Macroblog

February 25, 2019

Tariff Worries and U.S. Business Investment, Take Two

Last summer, we reported that one fifth of firms in the July Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) were reassessing capital expenditure plans in light of then-recent tariff hikes and retaliation concerns. Roughly 6 percent had already cut or deferred capital spending as a result of tariff worries.

Since then, tariff hikes and trade policy tensions have continued to mount, as recounted in the Peterson Institute's Trade War Timeline. U.S. stock market volatility also rose sharply in the last four months of 2018, partly in reaction to trade policy concerns. These developments led us to pose another round of questions about trade policy and investment in the January 2019 SBU.

We first asked each firm if tariff hikes and trade policy tensions caused it to alter its capital expenditures in 2018 and, if so, in which direction and by how much. We use the responses to estimate the net impact of tariff hikes and trade policy tensions on U.S. business investment in 2018.

We estimate that tariff hikes and trade policy tensions lowered gross investment in 2018 by 1.2 percent in the U.S. private sector and by 4.2 percent in the manufacturing sector. The larger response for manufacturing makes sense, given its relatively high exposure to international trade. In constructing these estimates, we consider firms that raised and lowered investment due to trade policy, and we weight each firm by its size.

To estimate the dollar impact of trade policy developments, we multiply the percentage amounts by aggregate investment values. The resulting amounts for U.S. business investment in 2018—minus $32.5 billion for the private sector and minus $22 billion for manufacturing—are modest in magnitude, in line with our forward-looking assessment last summer.

In January, we also asked forward-looking questions about the potential impact of trade policy worries on business investment. As reported in Exhibit 2 below, 20 percent of firms said they are reassessing their capital expenditure plans in 2019 because of tariff hikes and trade policy tensions, a share very similar to what we obtained in our forward-looking question last July. As before, manufacturing firms were more likely to reassess their capital spending plans due to trade policy concerns.

Exhibit 3 below speaks to the question of how firms have reassessed their capital expenditure plans. Here, too, results are similar to what we reported last summer, with one important exception. Among firms reassessing, more than half have either postponed or dropped some portion of their capital spending for 2019, compared to just 31 percent in July 2018. Thus, it appears that firms anticipate somewhat larger negative effects of trade policy developments on capital expenditures in 2019 than they did in 2018.

All told, our results continue to suggest that tariff hikes and trade policy tensions have had a rather modest impact on U.S. business investment. Of course, tariffs and other trade barriers affect U.S. and foreign economies through multiple channels. Even if the near-term business investment effects of trade policy developments are modest in magnitude, trade barriers can disrupt supply chains, raise input prices, and lead to higher prices for consumer goods. That's important to keep in mind as the trade policy outlook remains murky.

By David Altig, executive vice president and research director in the Atlanta Fed's Research Department,

Nick Bloom, the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University,

Steven J. Davis, the William H. Abbott Distinguished Service Professor of International Business and Economics at the Chicago Booth School of Business and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution,

Brent Meyer, a policy adviser and economist in the Atlanta Fed's Research Department, and

Nick Parker, the Atlanta Fed's director of surveys.

• February 25, 2019 in
  • Capital and Investment
  • macroeconomics
  • Surveys
  • Trade
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November 29, 2018

Cryptocurrency and Central Bank E-Money

The Atlanta Fed recently hosted a workshop, "Financial Stability Implications of New Technology," which was cosponsored by the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk at Georgia State University. This macroblog post discusses the workshop's panel on cryptocurrency and central bank e-money. A companion Notes from the Vault post provides some highlights from the rest of the workshop.

The panel began with Douglas Elliot, a partner at Oliver Wyman, discussing some of the public policy issues associated with cryptoassets. Drawing on a recent paper he cowrote, Elliot observed that there are "at least four substantial market segments" that provide long-term support for cryptoassets:

• libertarians and techno-anarchists who, for ideological reasons, want a currency without a government;
• people who deeply distrust their government's economic management;
• seekers of anonymity, who don't want their names associated with transactions and investments; and
• technical users who find cryptoassets useful for some blockchain applications.

