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UK 2013 Q1 Nominal GDP: A Slight Recovery
The Month 2 GDP figures are out for 2013 Q1. Demand growth was very strong in the quarter, although the quarterly growth rates have recently been erratic, so it is perhaps better to concentrate on the wider view. The Q1 figures were enough to push the annual NGDP growth rate up to (a still weak) 3.4% over the four quarters to Q1, from just 1.5% in the four quarters to 2012 Q4.
If anything it is surprising that output growth was not stronger in the quarter; the recovery in demand brought mostly inflation. I was saying the same thing last year and the deflators ended up getting revised down, though I’ve no particularly reason to expect that will happen again.
The usual tables and charts follow. % growth quarter-on-quarter, seasonally adjusted annual rates:
| Year | Nominal GDP |
GDP Deflator |
Real GDP |
Nominal GVA |
GVA Deflator |
Real GVA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 Q2 | 0.5 | 1.9 | -1.5 | 1.0 | 2.3 | -1.5 |
| 2012 Q3 | 8.4 | 4.6 | 3.8 | 9.2 | 5.5 | 3.7 |
| 2012 Q4 | -1.4 | -0.4 | -1.2 | -3.2 | -2.2 | -1.2 |
| 2013 Q1 | 6.3 | 5.3 | 1.3 | 7.0 | 5.8 | 1.1 |
And here’s the wider view of GVA:
Deleveraging is Easy. Deleveraging is… Good?
I had not realised the extent of UK household deleveraging until I looked at the household income data. Using the normal definition of leverage (the ratio between the stock of outstanding debt and the annual flow of income), household leverage has fallen from a 2008 peak of 175% to 144% by the end of 2012 – a level last seen in 2004.
Using that ratio obscures the underlying movement of the two series, so if we split them back out we get this:
UK Household Deleveraging. Source: ONS as above
Those who assert that households “need” to deleverage (which is really an argument about expected future income) must address the question of the desired level of leverage. Is 144% too high or too low; how should we decide where to draw the line? Should we let central plannersbankers decide by plucking numbers out of the air?
And because debt is just (ah ha) money we owe to ourselves… let’s not forget household assets, which continue to dwarf liabilities; household net worth was up from £6tn in 2008 to £7tn in 2011 in the last Blue Book estimate, mind-boggling numbers.
When the OBR forecasts for household debt and debt/income were published in 2011 there were some rather hysterical responses from Labour MP Chuka Umunna and others. (Krugman’s claims there are surely too strong; income is just money that we pay to ourselves, so what has debt got do with it? There was no debt in the babysitting co-op!)
The OBR have in any case now revised down their estimates and predict household debt/income will rise only to 153% by 2018 (previously 175% by 2015). This revision was celebrated by nobody at all, as far as I can tell.
Memo to the IMF: UK Monetary Policy is not “Accommodative”
UK Article IV consultation, concluding statement:
Monetary policy: maintain accommodative stance
…
The monetary policy response has been vigorous and appropriate
…
Monetary policy should remain accommodative
Over the last five years the average rate of UK nominal GDP growth has been 1.8%; to find a similar period of slow nominal growth we have to look back to the 1920s. Is that the kind of nominal growth which a “vigorous” or “accommodative” or “appropriate” (seriously? “appropriate”?) monetary policy produces? Hardly.
MPC on Safe Assets: Higher Gilt Yields Would be Good
So close and yet so far. This is a comment on safe assets from this month’s MPC minutes:
This improvement in risky asset prices came at a time when the underlying risks to the global economy remained material. Much of the increase could be attributed to lower rates on safe assets, such as some government bonds, which raised the current value of future flows of income from risky assets. These low rates, in turn, reflected both a global mismatch between strong desired savings and weak investment plans, and the policies undertaken by various central banks to underpin nominal demand and meet their inflation targets. At some point, higher prices of risky financial assets would in all probability make investing in the real economy a more attractive proposition, leading to higher aggregate demand. A sustained rise in demand would, in due course, mean a rise in interest rates on safe assets and, potentially, some unwinding of the rise in risky asset prices.
