By Ajay Shah, on October 5th, 2009
Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar has an article in Economic Times on India’s remarkable emergence as an exporter of automobiles. Mahesh Vyas has an article in Business Standard on the recent rebound in automobile production and sales. And, here’s the link to the CMIE website on cars.
It’s interesting to look at (seasonally adjusted) US data for sales of automobiles. Possibly helped by the cash-for-clunkers program, this data shows a strong bounce, back to the levels seen in early 2009. Click on the graph to see it more clearly:
 Giovanni Veronese emailed me a fascinating graph, with seasonally adjusted data for Indian commercial vehicles. Click on the graph to see it more clearly. This is not quite comparable with the above, since it pertains to commercial vehicles and not cars. And, Indian exports are unlikely to have benefited from the US cash-for-clunkers program. All the three lines on the graph are seasonally adjusted levels, indexed to 100 for the production of January 2005. The red line is for Indian exports. It shows a very high rate of growth – a roughly 50% rise over the period from 2005 to early 2008. This is the incredible rise of India as an automobile exporter, the story told by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar. Unlike sales of cars in the US, this has not recovered to pre-crisis levels.
The green line is domestic sales. This shows a recovery similar to that seen in the US – back to the values immediately before the crisis, but without a cash-for-clunkers program being run by the government.
The blue line is automobile production. It shows savage cuts in production executed by the industry when the financial crisis appeared. This was unlike the standard script for downturns as we know them, where firms generally build up inventory when sales slow down. This time around, working capital financing in order to hold inventory was hard to find. I also think that the headlines and television dramatisation of the early stages of the downturn, accompanied by sharp movements in the prices of securities, were useful as an early warning system. This triggered off action by CEOs well before the full bad news came out through sales. As a consequence, there was very little inventory in hand, and production bounced back nicely when sales came back.
If the three indexes had continued to grow as they had done pre-crisis, then all three would have been roughly at values like 200 today (i.e. one doubling ahead of the values of January 2005). Instead, we’re back to the pre-crisis level of 150.
It is really important to do seasonal adjustment, and then eyeball time-series of seasonally adjusted levels, in order to understand what is going on with these series. We’ve been updating a set of series every Monday morning, and releasing these as a public good.
By Dan McLaughlin, on October 5th, 2009
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.” That celebrated quote by long gone philosopher George Santayana is familiar to most people because it is so true. Sadly, people and nations choose to forget.
The Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. is a stark reminder of a not-so-distant history, a grim and disturbing past that many believe cannot happen again. Those people are wrong. Extreme concentration of power, contempt of the governors for the rights of the governed and worship of a powerful leader as savior lends itself to the conditions that have always ended in disaster for a nation and its people. Museum visitors who are aware of contemporary politics likely come away from it with a disturbing sense that something is eerily familiar in that history.
The rise of the Nazis in Germany didn’t just happen overnight in the 1930’s. The people were conditioned over a long period. Many actually cheered the rise of the Fuehrer as a powerful and charismatic leader, someone to regain their proud heritage after the humiliation of World War I. While Hitler was not academically accomplished, he was a genius with a goal that prodded him for many years. He had a plan and came to power within the existing system. He was named Chancellor by the President, with significant support from powerful parties.
The ultimate political accomplishment which allowed Hitler to elevate himself to dictator was the passing of the “Enabling Act.” As described by William L. Shirer in his classic book, “The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich”, “Parliament had turned over its constitutional authority to Hitler and thereby committed suicide.” They abdicated their role as a check against power and allowed a domineering politician to take his stand among the coldest and most brutal totalitarian rulers the world has known.
The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 capped a series of events over many years. The people of Russia suffered oppression at the hands of the Czar and revolutionaries used unrest and chaos to seize power. What they didn’t comprehend is that a government ostensibly of “the people” could multiply the oppression and terror on the people. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and so many others who legitimized themselves as saviors of the masses put their ideologies above the people. Countless millions suffered brutal deaths at the hands of cold ideology.
On the other side of the coin, the American Revolution did not happen overnight either. England’s war with France over colonies to the north meant that the British colonies benefited from benign neglect for an extended period of time. Independence and a mentality of freedom grew up over dozens of years. The revolution was merely the natural culmination of a long train of events. The embedded tradition of individual liberty set the stage for an America that quickly blossomed into a nation of prosperity for the common man.
For decades America has been on a different course. It is not to the point where a dictator can take over without a fight. America is, however, definitely heading down that path, like most other Western countries infatuated with socialism. Progressivism started in Germany in the late 1800’s. The conscious objective of the welfare state was not charity, but rather to make the German people dependent on the government. Dependent people can more easily be bent to the will of the state. Contemporary American government is consciously, actively and progressively making Americans dependent.
