(By Greg Ip, Washington
Post, 05 October 5 2012)
Cast your
mind forward to October 2014. The economic rebound for which Barack
Obama had worked so hard and hoped so long is finally underway: Growth is
humming, unemployment is steadily dropping, and the stock market is hitting one
record high after another. But unfortunately for Obama, he’s not in the White
House anymore — and President Mitt
Romney is the man whose approval ratings are being carried aloft by the
Dow. Romney is widely considered to have
won
Wednesday night’s presidential debate by attacking Obama’s economic record
and promising, if elected, to restore job growth and middle-class incomes. The
irony is that, if Romney wins the election and the economy rebounds on his
watch, much of the recovery will be due to efforts undertaken during the Obama
administration.
Every
president faces two painful, immutable truths about the economy: First, he has
far less influence over it than voters think. Second, even when his actions
make a difference, it is often not felt until after he’s left office, and not
always in the expected way. Consider the
two most successful presidents of recent decades. Ronald Reagan is often
credited with sparking an economic renaissance by defeating inflation and
deregulating the economy. But it was Jimmy Carter’s appointment of Paul Volcker
as chairman of the Federal Reserve that spelled the death knell for inflation
(not to mention Carter’s reelection bid), and the deregulation of airlines,
trucking and railroads all began under Carter’s watch.
Similarly,
the economic boom during Bill Clinton’s presidency was kick-started by an
extended decline in long-term interest rates, which began with the budget deal
George H.W. Bush signed in 1990 at great personal cost. And if you want to go
really big-picture, the technology bubble that gilded Clinton’s second term can
be traced to investments in computer-network technology that began under
President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s.
Of course,
not everything presidents bequeath to their successors turns out well. Obama’s
term has been cursed by the effects of a financial crisis that bears the
fingerprints of every president going back to Lyndon Johnson, who turned
mortgage giant Fannie Mae over to private shareholders, as well as Carter, who
ushered in the era of deregulated finance by loosening interest-rate controls.
And for all the problems George W. Bush left for Obama, he also did him one big
favor by creating the bailout fund that helped end the crisis.
Paradoxically,
the same forces that made for such a weak recovery during Obama’s first term
suggest that the next four years will be better, regardless of who holds the
White House. Right now, businesses, households and governments are all trying
to wrestle down their debts. That “deleveraging” saps spending and blunts the
power of low interest rates. But eventually it ends, on average six to seven
years after the debt (as a percentage of GDP) peaks, according to the McKinsey
Global Institute and a study by economists Carmen and Vince Reinhart. For the United States, that means sometime
between 2013 and 2016, depending on which measure of debt one chooses.
Households have already whittled their debts down, often by defaulting; banks
have rebuilt their capital; and home prices, which hit bottom in January, are
rising steadily.
So, how will
historians judge the economic legacy of Obama’s first term? There will be black
marks, such as his failure to produce a lasting solution to America’s deficits,
in particular the rising cost of Medicare. Indeed, the biggest near-term threat
to economic recovery remains tightening government budgets, in particular the“fiscal
cliff,” a withering combination of tax increases and spending cuts that
could automatically take effect in January. Yet, historians will probably also
see many things that laid the groundwork for stronger growth in later years.
Here are the most notable:
Reappointing
Ben Bernanke
Presidents
often come to regret their Fed chairman appointments; Volcker helped doom
Carter’s reelection chances, and George H.W. Bush suspected Alan Greenspan of
doing the same for his. Obama announced
the 2009 reappointment of Bernanke, a Republican, largely because of Bernanke’s
aggressive response to the financial crisis. While the Fed chief has since
tried to boost growth with repeated rounds of quantitative
easing — the purchase of bonds with newly printed money — some Obama supporters
have groused that he isn’t trying hard enough.
Last month, though, the Fed broke new ground by committing to open-ended
bond buying until unemployment has fallen substantially, even if inflation tops
the Fed’s 2 percent target. Since monetary policy works with a lag, this is
probably too late to help Obama’s reelection chances much. But it will be a
boon to whomever occupies the White House starting next year. Moreover, by
waiting until he had built a consensus inside the Fed, Bernanke is more likely
to see his policy survive, even if a future president replaces him, as Romney
promises to do.
