IMF World Economic Outlook available

For those who may not know, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 186 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.

The World Economic Outlook presents analysis and projections concerning economic developments at the global level, in major country groups (classified by region, stage of development, etc.), and in many individual countries. It focuses on major economic policy issues as well as on the analysis of economic developments and prospects. It is usually prepared twice a year, as documentation for meetings of the International Monetary and Financial Committee, and forms the main instrument of the IMF's global surveillance activities.

Click here for the executive summary and here for the full document.

Light at the end of a long tunnel

If you noticed, I started a new poll that will last during the spring season. It appears on the right side of this page and asks about monthly sales compared to this time last year. Feel free to participate each month so that we can gauge how we are progressing through the season. Vote once, but not often!

Also, the latest from Bill Conerly...see below.

White Christmas

Merry Christmas to all and best wishes for a prosperous 2009! Enjoy this rendition of one of our classic Christmas ballads!

Graphically speaking...

The latest from Bill Conerly (click on each graph below to enlarge):

A good overview of economic policy

As usual, Mankiw hits the nail on the head (in his latest NYT column):

IF you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the economy, there is little doubt that the economist would be John Maynard Keynes. Although Keynes died more than a half-century ago, his diagnosis of recessions and depressions remains the foundation of modern macroeconomics. His insights go a long way toward explaining the challenges we now confront.

According to Keynes, the root cause of economic downturns is insufficient aggregate demand. When the total demand for goods and services declines, businesses throughout the economy see their sales fall off. Lower sales induce firms to cut back production and to lay off workers. Rising unemployment and declining profits further depress demand, leading to a feedback loop with a very unhappy ending.

The situation reverses, Keynesian theory says, only when some event or policy increases aggregate demand. The problem right now is that it is hard to see where that demand might come from.

The economy’s output of goods and services is traditionally divided into four components: consumption, investment, net exports and government purchases. Any expansion in demand has to come from one of these four. But in each case, strong forces are working to keep spending down.

CONSUMPTION The Conference Board reports that consumer confidence is near its record low. It is easy to understand why consumers are so scared. House values have declined, 401(k) balances have shrunk and unemployment is up. For many people, the sense of economic uncertainty is greater than they’ve ever experienced. When it comes to discretionary purchases, like a new home, a car, or a washing machine, wait-and-see is the most rational course.

A bit more saving is not entirely unwelcome. Many economists have long lamented the United States saving rate, which is low by international and historical standards.For the overall economy, however, a recession is not the best time for households to start saving. Keynesian theory suggests a “paradox of thrift.” If all households try to save more, a short-run result could be lower aggregate demand and thus lower national income. Reduced incomes, in turn, could prevent households from reaching their new saving goals.

INVESTMENT In normal times, a fall in consumption could be met by an increase in investment, which includes spending by businesses on plant and equipment and by households on new homes. But several factors are keeping investment spending at bay.

The most obvious is the state of the housing market. Over the past three years, residential investment has fallen 42 percent. With house prices continuing to decline, increased building of new homes is not likely to be a source of robust demand over the next few years.

Business investment has lately been stronger than residential investment, but it is unlikely to pick up the slack in the near future. With the stock market down, interest rates on corporate bonds up and the banking system teetering on the edge, financing new business projects will not be easy.

NET EXPORTS Not long ago, it looked as if the rest of the world would save the United States economy from a deep downturn. From March 2004 to March 2008, the dollar fell 19 percent against an average of other major currencies. By increasing the price of foreign goods in the United States and reducing the price of American goods abroad, this depreciation discouraged imports and bolstered exports. Over the last three years, real net exports have increased by about $250 billion.

In the coming months, however, the situation may well go into reverse. As the United States financial crisis has spread to the rest of the world, fast-moving international capital has been looking for a safe haven. Ironically, that haven is the United States. Since March, the dollar has appreciated 19 percent, a move that will put a crimp in the export boom.

GOVERNMENT PURCHASES That leaves the government as the demander of last resort. Calls for increased infrastructure spending fit well with Keynesian theory. In principle, every dollar spent by the government could cause national income to increase by more than a dollar if it leads to a more vibrant economy and stimulates spending by consumers and companies. By all reports, that is precisely the plan that the incoming Obama administration has in mind.

