Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Nicole Foss, the systems analyst and biologist behind the blog Automatic Earth, is speaking tomorrow at A Compass for Turbulent Times, organised by Ceres.

I’m on the bill too, which I’m told will proceed roughly as follows:

9-11 Nicole (inc Qs)
11-30 Morning tea
11.30 – 12.30 Steve (inc Qs) – focus on aust context
12.30 – 1.30pm Lunch
1-30 – 2pm Opportunity for further Qs to both
2pm – 3.30 – Workshop session – smaller groups come up with
hypothetical scenarios/strategies (30mins) to put back to Nicole/Steve
for response / discussion (1hr).

Nicole is an excellent thinker and speaker; we’ve spoken twice together now at events organised by Local Futures in Michigan, and I have great respect for her combined economic-ecological perspective (in which ecology dominates!).

If you’d like to attend, bookings are still available from Ceres; tickets cost $150, or $110 for concessions and Ceres members. Ceres is a not-for-profit organisation, and the fees are covering the costs of bringing Nicole out to Australia.

The event is being held at CERES Community Environment Park Cnr Roberts and Stewart East Brunswick VIC 3057.

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The most recent ABS data implies that unemployment is falling, and that those who saw the economy as either stable or booming were right. Both the seasonally adjusted and the trend estimates fell, and the seasonally adjusted unemployment is now 0.2% below the peak it reached in August 2011 of 5.3%. This looks good—though not as good as conventional Neoclassical forecasters were expecting a year ago: in the 2011-12 budget, the Treasury, using its TRYM model, predicted a smooth fall in unemployment from 5% in June 2010 to 4.75% in June 2011 and 4.5% in June 2012.

Figure 1: ABS Unemployment Data and Treasury Forecasts

Clearly the Treasury didn’t expect the rise in unemployment that occurred in mid-2011. But the last five months of seasonally adjusted ABS data appear to imply that this deterioration was an aberration, and the expected recovery is on its way once more.

Figure 2: Treasury forecasts (& projections of a return to equilibrium) in the 2011-12 MYEFO

Or is it? As I noted in my most recent post, the definitions of employment and unemployment are now seriously compromised. The formal definition of unemployment used by the ABS is:

Persons aged 15 years and over who were not employed during the reference week, and:

• had actively looked for full time or part time work at any time in the four weeks up to the end of the reference week and were available for work in the reference week; or
• were waiting to start a new job within four weeks from the end of the reference week and could have started in the reference week if the job had been available then.

The definition of “actively looked“:

Includes writing, telephoning or applying to an employer for work; answering an advertisement for a job; checking noticeboards; being registered with Centrelink as a jobseeker; checking or registering with any other employment agency; advertising or tendering for work; and contacting friends or relatives.

The definition of employed is:

All persons aged 15 years and over who, during the reference week:

• worked for one hour or more for pay, profit, commission or payment in kind in a job or business, or on a farm (comprising employees, employers and own account workers); or
• worked for one hour or more without pay in a family business or on a farm (i.e. contributing family workers);

On these definitions, people who are discouraged by the job-seeking process—so that they haven’t applied for a job in the previous 4 weeks—are not unemployed. If they have worked for one hour or more in the previous fortnight, they will be classified as employed; if not, they will be “Not in the Labour Force”.

As noted in the previous post, these definitions disguise the real level of unemployment, and they inspired Roy Morgan to conduct its own survey with a rather more straightforward definition:

The Roy Morgan survey, in contrast, defines any respondent who is not employed full or part-time and who is looking for paid employment as being unemployed. ” (Roy Morgan, September 2001)

When Roy Morgan reports a trend in unemployment, this can be taken seriously—with caveats about the smaller size of the Roy Morgan sample (4,500 versus 30,000 for the ABS), and the fact that the data is not seasonally adjusted. When the ABS reports a trend, it could be a trend, or it could be an artefact of its definitions.

Curiously, the ABS itself implied in today’s statement that its unemployment data should be taken with a grain of salt. They recommended instead using the ratio of employment to population

A different method of analysis that removes the effect of population growth is to compare average employment to population ratios for each year… This analysis provides an alternative comparison of employment between years, as the influence of change in the underlying population in each year is removed.

The ABS’s definition of employment is not above reproach—including as employed people who worked a ludicrous 1 hour in a fortnight (and unpaid at that, if in a family business or on a farm)—but it lacks the additional distortion of its unemployment definition, which classifies the discouraged unemployed as “not in the workforce”. Curiously, the trend to falling unemployment in the last 5 months of ABS data isn’t mirrored in the employment to population ratio: though it blipped up in the most recent month, it has been steadily falling since the beginning of 2011.