Making
the banks safe
Under Obama,
banks have been forced to hold hundreds of billions of dollars in additional
capital to absorb potential losses and to exit risky lines of business, such as
trading for their own accounts. If they need a bailout, they must suffer a
draconian government-run restructuring that wipes out their shareholders. Debit
cards, credit cards and derivatives are all less lucrative businesses. U.S.
banks are the best capitalized they’ve been in at least 20 years. Of course, spreading smaller profits over
more equity capital is a recipe for lousy shareholder returns. Ed Najarian of
the brokerage firm ISI Group estimates that the market now values big banks at
20 percent less than their book value while valuing regional banks at 80
percent more — a source of deep frustration to big banks but an effective
disincentive to any bank to get too big to fail. Much of the new regulation is overkill, and Obama
has probably hurt growth and himself by raising the cost of credit. But in the
process, he has done future presidents a favor. There will be new financial
crises, but banks aren’t likely to be the cause for a long time.
Encouraging
innovation
Government
funding has long been critical to basic research that lacks commercial appeal.
In the 1950s, Eisenhower’s Pentagon created the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, which funded the development of network technology that later
became the Internet. Gerald Ford’s Energy Department funded demonstration
projects and research into technology for extracting natural gas from dense
shale rock; decades later, abundant shale gas has revolutionized America’s
energy supply. Obama has emulated those
examples, creating a DARPA clone to fund hundreds of small, early-stage energy
projects. His stimulus package lavished loans and grants to companies and labs
working on alternative energy. Every
venture capitalist knows that for every big success, there are many failures.
Unfortunately for presidents, that means the failures are early and
high-profile (think Solyndra),
while the successes may not show up for years — and may be utterly unrecognizable
when they do. Shane Greenstein, a Northwestern University business professor
who has traced the history of the Internet, notes that the creators of DARPA
never saw it as an incubator of commercial technologies; it was “motivated by a
desire to do innovative military work outside the structure of the existing
military units.” Someday, one of the
projects the Obama administration has backed is going to produce a breakthrough
— probably long after this president has left office.
Boosting
human capital
While the
biggest problem in the job market today is the lack of demand for employees, in
the long run it’s the mismatch between the growing demand for college-educated
workers and the slower-growing supply. Three decades ago, the share of
Americans who had graduated from college was the second highest among advanced
countries; now, it ranks 15th. That’s
starting to change. In 2009, a record 70 percent of high school graduates went
on to college that fall. Though the rate has slipped slightly since, it remains
high by historical standards. Most of the credit goes to simple incentives:
College graduates earn far more than high school graduates, and high
unemployment has diminished the options for those without a degree. But Obama
has done his part by significantly increasing the size and number of Pell
grants for low-income students, enriching the tax credit for college education,
overhauling federal student aid and seeking to crack down on for-profit
colleges that saddle their students with too much debt and not enough
employment success. This won’t
make a difference to the economy anytime soon, but if enrollment stays high, it
will in the years to come ease the shortage of skilled labor that hobbles so
many American companies.
Keeping
calm on China
The final
part of Obama’s term for which future presidents may be grateful is that he
didn’t start a trade war with China. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t thank a president
just for avoiding stupid things. Yet all the ingredients were there: a decade
of rising Chinese trade surpluses and shrinking American factory employment, a
devastating recession, a protectionist Congress and electorate, a Democratic
president indebted to organized labor, and a Chinese leadership fearful of
appearing weak to its people. Yet Obama
initiated only one serious, unilateral action against China: a
tariff on tires in 2009. Other moves were either made by apolitical trade
bureaucrats responding to private complaints or initiated through the World
Trade Organization, a neutral forum that China and the United States
scrupulously respect. A study by Chad Bown of the World Bank and Meredith
Crowley of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that protectionism during
the last recession was far lower than what previous patterns predicted.
Obama has
faced frequent pressure from many in Congress to label
China a currency manipulator and impose compensating tariffs — a
development that could trigger a cycle of retaliation between Beijing and
Washington that would damage trade and raise geopolitical tensions. With the
help of House Speaker John Boehner, Obama has sidestepped those pressures. His
administration, like Bush’s before it, has instead used the threat of
congressional action as leverage in back-channel negotiations with the Chinese.
And indeed, the
yuan has steadily risen and is no longer seriously undervalued — one reason
U.S. exports to China have soared and manufacturing employment is on the mend.
No one knows
whether China’s rise will remain peaceful, as that of the United States was in
the 1800s, or not, like Germany’s a century ago. Either way, how an American
president handles China is one of the few things that, a century from now, will
really make a difference. Depending on how it ends, both Obama and Bush stand
to get plenty of credit — or blame. It
is ironic that presidents are so often accused of short-term thinking when so
much of what they do shows results, for better or for worse, only in the very
long run. If a few years from now Romney finds himself presiding over an
economic boom, he should remember that and offer a quiet word of thanks to his
predecessors, including the man he defeated in November.
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