The fly in the ointment — or perhaps it is more an elephant — is the long-term fiscal picture. Increased government spending may be a good short-run fix, but it would add to the budget deficit. The baby boomers are now starting to retire and claim Social Security and Medicare benefits. Any increase in the national debt will make fulfilling those unfunded promises harder in coming years.

Keynesian economists often dismiss these long-run concerns when the economy has short-run problems. “In the long run we are all dead,” Keynes famously quipped.

The longer-term problem we now face, however, may be more serious than any that Keynes ever envisioned. Passing a larger national debt to the next generation may look attractive to those without children. (Keynes himself was childless.) But the rest of us cannot feel much comfort knowing that, in the long run, when we are dead, our children and grandchildren will be dealing with our fiscal legacy.

So what is to be done? Many economists still hope the Federal Reserve will save the day. In normal times, the Fed can bolster aggregate demand by reducing interest rates. Lower interest rates encourage households and companies to borrow and spend. They also bolster equity values and, by encouraging international capital to look elsewhere, reduce the value of the dollar in foreign-exchange markets. Spending on consumption, investment and net exports all increase.

But these are not normal times. The Fed has already cut the federal funds rate to 1 percent, close to its lower bound of zero. Some fear that our central bank is almost out of ammunition.

Fortunately, the Fed has a few secret weapons. It can set a target for longer-term interest rates. It can commit itself to keeping interest rates low for a sustained period. Most important, it can try to manage expectations and assure markets that it will do whatever it takes to avoid prolonged deflation. The Fed’s decision last week to start buying mortgage debt shows its willingness to act creatively.

It is hard to say how successful monetary and fiscal policy will be in avoiding a deep downturn. But as events unfold, you can be sure that policymakers in the Fed and Treasury will be looking at them through a Keynesian lens.

In 1936, Keynes wrote, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.” In 2008, no defunct economist is more prominent than Keynes himself.

N. Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard.

Frankel on the recession

Professor Jeffrey Frankel of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government is also on the Recession Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Last night, he was on Bloomberg discussing the recession. He has a terrific piece in the cafe on the same subject, titled, NOW Are We In Recession?

Go check em out.

In the tunnel

The latest from Bill Conerly (click on each graph below to enlarge):

The economics underlying politics?

One of the things this election will be notable for is how the Press is using digital media and interactive pages to dissect the issues and polls. Barry Rithholtz has gathered a slew of them and posted them in the Digital Media Tab.

Here’s a terrific example: Forget the polls for a moment, and consider instead what might be driving them. The WSJ’s Real Time Economics does just that, looking at a state-by-state polls compared to key economic indicators. These are changes in home prices, employment, and income (click here to go to the original interactive version).>

Source: Phil Izzo, WSJ, November 1, 2008, 1:47 pm

The psychology recession

From the SAF Floral Trend Tracker newsletter:

It ís too early to show up on the official gauges, but we're surely in a recession now. The economy was actually holding up through most of the summer, but the news since August has been dreary, and one-sided.

The credit turmoil, the bank failures and restructuring, and the stock market volatility has been bad enough, and the bipartisan drumbeat of "This bailout bill has to be passed now!" has to concern the most financially secure, while increasing the anxiety of the rest of us. The desperation of the nation's political leaders warning us about being on the edge of financial collapse has exacerbated the problem.

Strong Engines. The economic engine of growth remains strong — productivity growth has been vibrant, and exports have been soaring. That allows businesses to absorb higher prices on their inputs without raising the price on their output and helps maintain profit levels. If productivity growth were limping along, or declining, then firms would find business expansion much more difficult.

Moreover, a broad measure of economic activity known as real (or inflation-adjusted) final sales jumped a very healthy 4.4% during the second quarter, up from just 0.9% during the first quarter. The fact that it was so much higher than real GDP's 2.8% increase means that households and businesses bought a lot out of business inventories during the quarter (GDP equals final sales plus the change in business inventories). A big drop in inventories, as we just experienced, foretells increased production activity as businesses respond to strong demand and rebuild inventory to desired levels.