If only some central banks could work a little harder to “boost” nominal demand rather than just “underpinning” it. The doves (King, Fisher, Miles) say ease, noting correctly that easing monetary policy now will mean interest rates rise sooner than otherwise:
Earnings growth had fallen and there was little sign of any de-anchoring of inflation expectations. Further asset purchases now would facilitate an earlier normalisation of the monetary stance when that became appropriate. Against that backdrop, it was appropriate to reduce labour market slack more quickly than was envisaged in the Committee’s central projections. The impact of such a policy on inflation was uncertain. The initial impact of faster demand growth might be to reduce cost pressures by improving productivity.
But the hawks say no, and the hawks win:
Inflation had been above the target for a considerable period and there was tentative evidence that measures of medium-term inflation expectations were becoming more sensitive to short-term news in inflation. Moreover, financial markets were not expecting further asset purchases at this meeting and might, at the margin, reassess the Committee’s tolerance of elevated inflation should additional stimulus be injected.
In other words, the most important thing for UK monetary policy is that everybody believes that the MPC are inflation hawks.
UK Household Income, Not Your Average AD Story
Last week’s ONS bulletin with the catchy title of “Measuring National Well-being, The Economy – International Comparisons” attracted some attention in the press, several papers picking up on the decline of UK real household income relative to other countries.
The ONS do have a hackneyed discussion of inflation in their bulletin, but I thought it was worth exploring. Using the usual ONS measure of “gross disposable income” for the household sector, there is a rather surprising statistic: nominal household income has grown at the same rate in the five years since 2008 as it did in the five years to 2008.
Gross disposable income is only one of many available measures of household income. The ONS bulletin mentioned above uses an OECD series for “Household Actual Disposable Income” but I think these two are roughly equivalent. (Maybe I am wrong; I could not find a current price series in the OECD database during a brief search, to compare. Comments welcome.)
This can be illustrated as follows:
If you look further back at the household income series, there is a break in the trend growth rate at 2001; household income grew at c.5% p.a. between 1993 and 2001 and has grown at only c.4% since then; Phil over at the World of Interest blog picked up my chart showing this.
This view of the data certainly doesn’t tell us a convenient AD story about 2008-2012, more a supply-side story. (The deflator which the ONS apply to produce “real” household income is almost identical to the CPI itself.) Looking at a narrower measure of income, wages and salary compensation, per my previous post on Scott Sumner’s “musical chairs” model of the business cycle, that does show an AD story; I’ll expand on this again in another post.
Welcome Fall in Inflation Rate… as UK Aggregate Demand Slows
It’s a Tuesday and it’s CPI day, so it is “never reason from a price change” time…
The Labour Shadow Treasury Minister Cathy Jamieson MP like everybody who thinks inflation is just a nasty thing which lowers real wages, bizarrely welcomed the fall in the inflation rate:
“This fall in the inflation rate is welcome, but the squeeze continues as prices are still rising much faster than wages.
Don’t worry Ms. Jamieson, Iet’s “hope” the government’s macro policy of large fiscal deficits and tight monetary policy will slow AD growth and get that inflation rate down even further, just like Ed Balls wants. Here are are my favourite statistics, updated for April 2013:
Number of months during fiscal austerity at the ZLB in which the Bank of England has undershot its nominal target: zero
UK price level: all time high
Number of macroeconomists who think the Bank of England is impotent at the zero lower bound: absurdly high
Update: Lest anybody accuse me of being selective, an idiotic inflation hawk at HM Treasury said the same thing as Labour; “This is good news for families and businesses”.
Shameless Hypocrisy and UK Monetary Policy
Dr. Martin Weale is concerned about market sector Unit Labour Costs. OK. Here is what happened to market sector Unit Labour Costs going in to Summer 2011:
Market Sector Unit Labour Costs. Source: ONS Sectional Productivity Bulletin
They have just tipped out of outright deflation. To be fair, this is current data; possibly the Bank had data saying something different back in 2011. But let’s presume that if Dr. Martin Weale was looking at even vaguely similar data, he must have been arguing for looser monetary policy at the time? Here’s what he was saying in June 2011:
I have, of course, been pleasantly surprised that wage settlements in the private sector have remained low and that private sector regular weekly earnings are rising by less than 2 1⁄2 per cent per annum.
(Yes, Dr. Weale! Like you, people all round the country are celebrating their low pay rises! Hooray for low pay rises, they say! Hooray, hooray! He continues…)
But a more general picture of unit domestic costs excluding taxes can be obtained by looking at the gross value added deflator. This rose by 1 per cent in the first quarter of the year and by 2.4 per cent compared with the first quarter of 2010. So it is consistent with the view that, even after excluding import costs and taxes, there are at present substantial cost pressures in the economy.
