since the recovery took hold is attributed to the widespread major restructuring of our financial system and the burgeoning federal deficit, which creates critical future tax uncertainty.

Only the deficit lends itself to being quantified. Fixed capital investment as a share of cash flow over the past four decades has been significantly (negatively) correlated with the ratio of the federal deficit to GDP, with the deficit ratio leading the fixed investment share by nine months.* This would imply that the federal deficit as a percentage of GDP since September 2008 (cyclically adjusted to remove the effect of a weaker economy), accounted for as much as a third of the $325bn shortfall in business capital investment since early 2009.

But an indeterminate amount of the remaining shortfall reflects both a direct and indirect hobbling of vital financial intermediation. It is going to take years to address the unprecedented complexity of final rulemaking required in the massive Dodd-Frank bill. The inevitable uncertainty engendered will inhibit financial innovation and intermediation, and render the rules that will govern a future financial marketplace disturbingly conjectural. This is bound to have a significant impact on economic growth. Business planners must now confront a much wider set of scenarios that could affect the profitability of contemplated long-term commitments. This wider set, of necessity, increases risk premiums on illiquid assets.

The critical question, of course, is how much of a contraction in deficits and a decrease in the frenetic pace of new regulations can assuage the sense of a frightening future, allowing the natural forces of economic recovery to take hold.

Just the certainty that he won't be able to do any more damage can unleash vast flows of cash.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 7, 2010 5:36 AM