Sticky Wheels. But now credit, the oil lubricating the engine, has turned to sludge. That's meant that lots of companies, large and small, are facing problems financing their regular operations, much less their business expansions. This troubling development will cause and prolong our downturn. Without the credit market problems, the housing market workout and the oil price shock were being handled without driving the economy into a recession. The recently passed financial bailout doesn't solve the problem, but it will help as it removes many of the toxic mortgage securities off corporate balance sheets.

We are getting a break in oil prices, and the price of gas has dropped by 20% or so since the summer. Sure, that's after a big run-up, and itís tough to know if the price decline will prove to be a brief respite or a long-lasting correction. But the lower prices are giving household and corporate budgets more breathing room.

The economy will recover when confidence replaces fear in the credit markets, as it will (it always has). We'll still be reassessing value in many housing markets, and the recovery may be subdued as consumers avoid over-leveraging themselves with the purchase of big-ticket items. But then sticking to a low-debt diet will be a good thing, as we've learned.

Author Robert Barr is an economist in Northern Virginia

Regional economic contractions vs growth

Nice depiction of where the pain is being felt most:
click for ginormous version

This is obviously having a political effect:
click for ginormous version

Sources:

For Most Cities, Recession Has Arrived
BILL MARSH
NYT, October 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/weekinreview/05marsh.html

Economic Unrest Shifts Electoral Battlegrounds
ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY
NYT, October 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/us/politics/05map.html

What got us here in the first place?

After having time to think more about the current financial industry crisis, I think the reason it is confusing is that it is the result of two parallel but largely independent causes that worked together to create this mess. Conservatives will see government intervention as the problem; liberals will see greed and deregulation.

What makes this situation particularly confusing is that of the two causes I believe led to the crisis, each has been embraced by one of the two parties as the only cause. It's a case where everyone is half right, but the other half is important too. It's a two part recipe, with neither active ingredient causing much of an explosion until mixed with the other.

Cause 1: Creating the Asset Bubble

The first thing that had to happen for the crisis was the creation of an asset bubble. There had to have been some type of over-valued asset whose prices crash to earth to spark the crisis. So we begin with housing.

Home prices have gone through boom-bust cycles for years, just as have many commodities. There is a whole body of literature on such cycles, so we will leave that aside and accept their existence as a feature of markets and human behavior.

But this housing bubble had a strong accelerant, in the form of the Federal government. For years, this nation has made increasing home ownership a national goal and many laws and tax policies have been aimed at this goal. The mortgage interest deduction on personal income taxes is just one example.

Starting in 1992, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were strange quasi-public / quasi-private entities, came under pressure from the Congress (e.g. Barney Frank) and the Clinton administration to add increasing home ownership to poorer people part of their missions.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has.

The results were astonishing:

Beginning in 1992, Congress pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase their purchases of mortgages going to low and moderate income borrowers. For 1996, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave Fannie and Freddie an explicit target — 42% of their mortgage financing had to go to borrowers with income below the median in their area. The target increased to 50% in 2000 and 52% in 2005.

For 1996, HUD required that 12% of all mortgage purchases by Fannie and Freddie be "special affordable" loans, typically to borrowers with income less than 60% of their area’s median income. That number was increased to 20% in 2000 and 22% in 2005. The 2008 goal was to be 28%. Between 2000 and 2005, Fannie and Freddie met those goals every year, funding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of loans, many of them subprime and adjustable-rate loans, and made to borrowers who bought houses with less than 10% down.

Fannie and Freddie also purchased hundreds of billions of subprime securities for their own portfolios to make money and to help satisfy HUD affordable housing goals. Fannie and Freddie were important contributors to the demand for subprime securities.

Simultaneously, the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act was pushing private banks to make more loans to less qualified borrowers:

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) did the same thing with traditional banks. It encouraged banks to serve two masters — their bottom line and the so-called common good. First passed in 1977, the CRA was "strengthened" in 1995, causing an increase of 80% in the number of bank loans going to low- and moderate-income families.

These actions had a double whammy on the current crisis. First, by pushing up housing demand, they inflated the housing pricing bubble. Second, it meant that these inflated-price homes were being bought with lower and lower down payments. In effect, individuals were taking on much more leverage (leverage is a term that I will use to mean the percentage of debt used to finance a set of assets -- more leverage means more debt and less equity. The term comes from the physics of a mechanical lever, in that more debt, like a lever, can magnify force. Profits from assets are multiplied by leverage, but, alas, so are losses.)

