How significant is the economic backdrops between the Greenspan and the Bernanke eras? That’s a key question for Dan Gross (usually of Slate, but today in Fortune).
To provide context, he notes:
"Bernanke may face a much different inflation vista than Greenspan did. In the
1990s, Europe, Asia, and America took turns growing strongly, so we never had a
pervasive global push on prices, says Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of
the Economic Cycle Research Institute. Now the world’s largest economies have
all been expanding for several years, which is pushing up prices for
commodities. (Hello, inflation!)If lower productivity and higher inflation amplify each other – as higher
productivity and lower inflation did in the 1990s – we face the risk of a
bizarro virtuous circle, says Achuthan: a vicious reinforcement, in which lower
productivity drives inflation higher, which in turn drives productivity lower."
Now for the moneyshot: Gross asks How concerning should this be to the Fed? The answer is found in the two most recent FOMC’s communiqués. The June 29 statement contained this sentence:
"Ongoing productivity gains have held down the rise in unit labor costs, and
inflation expectations remain contained."
In the Aug. 8 missive, that reassuring statement was nowhere to be found. Indeed, it was glaring in its omission. And that suggests that the data dependent Fed will be paying close attention to upcoming productivity data. And, the most recent productivity release showed unit labor costs rose 4.2 percent
in the second quarter of 2006, up from 2.5 percent in the first quarter.
This suggests the labor component of upcoming inflation data will be rather higher than many investors are expecting.
UPDATE August 22, 2006 1:30pm
As if on cue, Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Michael Moskow said policy
makers might need to raise interest rates further to fight inflation. Earlier in the day, Atlanta Federal Reserve
Bank president Jack Guynn said in a speech in Atlanta that while he’s confident that inflation will
be well contained, central bankers need to be cautious about "the slippery slope
of trading inflation for growth."
Source:
Productivity watch: The nirvana of high growth and low inflation may be over
Daniel Gross
Fortune, August 22 2006: 5:35 AM EDT
http://tinyurl.com/lpnex
I agree this is a very important point Barry.
I do expect a turn up at some point soon. Again, I know this is a variant view. This does have my attention as well.
Did unit labor costs rise because of lower productivity, higher wages, or some combination of the two?
If wages are rising, this bodes well for continued strength in consumer spending. Ideally, wages would naturally rise to keep pace with (but not act as an accelerant to) inflation.
Why not a nirvana of sustainable (not necessarily high) growth and contained (not necessarily low) inflation?
baby, you miss the point, higher wages in this environment is a PRODUCT of inflation.
OT. I thought the promise of big Wall St. bonuses this year was supposed to keep the bubble from popping in New York: Unsold Manhattan Apartments at 10-YR. High.
I can tell you in the industries I am involved with (trucking and related areas) the labor market is tight. Having to pay more to steal employees from competitors and having to ask those we have to work overtime at higher rates.
babycondor, consider the following conversation starter:
“Boss, ’cause gas prices are staying high it’s costing me an extra $20 every month just to drive to work. Can I get a raise?”
It’s both Condor, slowing productivity gains and accelerating wage growth.
With consumers at an all time high F.O.R., running a negative savings rate for about a year now, the house as ATM era coming to a close, inflation continuing to outpace wage growth, ARM resets, and no “wealth effect” on spending from rising asset prices (i.e. stocks are flat, housing is dropping)…I don’t see a compelling case for continued consumer strength. The only way I can see it happening is if govt spending ratchets up and that is becoming politically untenable after the spending/pork orgy of the last 6 years.
This is all a rehash of the same bearish arguments we’ve heard over and over, but they remain valid IMO. (I’m short the retail sector).
Why not a nirvana? I could be glib and just say “you can’t defeat the business cycle”. But it’s deeper than that and would take many pages to flesh out the entire case.
About time for another earnings less energy posting?
Condor…I am in that nirvana camp……
(hold the snickers ;-).