The harsh reality is that dependence and freedom are opposites. Slaves are totally dependent on their masters. They have no rights, no powers, no property and no dignity. They will, however, likely have some level of security and some food for their bellies. Freedom, on the other hand, is difficult. It may entail periods of failure, hunger, struggle and rebuilding. But free individuals are the most likely to rise from the hunger, the failure and the struggle to become more, to have more and to live more.
If Americans, including the poor, want to prosper and improve their own lot, we need to un-elect all those politicians who would make us dependent. We are at a turning point in our history. We can continue over the cliff to our demise or we can turn back and begin again to honor those characteristics that made America great: freedom and personal responsibility.
Benjamin Franklin gave us another profound thought, which cannot be denied – anyone who trades liberty for security deserves, and will soon have, neither.
By Eldon Mast, on October 5th, 2009
As another October comes into focus there are many signs that robust recovery is no doubt firming in late 2009:
1. Retail sales improved in the last week in Sept according to ICSC-Goldman’s tally which rose 0.1 percent. The gain represents a 0.9 percent year-on-year gain that compares with a plus 0.6 percent gain the week before. Goldman’s report summarizes that retail traffic is indeed improving. Redbook, like Goldman, reported strength for store sales and extends an improving trend. Redbook further reports that Halloween sales are off to a good start. Later in the week the Commerce Department reported that while everyone was expecting spending to be up in motor vehicle sales, consumers were actually spending elsewhere, too. Consumer spending spiked on clunkermania auto purchases as personal consumption expenditures surged 1.3 percent in August. Indeed there was strength in durable goods spending, which jumped 5.3 percent on sharply higher motor vehicle sales. However, non-durables were robust also with a 2.3 percent boost and services also advanced 0.4 percent.
2. Case-Shiller reported a third month of gains for home sale prices. Their index rose 1.7 percent in July on top of a 1.4 percent gain in June and a 0.5 percent gain in May. Interestingly almost all metro areas now show sale price gains or at least flat conditions in the July report period. Year-on-year rates also improved for a third month. The pending home sales index also jumped in August, up 6.4 percent for a year-on-year gain of 12.4 percent. All regions posted home sales increases for August.
3. The third estimate for second quarter GDP clearly shows the economy at the recession bottom back when we technically called the recession’s end in June. And the component mix for second quarter GDP adds to credibility our argument that the third quarter will be much more positive than the lackluster results many had predicted. For the second revision to second quarter GDP, the Commerce Department pushed up its estimate to an annualized 0.7 percent decrease from the previous estimate of minus 1.0 percent.
4. On the employment front, Challenger’s count of layoff announcements fell to 66,404 in September, down from 76,456 in August for the lowest total since March 2008. Industrial goods employment showed improvement as did the health care and construction segments. The Monster employment index also showed firming job prospects in many blue collar segments.
The first half of September was full of economic good news, and October is bringing more of the same.
By Richard Daughty, on October 2nd, 2009
Roger Wiegand of Trader Tracks Newsletter finally says what I always figured: “Cash for Clunkers was a real clunker. One out of four auto buyers using this program is having buyer’s remorse as they just signed-up for so many new payments they cannot afford.”
Thanks, Roger! I always had a hard time believing in the unbelievable “Cash for Clunkers” program, where the government astonishingly gives up to $4,500 to people who buy a new car!
This is a subject which is very interesting to me because I happen to be a guy who owned a whole series of clunker cars and trucks over the years because I couldn’t justify the expense of a new vehicle/a good vehicle/a better vehicle/a vehicle that wasn’t rusted/a vehicle where parts and pieces didn’t fall off/a vehicle that usually started because they were completely paid for, thus costing me exactly nothing per month in principal and interest payments, and which needed only the legally-required minimum of liability insurance.
In short, the cost of driving those old cars and trucks was almost zilch, which fitted my budget perfectly, as I thought I would need the extra money for dating, but which turned out not to be the case. In fact, I found that women usually disdained both me and my cars, and they would say hurtful things like, “Hey! It stinks in here! Or is that you?” and, “At least clean out the old, moldy pizza boxes and chicken bones so I won’t be more disgusted than I am just sitting next to you!” and yammer yammer yammer.
That is, however, when I learned one of the Immortal Lessons Of The Mogambo (ILOTM), which is that as long as you had a good set of brakes on your ratty old car, a case of cheap oil in the trunk, a long siphon hose and a girlfriend who had a nice car in which to ride around, you could get along pretty good!