Besides these groups are the speculators and investors who hope to benefit from price appreciation of these assets.

Given the strong interest of these four groups, Elliot argues that cryptoassets are here to stay, but he also asserts that these assets raise public policy issues that regulation should address. Some issues, such as anti–money laundering, are being addressed, but all would benefit from a coordinated global approach. However, he observes that of the four long-term support groups, only the technical users are likely to favor such regulations.

Another paper, by University of Chicago professor Gina C. Pieters, analyzed the extent to which the cryptocurrency market is global using purchases of cryptocurrency by state-issued currencies. She finds that more than 90 percent of all cryptocurrency transactions occur using one of three currencies: the U.S. dollar, the South Korean won, and the Japanese yen. She further finds that the dominance of these three currencies cannot be explained by economic size, financial openness, or internet access. Pieters also observed that transactions involving bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, do not necessarily represent a country's cryptomarket share.

Warren Weber, former Minneapolis Fed economist and a visiting scholar at the Atlanta Fed, discussed so-called "stable coins," one type of cryptocurrency. The value of many cryptocurrencies has fluctuated widely in recent years, with the price of one bitcoin soaring from under $6,000 to more than $19,000 and then plunging to just over $6,000—all within the period from October 2017 to October 2018. This extreme price volatility creates a significant impediment to Elliot's technical users who would like some method of buying blockchain services with a currency controlled by a blockchain. In an attempt to meet this demand, a number of "stable coins" have been issued or are under development.

Drawing on a preliminary paper, Weber discussed three types of stable coins. One type backs all of the currency it issues with holdings of a state-issued currency, such as the U.S. dollar. A potential weakness of these coins is that they incur operational costs that require payment. Weber observed that interest earnings might cover part of these expenses if the stable coin issuer holds the dollars in an interest-bearing asset. Additionally, charging redemption fees might offset some or all of the expense.

The other two alternatives involve the creation of cryptofinancial entities or crypto "central banks." Both of these approaches seek to adjust the quantity of the cryptocurrency outstanding to stabilize its price in another currency. However, Weber observed that both of these approaches are subject to the problem that the cryptocurrency could take on many values depending upon people's expectations. If people come to expect that a coin will lose its value, neither of these approaches can prevent the coin from becoming worthless.

The question of whether existing central banks should issue e-money was the topic of a presentation by Francisco Rivadeneyra of the Bank of Canada. Summarizing the results of his paper, Rivadeneyra observed that central banks could provide e-money that looks like a token or a more traditional account. The potential for central banks to offer widely available account-based services has long existed. However, after considering the tradeoffs, central banks have elected not to provide these accounts, and recent technological developments have not changed this calculus. However, new technologies may have changed the tradeoff for token-based systems. Many issues will need to be addressed first, though.

Larry D. Wall, director of the Atlanta Fed's Center for Financial Innovation and Stability

• November 29, 2018 in
  • Capital and Investment
  • Technology
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January 31, 2014

A Brief Interview with Sergio Rebelo on the Euro-Area Economy

Last month, we at the Atlanta Fed had the great pleasure of hosting Sergio Rebelo for a couple of days. While he was here, we asked Sergio to share his thoughts on a wide range of current economic topics. Here is a snippet of a Q&A we had with him about the state of the euro-area economy:

Sergio, what would you say was the genesis of the problems the euro area has faced in recent years?

The contours of the euro area’s problems are fairly well known. The advent of the euro gave peripheral countries—Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Greece—the ability to borrow at rates that were similar to Germany's. This convergence of borrowing costs was encouraged through regulation that allowed banks to treat all euro-area sovereign bonds as risk free.

The capital inflows into the peripheral countries were not, for the most part, directed to the tradable sector. Instead, they financed increases in private consumption, large housing booms in Ireland and Spain, and increases in government spending in Greece and Portugal. The credit-driven economic boom led to a rise in labor costs and a loss of competitiveness in the tradable sector.

Was there a connection between the financial crisis in the United States and the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area?

Simply put, after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, we had a sudden stop of capital flows into the periphery, similar to that experienced in the past by many Latin American countries. The periphery boom quickly turned into a bust.