I’m of the (minority opinion) that CTO’s and CFO’s will sign off on the much anticipated tech capex, and open up another leg of productivity. Communication/computing/networking convergence will be a reality. We can glibly call it — Vista meets mobile Wimax. The productivity we will gain could/will be huge. How many corporations are running on pre Y2k junk? We will be lighting up lots of dark fiber to meet the coming tsunami of IP bandwidth demand, imho.
Jack the Jawboner and his Muscovite cohort came out right on que. Maybe Bennie and the Feds should go jawbone the nickel pit at the LME about “contained inflation expectations” and see how well that works for ’em.
Anyone else following this nonsense in nickel?
more capex upgrade means more jobs outsourced to India and China replacing leaving well paid developers at home scrambling for jobs as telemarketers or whatever they can find.. but whatever it is pays less and that means less they can spend. example Onyx software in Bellevue, Wa bought out, today annouces close of US development offices and outsources to Bangalore.
Interesting Pring video commentary / TA focused on commodity complex:
http://www.pring.com/movieweb/commodity/commodity.html
Wow, thjis feels so much like holiday trading.
I’m always getting the feeling during holiday trading that the traders whip the markets around but end the period at the short term highs, then when the volume returns, a huge move always emerges to break those highs or whack the entire low volume move.
I agree – I can’t wait for labor day to be in the rear view mirror.
exactly Alaska Pete
time to short Nickel , LME ‘ll raise margins and kill it
My personal and often stated impression is that Greenspan had the enormous advantage of being able to count on a lot of spare capacity coming online fast in China and India, and being able to export inflation and import deflation.
Bernanke is not in the same position; spare capacity is getting scarce in both India and China, as their ”modern” subsets are getting near full utilization.
“How many corporations are running on pre Y2k junk?” – SS
You mentioned Vista so i assume you are referring to Windows 98 or earlier. I work as a consultant in technology and I have not seen any company that is still on that. XP is nearly 5 years old and almost everyone is on it by now.
WiMax is years away from widespread adoption and I have heard plenty of annecdotal evidence that Managers find nothing in Vista to encourage an upgrade so it will happen when the hardware needs to get upgraded. Not exactly driving a virtuous cycle of upgrades. Besides that, how is Vista going to add to productivity? There is nothing ground breaking in there.
Is this kind of pipe dreaming where you get your optimism from? You really should have a stream of consciousness that is atleast somehow coherent if you are going to use it to argue your case. What you are arguing on the productivity front is just a bunch of words about technology that sounds plausible to someone who doesn’t know anything about the technology. But it is non-sense when considered in the context in which you proposed it concerning timeframe and productivity.
Pete,
Nickel is a “cornerable” asset. ie, The annual production is small enough that you don’t even need massive money to manipulate the prices.
For those who think the Fed can start cutting rates, welcome to Mr. nickel.
Another new bug-ridden, security hole rampant, piece of dung OS from Mr. Softee isn’t going to do jack to increase productivity. In fact, I’d argue a new rollout will decrease, not increase, productivity in the near term as malicious code flourishes (viruses, worms, phishing schemes, spyware, adware) while the clowns in Redmond rollout patches for security holes they should have solved prior to release, and the millions of users re-learn a new OS (I wasted at least 6 hrs over the course of a few months after transitioning from NT to XP, and I’m not a exactly tech illiterate having used just about every OS in existence since 1989).
Maybe I don’t understand the nature of productivity gains, but I ain’t buyin’ into Vista™ being a savior.
One quarter of below-trend productivity growth does not constitute evidence that the trend has changed. Of the 28 quarters from 1995 through 2001 (the period cited by Dan Gross for rapid productivity growth), 10 of them had productivity growth slower than Q2 2006. Moreover, even with the revised data, the average productivity growth rate starting in 2002 has been even higher (by almost 50 bps) than in the 1995-2001 period. The average productivity growth rate over the past 4 quarters is also a bit higher than 1995-2001. If the days of rapid productivity growth are over, we are not yet seeing this change in the data.
I’m skeptical of the high inflation story, too. All the signs are now pointing to a severe growth slowdown which is likely to destroy pricing power.
Thanks for the “kind” comments qw.