Not “getting along” as good as the federal government, however, which can (and did) just decide on a plan to sell a couple of trillions of dollars in new debt, whereupon the Federal Reserve will create the money, like when the Fed bought $30 billion of US government securities, directly increasing the money supply by the amount of the new debt! Now THAT’S what I call “getting along pretty good!” Hahaha!
Now, suddenly, sad sack people like me, whose incomes are so low that we have to drive rusted-out, beat-up old clunkers that cost almost nothing to own or operate, that nobody would steal, which were completely paid for, for which you only needed the minimum of liability insurance, would suddenly decide to buy a very expensive, shiny new car and begin paying upwards of $400-$500 a month for the new car and the big new premiums for the required higher insurance coverage? Hmmmm!
Perhaps this is why Bloomberg reports that “Consumer spending in the US rose in July as Americans jammed auto showrooms to take advantage of the ‘cash for clunkers’ program while avoiding other purchases”! Yikes! Avoiding other purchases! This is NOT the kind of thing from which economic recoveries are made!
And to suddenly start paying all of that money, every month for the next seven years or so, is not to even mention the effort of always having to wash and wax the new car, which is hard, disagreeable work that you don’t get paid for, which is like being punished for having a new car!
So, the only explanation that makes sense is that since people can stop paying on their house but still live in it because the bank doesn’t want to evict them, people will start living in their cars and stop paying on them, too! What are the car companies going to do? Evict a family onto the street by repossessing the snazzy new car in which they are living? Hahahaha!
I say this because I read in The Financial Times that in the UK, “The number of people of working age living in a household where none of the adults work rose by 500,000 to 4.8m for the period April to June”, which is a huge number of people which is now “close to one in five households”, which I assume is a rough estimate of what is happening in the USA.
Instead of laughing in my usual mocking style to indicate the bizarre absurdity of an economic system where the unemployed are given financial incentives to buy new cars, let me instead merely urge you to buy gold, silver and oil with your every waking moment and your every last dime, whichever comes first, which says the same thing but with the “secret bonus feature” of letting you make a Whole Lot Of Money (WLOM) when their prices rise, rise, rise, which is good because you are going to need a WLOM when inflation in consumer prices catches up with the inflation in the money supply that will accommodate the inflation in government spending, thanks to the loathsome Federal Reserve allowing and abetting the inflations by merely creating more money, which makes buying gold, silver and oil such an obvious choice that you say, “Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”
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By Winton Bates, on October 1st, 2009
The idea of governments collecting data on our subjective well-being might seem slightly Orwellian to many people. It could bring to mind images of officials from the government statistics office knocking at your front door and telling you that they are from the government and they have come to help you by collecting information about what is going on in your mind.
However I don’t think anyone needs to worry a great deal about the implications for their personal liberty of proposals for government collection of subjective well-being data, such as in the recently published book, “Well-being for Public Policy” by Ed Diener, Richard Lucas, Ulrich Schimmack and John Helliwell. As discussed in an earlier post, such data would be unlikely to increase the influence that paternalistic interventionists may have on the policy making process.
The important issue is whether the collection of this additional information is warranted in terms of its potential contribution to discussion of policy issues.
In their concluding chapter the authors ask themselves whether enough is known about subjective well-being for government agencies “to initiate systematic programs for measuring it”. This is how they summarise their reasons for answering “yes”:
“The measures are sufficient to reveal some of the groups in society that are suffering, and they also tell us which groups are thriving. The measures already provide strong clues about the characteristics of nations that lead to the experience of a satisfying life for citizens, along with those that predict the opposite. The measures give clear clues about the activities and circumstances that tend to lead to ill-being and well-being. And when national accounts of well-being are instituted our understanding of these issues will only grow.”
Do we really need systematic programs for collection of information on subjective well-being to tell us about such matters? The measures of subjective well-being generally tend to confirm what we know already from information on incomes and other objective indicators of the quality of life. It seems to me that the important issue is whether collection of more data on subjective well-being would add reliable information that is not available from other sources.
The book discusses the potential contributions of subjective well-being measures in providing new information that could be relevant to discussion of policy issues relating to externalities, non-market goods, taxation, setting fines and compensation for lost welfare. Some specific examples caught my eye. It is possible that information on the extent of misery caused by different diseases could result in better allocation of public funds for medical research (p 134). Some research findings suggest that effects of airport noise on well-being of people in affected areas may currently be under-stated by its effects on residential land values (p 147). Subjective well-being information may help in assessing the value of public facilities such as parks to residents of cities who have access to such facilities (p 155).