What do you see as the role for euro area monetary policy in that context?

It seems clear that more expansionary monetary policy would have been helpful. First, it would have reduced real labor costs in the peripheral countries. In those countries, the presence of high unemployment rates moderates nominal wage increases, so higher inflation would have reduced real wages. Second, inflation would have reduced the real value of the debts of governments, banks, households, and firms. There might have been some loss of credibility on the part of the ECB [European Central Bank], resulting in a small inflation premium on euro bonds for some time. But this potential cost would have been worth paying in return for the benefits.

And did this happen?

In my view, the ECB did not follow a sufficiently expansionary monetary policy. In fact, the euro-area inflation rate has been consistently below 2 percent and the euro is relatively strong when compared to a purchasing-power-parity benchmark. The euro area turned to contractionary fiscal policy as a panacea. There are good theoretical reasons to believe that—when the interest rate remains constant that so the central bank does not cushion the fall in government spending—the multiplier effect of government spending cuts can be very large. See, for example, Gauti Eggertsson and Michael Woodford, “The Zero Interest-rate Bound and Optimal Monetary Policy,” and Lawrence Christiano, Martin Eichenbaum, and Sergio Rebelo, "When Is the Government Spending Multiplier Large?”

Theory aside, the results of the austerity policies implemented in the euro area are clear. All of the countries that underwent this treatment are now much less solvent than in the beginning of the adjustment programs managed by the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the ECB.

Bank stress testing has become a cornerstone of macroprudential financial oversight. Do you think they helped stabilize the situation in the euro area during the height of the crisis in 2010 and 2011?

No. Quite the opposite. I think the euro-area problems were compounded by the weak stress tests conducted by the European Banking Association in 2011. Almost no banks failed, and almost no capital was raised. Banks largely increased their capital-to-asset ratios by reducing assets, which resulted in a credit crunch that added to the woes of the peripheral countries.

But we’re past the worst now, right? Is the outlook for the euro-area economy improving?

After hitting the bottom, a very modest recovery is under way in Europe. But the risk that a Japanese-style malaise will afflict Europe is very real. One useful step on the horizon is the creation of a banking union. This measure could potentially alleviate the severe credit crunch afflicting the periphery countries.

Thanks, Sergio, for this pretty sobering assessment.

By John Robertson, a vice president and senior economist in the Atlanta Fed’s research department

Editor’s note: Sergio Rebelo is the Tokai Bank Distinguished Professor of International Finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Center for Economic Policy Research.

• January 31, 2014 in
  • Banking
  • Capital and Investment
  • Europe
  • Interest Rates
  • macroeconomics
  • Monetary Policy
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September 26, 2013

The New Normal? Slower R&D Spending

In case you need more to worry about, try this: the pace of research and development (R&D) spending has slowed. The National Science Foundation defines R&D as “creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge” and application of this knowledge toward new applications. (The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) used to treat R&D as an intermediate input in current production. But the latest benchmark revision of the national accounts recorded R&D spending as business investment expenditure. See here for an interesting implication of this change.)

The following chart shows the BEA data on total real private R&D investment spending (purchased or performed on own-account) over the last 50 years, on a year-over-year percent change basis. (For a snapshot of R&D spending across states in 2007, see here.)

Notice the unusually slow pace of R&D spending in recent years. The 50-year average is 4.6 percent. The average over the last 5 years is 1.1 percent. This slower pace of spending has potentially important implications for overall productivity growth, which has also been below historic norms in recent years.

R&D spending is often cited as an important source of productivity growth within a firm, especially in terms of product innovation. But R&D is also an inherently risky endeavor, since the outcome is quite uncertain. So to the extent that economic and policy uncertainty has helped make businesses more cautious in recent years, a slow pace of R&D spending is not surprising. On top of that, the federal funding of R&D activity remains under significant budget pressure. See, for example, here.

So you can add R&D spending to the list of things that seem to be moving more slowly than normal. Or should we think of it as normal?

By John Robertson, vice president and senior economist in the Atlanta Fed’s research department

• September 26, 2013 in
  • Business Cycles
  • Capital and Investment
  • Productivity
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