You’re a bear and that’s just fine with me. We’ll agree to disagree. I know alot more about this technology that you might imagine, btw.
PS..did you ever “see” the productivity coming from the past wave? I doubt it highly judging from your demeanor.
Here’s a good debate point:
Will the government eat bad Fannie Mae loans and Freddie Mac loans, or will they just eat bad Ginnie Maes?
QW — ss (or anyone expecting much impact at the enterprise level from Vista or WiMax) obviously isn’t familiar with corporate IT practice. Many large companies only rolled out XP fully 2 years ago, and some have just barely finished Office 2003. No IT director worth his salt is going to be out looking to risk his job rush an upgrade into Vista before late 2008 at best; the upside just isn’t there and the costs of the last upgrade cycle haven’t amortized off yet.
Not to mention that even if they did roll it out, the potential impact on productivity is almost totally negligible. Just look at the rough numbers: if you figure that maybe 20% of the work force are knowledge workers, who spend maybe 50% of their time at a computer, and will see a 1% boost in productivity (remember, this is an OS we’re talking about — most won’t even notice a difference from XP) you’d have at best a 0.5% boost in output. (You can take issue with that 1%, but I’m figuring that a good 95% percent of time spend in Office is used up waiting on the person, not the system. So I’m giving a 20% boost on the part controlled by the computer.)
SS
The “productivity” gain this past cycle was from the excess malinvestment in capex through 2000. Plant, equipment and capacity expenditures were absolutely stupid in the late 1990s. Thus, the productivity you saw post 2000 was simply the fact that none of that along with people needed to be invested in to drive revenue or profit growth.
Productivity post 2000 has been a mirage. WiMax and the telecom build out won’t hit the economy in full stride for five more years. Web 2.0 and all of the associated hype will remain such for quite some time. That is, unless you consider YouTube web 2.0.
There’s statistics, damn statistics and lies.
Sorry, that should be 0.1% update — I changed the potential productivity boost at a computer from 5% to 1% after realizing that very little time is actually under the control of the computer.
I know B, especially with current (lack of) warehouse stocks. Any kind of manipulation sucks, but exchange sanctioned manipulation specifically to support a big short player is beyond the pale. With one player holding something like 40% of the OI on the short side and the exchange sees fit to cap carry rates?
First we had the Greenspan put, now the LME call?. Wait until that paltry little 6k ton stockpile (~1 day of world demand) is gone and the party will really get started.
SS:
you know a lot about this technology huh? And from that you believe that WiMax will be rolled out in any meaningful fashion in the next year and that Vista will have any meaningful adoption in the next year and that when it does it will have any meaningful impact on productivity.
Jeez, this is getting rediculous. Read all the other posts from people in technology on here who think you are nuts. Haven’t heard one person who backs your ludicrous proposal that a Vista-WiMax upgrade cycle is either imminent or meaningful (except for Microsoft).
I don’t like making comments that point out people’s stupidity but when its this blatent it is necessary to challenge it.
You assume I am a big bear because I am not wildly optimistic. I actually think most likely we are just stuck in a dull and directionless market. Just because you want to make up pipe dreams for why the market should “melt up” doesn’t make everyone else a bear nor does it make them out to get you. You will notice I don’t post that often. Just when I see utter non-sense. And this was non-sense in copious volumes.
I was not penning a dissertation on the detailed path to a new productivity boom. Vista and Wimax are only two (from the hip) examples of coming offerings for the market to consider….and a small part at that. Success of companies like CRM, GRMN and GOOG are a perfect examples of what I expect to see over a wide spectrum of enhancements. Whatever…place your bets.
I’m not here to debate bears…I love bears….teeth gnashing, rabid, mouth foaming, and predictable.
SS:
“Whatever…place your bets.” — Indeed, as Jesse Livermore says, you won’t know until you bet.
“I love bears….teeth gnashing, rabid, mouth foaming, and predictable.” — Grrrrrrr. :)
Hey Q ball…wipe the foam from your lip and Google
up “Nanotechnolgy, Productivity”.