Can you see what he’s done there? He did not mention unit labour costs! In 2011, the GVA deflator was a good reason to… well, what did Dr. Martin Weale want to do in 2011? Just check the title of the spech: “Why the Bank Rate should increase now“.
Coming back to 2012, Unit Labour Costs have been rising, and what is happening to the GVA deflator? It rose just 1.2% in the four quarters to 2012 Q4 and has been below 2% for most of the last four years. So is that a “substantial” level of cost pressure, Dr. Weale, or a “pathetically weak” level of cost pressure? What would you say? Or do you in fact cherry-pick the statistics which fit your narrative and ignore the rest?
[Update: I meant to note that the GVA deflator reading which Weale mentioned, of 2.4% over the four quarters to 2011Q1, has since been revised down to 1.0%.]
I am honestly disgusted by this. This is not policy. This is not how the UK’s most powerful technocrats should behave, lurching from arbitrary decision to arbitrary decision. We deserve much, much better than this. Re-appointing the hawks to the MPC is looking like a catastrophically bad decision, absent a tighter (less discretionary) policy mandate to keep them on a tight leash.
Martin Weale is Here To Help
… get inflation down. He presents the graph of nominal wages. I’ll put the figure here for the annual rate of change in average weekly earnings, looking at private sector regular pay:
0.7% in the year to March 2013
Weale decides instead that private sector unit labour costs are a clear and present threat to the sacred inflation target, and concludes:
So my own judgement is that a further easing of the rate of growth of cost pressures is necessary before I feel we are in danger of undershooting the inflation target.
Do you like that? “easing of the rate of growth of cost pressures”? Nominal wages are rising, let’s say it again ZERO POINT SEVEN PERCENT, and Weale wants to see an “easing of the rate of growth of cost pressures” before he’d consider easing monetary policy.
May 2013 Inflation Report: Two Point Oh Not Again?
In the February Inflation Report we saw the Bank forecasting (and hence, targeting) CPI inflation significantly above 2% on the two year horizon for the first time in four years. In this week’s Inflation Report we saw the Bank revising up its real GDP forecasts for what Chris Giles says is the first time since 2007. What a strange co-incidence that is, eh?
Claire Jones has a nice post covering the improvements to the Inflation Report prompted by the Stockton Review. For the first time, I didn’t have to wait a week for the Bank to publish their sacred Excel spreadsheet with the forecast data. Rejoice! This graph shows how the median forecasts of the CPI rate have moved over the last four Inflation Reports:
Bank of England Median Forecasts for the CPI Rate
The median forecasts have shifted down across the entire forecast period, since February, and now perfectly hit 2.0% CPI on the two year horizon (versus 2.3% in February on the same horizon). The obvious response is to castigate the MPC for yet another opportunistic disinflation. In this case I wonder whether the Bank’s models might only have altered the real/inflation split, since the real GDP forecasts have moved in the opposite direction to inflation; Chris’ post has the graph showing the latter. It would be useful to have the forecast for the path of nominal GDP so we could identify such cases.
It is worth noting here that Mervyn King’s hawkish ITV interview in March seems to have “successfully” capped the rise in market inflation expectations seen earlier in the year, and put a floor under Sterling – at least the latter of these feeds in to the Bank’s forecasting model. King declared in that interview that the pound was “close to properly valued” and insisted the Bank was not going soft on inflation. Great work, Merv!
Sterling Exchange Rate Index and Market RPI Expectations in 2013.
Source: BoE, Sterling Broad ERI , 5 Year RPI Implied Forward
(The sharp movement in market inflation expectations at the start of January is not a data error, it was caused by the outcome of the RPI methodology consultation.)
So the usual conclusions must be drawn… does the MPC want higher inflation? No. Are they constrained from moving inflation expectations? No. Have the MPC been desperately printing money to raise (or keep elevated!) expected growth and inflation since February? No, no, no.
There is still room for a little hope; Carney might, just might, bring some improvement to policy. Lars has some excellent suggestions. In the mean time, well… things could be worse.
“To Understand Inflation We Must Understand Money”
Christina Romer’s paper links to this brilliant “infomercial” video from the US in 1933, which explains the power of monetary policy – which, by the way, is all about expectations:
Absolutely wonderful!