Figure 3 illustrates this by graphing the employment to population ratio and unemployment together, and inverting the unemployment data (putting low unemployment at the top and high at the bottom).

Figure 3

A smoothed plot makes the trends in both series more obvious: the employment to population ratio is still trending down—implying rising unemployment—while the recorded unemployment rate is falling.

Figure 4: The data in Figure 3 smoothed

Roy Morgan’s measure of the unemployment rate, however, is clearly increasing.

Figure 5

Roy Morgan’s estimate that 10.3% of the workforce is unemployed is now more than twice the ABS’s estimate of 5.1%, and the gap between the two is the largest it has ever been.

Figure 6

Part of this huge gap in the January 2012 figures is undoubtedly due to the fact that the Roy Morgan data is not seasonally adjusted, and January necessarily involves a huge boost to actual unemployment as school leavers enter the workforce. But the trend in the gap can’t be explained away, and that gap is now the biggest it has ever been.

Figure 7

So it’s too early to declare that unemployment is falling—especially when that call is based upon data with a dodgy definition.

Oh, and that Treasury forecast shown in Figure 2, of rising unemployment from mid-2012—with it returning to 5% from the forecast low of 4.5%? That’s not a forecast: that’s an assumption. Built in to the TRYM model—and every other neoclassical macroeconomic model on the planet—is the assumption that the economy will return to a long run equilibrium rate of growth after any short term “shock”. The Treasury happened to assume that this long run equilibrium includes an unemployment rate of 5%.

This assumption is a classic example of the adage that “to assume makes an ASS out of yoU and ME”. Neoclassical economists have been getting away with this sort of behaviour for decades, because the public didn’t challenge them before the Global Financial Crisis when the economy seemed to be doing well. I hope now that, after the crisis, the public will be as critical of such assumptions as Roy Morgan has been of the ABS’s dicky definition of unemployment.

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The RBA’s decision not to reduce rates this month caught most pundits by surprise—including me. Given the international and local data, I thought they’d err on the side of caution and cut rates.

As I always note when asked to call what the RBA will do next, this is a call on how another body will respond to what they perceive as the economic data and the direction their model of the economy predicts the actual economy will move in. That’s closer to picking which cockroach is going to walk out of a circle first in a Changi prison gambling den than it is to economic forecasting per se (which is dubious enough activity in itself). So making a wrong guess about what the RBA will do is not the same as making a wrong economic forecast; you’re just making a different forecast of the future than is the RBA.

The RBA’s explanation for its decision shows that it is making a rosy call of both the current data and the direction in which the Australian economy is headed.

Information on the Australian economy continues to suggest growth close to trend… the unemployment rate increased slightly in mid year, though it has been steady over recent months… In underlying terms, inflation is around 2½ per cent… the Bank expects inflation to be in the 2–3 per cent range.

Credit growth remains modest, though there has been a slight increase in demand for credit by businesses. Housing prices showed some sign of stabilising at the end of 2011, after having declined for most of the year. The exchange rate has risen further, even though the terms of trade have started to decline … With growth expected to be close to trend and inflation close to target, the Board judged that the setting of monetary policy was appropriate for the moment.

As the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised, the RBA message was that the future looks good:

MOVE right along folks. Nothing to see here. By keeping interest rates on hold this week, the Reserve Bank is sending a subconscious message to borrowers: the economy is doing reasonably well. There is no need to panic…

Although we in NSW seem bogged Eeyore-like in our sad and dank little corner of the forest, glumly chewing our thistles day after day, perhaps we really ought to cheer up. Gloom is not just miserable in itself. When it comes to the economy, it’s dangerous.

This is not the take that the majority of economic pundits have on the data—and for once, I’m with the majority. Normally the majority is bullish (because they have a Neoclassical perspective on the economy that largely ignores credit, and thinks the economy always returns to equilibrium) and I’m bearish (because I have a “Post Keynesian” perspective that sees credit as the key motive economic force, and believes the economy is always in disequilibrium).

The majority of economic pundits lined up with me for a change because there was a range of data that implied the economy was stalling. Firstly, unemployment has been trending up, and the “steady over recent months” phenomenon that the RBA referred to above was entirely due to a fall in the participation rate. Had this remained at the November level, the ABS unemployment rate would have jumped to 5.6% last month.