Open your eyes for god’s sake.
I’ve just scratched the surface…..lol
Sounds like Fed is trying to use ‘free’ ammunition. What happens if the CRB composite does crack and roll over? I’d think that boads well longER term for the Fed’s fight, however, does not address wages.
1990’s productivity gains were “bubble” money spent on completely worthless tech , telecom that imploded such as dark fiber …….we’re still paying for that
I’ll step into this productivity fray from a CFO perspective. . . there are few things harder than quantifying productivity gains from technology investments. (You can make it look like anything you want on paper, which is why such projects need to go through a gauntlet of scrutiny). I’ve seen lots of them on paper, and have approved some, refused many. Would I re-tool an organzation’s hardware and software for a new MS release? No (and I’d love to add a more emphatic word in front that rhymes with duck). No prudent organization would (unless they were cutting edge technology) with MS’s record. Let them work the bugs out first–particularly if you have to invest in a more robust PC to run it. So, if the productivity gains are suspect, I doubt that corporations, no matter what their cash balance, are going to be eager to spend money in lightof perceived slow down in business.
We have all that dark fiber, yet Bellsouth (soon to be part of AT&T) can’t even run fiber to my home and allow me to download one of those DVDs from Amazon in under 5 minutes. Nah, instead I crawl along at 3mb DSL (interleaved at that!) because Bellsouth is too cheap to upgrade their noisy, high-attenuation, last mile copper. I’d switch to cable modem but I need reliability and down here in south Florida the cable is the very last thing to come back after a hurricane.
The WiMax buildout will come, but it’ll come more slowly than the big fiber buildout of the late 90’s because the baby Bells are circumspect and tightfisted when it comes to spending their cash. Unless the investment bankers have a bunch of WiMax Global Crossings to push out the door, I don’t see a bubble coming from WiMax, just a nice boost for the hardware vendors, and I don’t see it coming until 2007.
I don’t understand why everyone focuses on the productivity number. It’s a farce. 50% of sectors are not included in its calculation.
It’s a great theoretical concept, but in practice it’s as meaningful as the CPI, if not less!
Vista & wimax are going to save the bacon, ss?
I am a senior systems administrator for a fortune 1000 technology company and find it remarkable that you would expect IT spending to pick up in a recession- it is one of the first things that is hit. Perhaps more to the point, the main reason Corporate America upgraded to XP was hardware replacement and diminishing support for win2k- it certainly wasn’t because there was any compelling reason to do so.
It won’t fit into your Gartner-ish view of IT, but there is very little that has come along in the past 5 years to get excited about. You mentioned CRM and I would agree that their platform is pretty nice, but they are famous for system failures and it remains to be seen whether they can or will spend enough on their backend infrastructure to become reliable.
Day in and day out, 80% of the corporate software cycle is redeveloping/reimplementing stuff that wasn’t truly broken, just kind of crappy. That means it is optional and not likely to get $$ when customer budgets tighten up. Another 19.9% concerns utterly broken things that should have never been sold to begin with which leaves 0.1% devoted to “innovation.” Of course marketing turns all of that upside down which is where I suspect you have gotten so horribly off of the track.
If anyone really wanted productivity to increase, they would begin by banning Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook worldwide. That triad sucks up more time and results in more erroneous projections, profound simplifications, and avoidable misunderstandings than OBL could hope to inflict on the West if he had 10,000 jihadi Pak programmers working for 10,000 years to create the same kind of chaos.
>>i’m of the (minority opinion) that CTO’s and CFO’s will sign off on the much anticipated tech capex, and open up another leg of productivity.
ss, you’re dead wrong. i work directly for a CTO of a Fortune 200 company and we’re squeezing the bottom line worse than after the .com crash. try picking up a copy of this month’s CIO magazine. you’ll see there’s no sign off happening but a further tightening of $$$.
per Leisa:
“I’ll step into this productivity fray from a CFO perspective. . . there are few things harder than quantifying productivity gains from technology investments.”