When the economy softened and the housing bubble started to burst, these new mortgage customers [that the government went out of its way to bring into the system] did not have any resources to handle the changes -- they did not have the down payment to cushion them (or the banks) against falls in asset value and did not have the cash flow to cushion them against falling income in the recession and/or rising interest rates.

The result: Huge portfolios of failing loans with rapidly falling collateral values.

Cause 2: Over-leverage of Risky Assets and Related De-regulation of Capital Requirements

Needless to say, the word "greed" was used a LOT during the Vice-Presidential debate. But what does it mean in this context? After all, we are all greedy in one way or another, if one equates greed with looking after one's self-interest.

So I will translate "greed" for you: When you hear "greed on Wall Street", think leverage. Remember, we said above that as long as the underlying asset values are going up, leverage (ie more debt) multiplies profitability. [Quick example: Assume a stock that goes from $100 to $110 in a year. Assume you pay 5% interest on money. No leverage, you make $10 on a $100 investment. With 95% leverage -- ie buying $2000 worth of the stock with $100 equity and $1900 debt -- you would make $105 on the same $100 equity investment. Leverage multiplied your returns by more than a factor of 10]

Remember that around the year 2000 we had the Internet bubble burst in a big way. A lot of companies not only dropped, but went to $0 in value. This was painful, but we did not have a cascading problem. Why? In part because most of the folks who invested in Internet companies did not do so in a highly leveraged way. The loss was the loss, time to move on. Similarly, in this case, if these mortgage packages had been held merely as a piece of a un-leveraged portfolio, like a pension fund or an annuity, the loss would not have been fun to write off, but it would not have cascaded as it has. The government would have had to bail out Fannie and Freddie, a few banks would have failed, but the disaster would have been limited.

One reason this problem has cascaded (forgetting for the moment Henry Paulson's chicken-little proclamations of doom to the world) is that many of these mortgage packages or securities got stuck in to highly leveraged portfolios. The insurance contracts that brought down AIG were structured differently but in the end were also highly leveraged bets on the values of mortgage securities in that small changes in values could result in huge losses or gains for the contracts.

If this all sounds a bit like cause #1 above, e.g. buying inflated assets with more and more debt, then you are right. There is an interesting parallel that no one wants to delve into between the incentives of home buyers trying to jump into hot housing markets with interest-only loans and Wall Street bankers putting risky securities into highly leveraged portfolios. Leverage is really the key theme here. In a sense, houses were double-leveraged, bought the first time around with smaller and smaller down payments, and then leveraged again as these mortgages were tossed into highly-leveraged portfolios. Sometimes they were leveraged even further via oddball derivatives and insurance contracts whose exact operation are still opaque to many.

Personally, I would have let the market forces play out without any government intervention. You probably gathered that from the tone of previous posts. Wall Street has been living high on the extra profits from this leverage during "the good times." They knew perfectly well that leverage is a two-edged sword, and that it would magnify their losses in a bad time. But their hubris pushed them into doing crazy things for more profit, and I am all for a Greek-tragedy-like downfall for their hubris [as long as Main Street is not taken down in the process]. The sub-prime, first-time home buyer can claim ignorance or unsophistication, but not these guys.

During the Bush Administration, these bankers came to the SEC trumpeting their own brilliance, and begged to be allowed to leverage themselves even more via a relaxation of capital requirement rules. And, in 2004, without too much discussion or scrutiny, the SEC gave them what they wanted:

Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.

On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks.

They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.

In part they traded capital requirements for computer models, a very dubious decision in the first place, made worse by the fact that most of the banks were gaming the models to reduce the apparent risk. The crazy thing is that, in gaming the models, they really weren't trying to fool regulators, who pretty much were not watching anyway, but they were fooling themselves! Certainly I would not expect government regulators to do a better job of risk assessment in this environment, which argues for a return to the old bright-line capital requirements that are fairly simple to monitor. Investment banks played a game of Russian Roulette, and eventually lost. Which begs the question of whether the government's job is to protect consumers at large or to protect financial institutions from themselves.