The critical issue in considering the contribution that subjective well-being data can make to public discussion is whether this information is reliable (yields consistent results) and valid (actually measures well-being). My assessment of the relevant literature (in my draft paper on Gross National Happiness) is somewhat less optimistic than the view presented in this book. Despite all the noise in this data, however, I think the authors may be correct that enough randomness washes out in large samples to make the responses to single item questions sufficiently reliable for the purpose of creating national indicators (p74). Multiple item questionnaires such as those suggested by Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener to measure “psychological wealth” (in their recent book, “Happiness”) could provide much more reliable information.
I think the authors make a fairly strong case that the surveys are measuring an aspect of well-being although I think it is an over-statement to claim that “the measures behave as they would be expected to behave given widely accepted ideas about what well-being is” (p 93). For example, the measures show a decline in well-being when people have children, despite the widely accepted idea that having children has something to do with well-being.
There is a risk that subjective well-being measures will cloud public discussion of policies rather than shed additional light on relevant issues if they come to be viewed as definitive measures of overall well-being. In interpreting these measures it is important to bear in mind that it is quite possible for people to make rational decisions to sacrifice some of their current satisfaction with life, in order to improve their own future well-being or that of their families.
By Richard Daughty, on October 1st, 2009
If you want to know what kind of monetary morons we have in charge of the Federal Reserve, then you have come to the right place, because a record of sorts was set last week, in that the loathsome, disastrous Federal Reserve bought up – in the last 12 short months – $1.011 trillion in US government securities! Yikes!
And remember… This is the Federal Reserve! This is a lousy private bank operating irresponsibly, at the behest of the Congress, and whose shadowy owners include, to one degree or another, foreigners and foreign central banks that are operating by the grace of their own governments which are just as corrupt and desperate as our own, but it was the Fed that created enough money to buy a trillion dollar’s worth of US government bonds for itself! A trillion!
It’s called “monetizing the debt”, which Ben Bernanke said, in response to a direct question about it recently, that the Fed would “never” do! “Never” has now been re-defined to mean “continually?” Hahaha! Too much!
As an astute observer, you figure this must be pretty bad, gauging by the way I make a Very Loud Mogambo Fuss (VLMF) about it and droplets of spittle are flying from my flapping lips at supersonic speed as a throbbing vein is bulging out on my forehead.
And since a lot of this money was spent to buy government debt, how big was the federal budget deficit? You will be sorry you asked, and if you want to know the actual size of the actual federal deficit for the actual last year because you are pretty sure that the government is lying to you about the real size of their deficit-spending, then you have also come to the right place, because Treasury Public Debt is, as of last Friday, $11.797 trillion, whereas 12 lousy months ago it was $9.667 trillion, meaning that even if you are not sober enough to get this damned calculator to work or see those tiny little numbers, you can do the subtraction in your head!
The actual, in-your-face federal deficit was $2.130 trillion in the last 12 months! The deficit-spending by Congress is a whopping 15.2% of GDP, for crying out loud!
And if you are collecting unemployment, then you will be interested to know that the federal contribution to your check could have been painlessly almost doubled, as, according to Wikipedia, the 2009 federal budget had $360 billion for “Unemployment/Welfare/Other”, while the budget also had another $260 billion that could be used to help you out, but had to be spent for “Interest on National Debt.”
In short, if the damned government did not borrow and spend us into the poorhouse, causing your unemployment and impoverishment, the government would have had another $260 billion to help you and the other unemployed instead of only being able to budget $350 billion!
And this brings up the interesting point that since the national debt is $11,790 billion and this “interest on the national debt” is $260 billion, this means that the government is paying an average of 2.2% interest! Wow!
And remember that this $2.130 trillion increase in the national debt is just the deficit in Congressional spending, which doesn’t even include the $2.6 trillion in the budget that was “paid for” by offsetting revenues!
So, being the cantankerous sort that I am, suspecting treachery at every turn and disaster at the hands of the corrupt, the ignorant and the stupid that we lovingly call “Congress”, let me note that the morons of Congress have spent $2.6 trillion, plus $2.1 trillion equals $4.7 trillion, which they spent in a $14 trillion economy! The government is spending the equivalent of 34% of GDP! Gaaahh!
And it is going to get worse and worse because the Fed is doing the more and more of the same thing that created the economic problem in the first place! Gaaahhh! We’re freaking doomed!
But this time, instead of over-reacting, I sigh in relief – aaaaaahhhhhh! – as I remember the last 4,500 years of history when governments acted monetarily and fiscally irresponsible, and how owners of gold, silver and energy did very, very well, which is the whole point of this investing stuff!
And the fact that it is so easy makes you say, “Whee!”
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