If you are a CFO, then you certainly understand exactly how dubious all software stuff is when it comes down to justification. It’s much easier to detect a benefit in hardware.
That’s one (of several) reasons why open source software has become popular, you spend the money on people instead of tools. Where that has gotten off track is that American companies (whether using open source or not) then hire coolie labor in India to cut costs even further.
I think that all of this offshoring is going to come back to bite the corporate participants as well as the US in the ass. The slaves are going to become the masters when they just steal the software and the Indian govt. says “sorry.” For that matter, we may not even be able to actually build a computer in the US now if all of the Asian component suppliers told us to f*ck off one day for whatever reason.
>>example Onyx software in Bellevue, Wa bought out, today annouces close of US development offices and outsources to Bangalore.
onyx is a great example of the type of midsized mainly regional firm who can’t hack it with the big boys so eventually sells out and moves development offshore. if you aren’t gobbled up, you’re sold and key functions outsourced. seems the best way to save your job in tech today is to work for an 800 pound gorilla and hope when the occasional scythe comes by you can duck fast enough.
Reading the comments by posters in a position to know saying that Microsoft is not providing productivity improvements worth upgrading for reinforces my sense that we are facing a bottleneck that we can’t see when it comes to the use of information/knowledge to drive the economy. I see Big Pharma and the main software companies holding back progress. Not because they are performing poorly or breaking the rules but precisely because they are doing what they are supposed to: maximize profits. The problem is that the way the rules are set up, there is more money in copyright/patent rent collection than in actual innovation.
If we were moving forward at maximum speed in knowledge creation and knowledge utilization, outsourcing would not be a problem.
Whipsaw:
“I am a senior systems administrator for a fortune 1000 technology company and find it remarkable that you would expect IT spending to pick up in a recession”
I find it remarkable that a senior systems administrator has read the future — and that is a recession. Are you Carnak?
Just to pile one… I’m the network admin at a wholly owned subsidiary of 40-some employees. Total corporate employment is 250. I’m the sole IT decision maker for the subsidiary (outside of my boss, a non-tech.) The whole company has 3.5 IT employees. I’m the only IT employee for the subsidiary. A couple observations:
1) Most vertical software still hasn’t moved on from a DCOM programming model. This model is near 15 years old. Despite all benefits of moving to an XML/web document interchange model, there are no companies in my vertical implementing it. Many of the insurance companies we submit forms to actually print the XML forms we submit and data enter them. There is very high resistance to spend the $100’s of K’s, if not millions, necessary to convert to a highly functional web document model.
2) Bandwidth to the business is really cheap. The slowest part of the Internet is no longer the last mile, but the Internet itself. (This is why VOIP is starting to peter out.) Until telecom can make more money, they are not going to spend the money to make the infrastructure upgrades.
3) In another job, I was prospecting for a top 3 IT company. In one of the projects, we were prospecting WalMart suppliers for RFID conversion. This conversion for REQUIRED by WalMart, and almost every company was giving stiff resistance. This included companies where WalMart was the sole buyer. In fact, the pressure was so great that WalMart delayed mandatory RFID tags for all except its top 10 or so suppliers.
Too many companies have gotten burned on IT investments, and we have a long time until they get their appetite back.
per Anna S:
“I find it remarkable that a senior systems administrator has read the future — and that is a recession. Are you Carnak?”
No madam, I am just foretelling the present and letting my undergraduate degree in finance apparently annoy you. If you are ambulatory, it doesn’t take too much to observe that things are slowing down to the point of a lifestyle change for many people- mostly at the lower end now, but the high end will be the next to fall. Good luck to you.
Vista, Wimax. pre Y2k junk? Lighting up dark fiber?
There is very little pre-Y2k junk still in existence. So what is going to drive the upgrade cycle? Bloat-ware? Most computers have their CPU’s spending 99% of the time at a whopping 1% utilization. This hardware is essentially idle. The same is true of network cards or existing Wi-fi connections. Most of the time they are idle.