Figure 1

And that’s the good news: as was widely reported, employment fell by almost 30,000 last month, so that net job growth in 2011 was zero—the worst outcome in 20 years.

Secondly, a broader measure of unemployment maintained by Roy Morgan Research hit 10.3 percent—5 percent above the ABS figure. The ABS treats someone who has worked for one hour in the previous two weeks as employed, a definition that Roy Morgan rightly rejects:

“Surely if someone is not working, is looking for work and considers themselves to be unemployed, then they should be considered unemployed regardless of whether they happen to have done a couple of hours work here and there during the month?”

The ludicrous official definition of unemployment is a classic case of bureaucracies (including the United Nations International Labor Organization in this case) eliminating a problem by redefining it rather than solving it. Many people have criticised this definition (including Peter Brain from the National Institute for Economic and Industry Research, who found that over a dozen official redefinitions of unemployment had all reduced the recorded level); since the late 1990s, Roy Morgan has gone one better and conducted a monthly survey using a definition of unemployment that actually makes sense:

” According to the ABS definition, a person who has worked for one hour or more for payment or someone who has worked without pay in a family business, is considered employed regardless of whether they consider themselves employed or not.

The ABS definition also details that if a respondent is not actively looking for work (ie: applying for work, answering job advertisements, being registered with Centre-link or tendering for work), they are not considered to be unemployed.

The Roy Morgan survey, in contrast, defines any respondent who is not employed full or part-time and who is looking for paid employment as being unemployed. ” (Roy Morgan, September 2011)

Roy Morgan’s definition therefore necessarily records a higher level of unemployment than the ABS—and they are also a more legitimate measure of real unemployment. However their results are also more volatile, since their sample is smaller than the ABS’s, and the results are not seasonally adjusted.

Figure 2

Overall however, Roy Morgan’s figures are a more accurate indicator of the level of unemployment than the ABS’s, and also as a harbinger of where the ABS data may move in the future. The current gap between the two measures is the highest it has ever been—over 5 percent, when the average gap has been about 2.5 percent—and this implies that the next move in the ABS figures could be substantially upwards. Gary Morgan warned that the economy is a lot weaker than the RBA seems to think:

“Today’s Roy Morgan unemployment estimates strongly support anecdotal evidence of continuing job losses throughout Australia. Just in the past week we have been told that Westpac has announced 550 jobs to go; ANZ is axing 130 jobs; Holden will cut 200 jobs at its Adelaide plant; Toyota will cut 350 jobs in Melbourne; Reckitt Benckiser (maker of Mortein & Dettol) is to retrench 200 jobs at its Sydney operations; defence firm Thales shedding 50 jobs in Bendigo — these are just the most prominent examples of job losses occurring in the Australian economy!

“Economists and politicians are wrong to talk about a ‘tight’ labour market in Australia driving wage pressures. Wage demands (inflation) at the moment are being driven by unions — a small minority of the Australian workforce — not by a tight labour market with workers changing jobs to secure better wages and conditions. Today’s Roy Morgan employment estimates show why inflation in Australia is contained, and will remain contained — at its meeting next Tuesday the RBA must drop interest rates by at least 0.5% and probably more.”

Figure 3

If Gary Morgan is right, the RBA’s rosy forecast for the future will be shown to be in error. The primary source of that error will be not merely misplaced optimism, but reliance upon neoclassical economic models about the economy that ignore the role of credit just at the moment that decelerating credit is finally setting in in earnest in Australia, after being delayed by the First Home Vendors Boost.

Figure 4

The First Home Vendors Boost was the sole cause of the reversal of deleveraging in Australia after the crisis began, with the growth in mortgages more than offsetting the reduction in debt by the business sector.

Figure 5

With that artificial stimulus to credit growth over, credit growth is now decelerating in Australia, and causing unemployment to rise despite the offsetting impact of the resources boom.

Figure 6

Mortgage debt is now decelerating strongly, and taking house prices down with it.

Figure 7

From its comment that “Housing prices showed some sign of stabilising at the end of 2011″, the RBA appears to be buying the RPData spin that a one month upwards blip in their data series after 11 months of decline signals a bottom to the housing market. However a simple comparison of house prices here to those in Japan and the USA after their bubble economies burst makes it hard to argue that “Australia is different”.

Figure 8

Of course, at this stage it is too early to tell whether we’ll follow the long slow decline of Japanese prices, or the sudden fall that marked the USA. But by the end of 2012, Australia’s house price decline profile should be apparent.

Figure 9