Perhaps the perma-geeks will layout some cash to get the latest and greatest from MSFT. More likely these geeks will diversify into a Mac experience for their home PC’s to try out something new. And sadly, though “experiencing” a Mac is cool and exciting, this does nothing for over-all business productivity.
As for corporate systems, why on earth would they go to Vista? At a minimum they will wait years and years for the software to stabilize, service packs to come out and certifications to become available.
Also, if you try to get a corporate decision maker to go with even a free, open source solution, you will still meet resistance. Free isn’t even cheap enough. Upgrading system with new software to do what these systems already do is labor intensive … and management knows this. Upgrades require a compelling reason. Doubly so for the back office.
Most IT spending is overhead for companies. So why spend money on something that’s currently working? “We just spent $25M for a new system. It does what our previous system did, but it’s more cool.”
Nah… Slowly systems are either being replaced or “enhanced.” But only when there are reasons to do so that support the enterprise.
Instead of getting sidetracked by who’s got the biggest IT cock, maybe y’all should pay more attention to something kevin_r wrote.
>>
The problem is that the way the rules are set up, there is more money in copyright/patent rent collection than in actual innovation.
<< Only ... Kevin, this problem does not stop with pharma and software. Think RIAA ... MPAA ... the bulk of the US legal system that we'd love to foist on the rest of the world in the name of "democracy". And for the most part we're stumbling around oblivious to the corner we're painted our collective selves into. Granted there are some progressive thinkers like Lawrence Lessig and Richard Stallman who have been fighting these battles on behalf of creativity and innovation. But for the most part, we've gone down the path of turning creativity and innovation over to the lawyers, the courts and the insurance companies. How is that a good thing? Example: Film. I am an independent filmmaker. There exists today a chokehold on the film industry that very few are even aware exists. In order to sell a film to any outlet where you might make more than the price of a tank of gas, you are *required* to have something called E&O insurance (Errors and Omissions). For instance, no television outlet will touch your product without it. How do you get it? You document a paper trail of copyright clearance for every image, sound, idea, person, etc etc which appears in your film. Don't have your paperwork in order? Don't plan on getting insurance. Fair Use is a fine concept, but explain why your work is transformative to an insurance underwriter and you might as well explain it to a wall. Insurance underwriters have a de facto chokehold on creativity when it comes to film. I'm sure that's not the only chokehold they have either. Alright, you say people like Mark Cuban with hdnet, and sites like YouTube are creating vast new playing fields ripe with possibility to monetize film (video) work. I say just watch as the future is co-opted ... same as the past was. The point is that we've evolved into a society which excels at creative financing and lawyering. Good luck growing productivity with those as core products.
Speaking of VISTA:
Microsoft Vista will be discounted (If it ever arrives)
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33833
I won’t allow my CTO’s to have any discretion on spending anymore ….. they have no clue what’s productive or not …. I’m outsourcing half my IT this month as a cost-saver , and hope to fire the rest by year-end
Is there no one who thinks like SS that Vista will be the kick-off to a wave of productivity?
Come on?
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Vista was a sound bite, Einstein…not the basis for the opinion. You never responded to my suggested homework assignment on Nanotechnology…ever heard of it?
Don’t you have someone to “consult”, or did they find someone more productive?
thats pretty laughable SS.
Vista was a sound-bite which represented what exactly? Where is the productivity bump going to come from? You specifically referenced the capex cycle. So if they are not going to go to Vista what capex cycle are you talking about? You were talking about Vista and the upgrade cycle. Lets not pretend you were talking about something else. If you want to now claim you were, please enumerate those items you actually meant to talk about when you mistakenly hung your hat on Vista as the driver.
You now want to switch to some argument based on a paper about the potential for productivity enhancements from nano-technology? Are you serious? If you want to talk about the stock market in 2030 fine, but this is 2006 and nano-technology is not going to drive any stock returns this cycle.
I am not quite sure how to take this line of reasoning which doesn’t seem to have any reasonable logic to it. You seriously think you can make some claims about productivity this cycle based on that essoteric paper on nano-technology?
Bueller and Einstein !!!!!
take this offline will you , you’re driving us nuts