“We foolishly believed that the firms had a strong culture of self-preservation and responsibility and would have the discipline not to be excessively borrowing,” said Professor James D. Cox, an expert on securities law and accounting at Duke School of Law.

The Ratings Agencies Didn't Do Their Job Either

Clearly, ratings agencies have really failed in their mission during this fiasco. Right up to the last minute, they were giving top ratings to highly risky securities. But I think folks who want to lay primary blame on the rating agencies go too far. Ratings agencies are for individuals and state pension funds and the like -- I have a hard time imagining companies such as Goldman or Lehman depending on them (ratings agencies) for risk assessment. Its a nice excuse, and we may well have very different companies rating securities five years form now, but its just a small contributor.

So What is The Fix?

So you see what is going on. Republicans are running around saying "the government caused it with the CRA" and Democrats are saying "it was greed and deregulation." Incredibly, both parties seem to come to the conclusion that sickly mortgage securities need to be pulled out of the hands of the folks who created and bought them and put in ... OUR hands.

As I said before, I personally would have let the whole thing sort itself out, and lived with the consequences. My hypothesis is that much of the current credit squeeze in the money markets is due to Henry Paulson's clumsy public statements and the Fed's busting open the door to overnight borrowing. Everyone is frozen not by the crisis, but by the prospect of some sort of incalculable government action. Short term borrowers and lenders are doing their business with the Fed, while the government crowds out the private short-term markets and causes the very problem it is trying to prevent.

Without the government bending over backwards to take in short-term money from lenders, private firms would be forced to find private options. Lenders have to lend to stay alive financially, just as much as borrowers have to borrow. Money may go into the mattresses for a week or two or three, but it can't stay there forever.

What was once a three-page plan from Henry Paulson became 110 pages long when considered by the House and it is now a 451-page monster. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 now also includes the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008 and a smorgasbord of other add-ons. MUCH has been written about why we need such a monumental intervention, but I find it VERY interesting that, amid discussions of eliminating pork and earmarks, this bill is laden with them.

For example, someone explain to me how "fixing" our ailing financial system includes the following:

Sec. 101. Renewable energy credit.
Sec. 102. Production credit for electricity produced from marine renewables.
Sec. 103. Energy credit.
Sec. 104. Energy credit for small wind property.
Sec. 105. Energy credit for geothermal heat pump systems.
Sec. 106. Credit for residential energy efficient property.
Sec. 107. New clean renewable energy bonds.
Sec. 108. Credit for steel industry fuel.
Sec. 109. Special rule to implement FERC and State electric restructuring policy.
Sec. 111. Expansion and modification of advanced coal project investment credit.
Sec. 112. Expansion and modification of coal gasification investment credit.
Sec. 113. Temporary increase in coal excise tax; funding of Black Lung Disability
Trust Fund.
Sec. 114. Special rules for refund of the coal excise tax to certain coal producers
and exporters.
Sec. 115. Tax credit for carbon dioxide sequestration.
Sec. 116. Certain income and gains relating to industrial source carbon dioxide treated as qualifying income for publicly traded partnerships.
Sec. 117. Carbon audit of the tax code.
Sec. 111. Expansion and modification of advanced coal project investment credit.
Sec. 113. Temporary increase in coal excise tax; funding of Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.
Sec. 115. Tax credit for carbon dioxide sequestration.
Sec. 205. Credit for new qualified plug-in electric drive motor vehicles.
Sec. 405. Increase and extension of Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund tax.Sec. 306. Accelerated recovery period for depreciation of smart meters and smart grid systems.
Sec. 309. Extension of economic development credit for American Samoa.
Sec. 317. Seven-year cost recovery period for motorsports racing track facility.
Sec. 501. $8,500 income threshold used to calculate refundable portion of child tax credit.

And, of course, the big one:

Sec. 503 Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.

All of these, however, are part of the bailout bill approved by the Senate. Sources here and here. Anyone else frustrated???

Read my lips...

Here at the conclusions of a study released yesterday by the Tax Policy Center:

The tax proposals of both presidential candidates would alter effective marginal tax rates in complicated ways. Senator McCain’s plan would—among other things—reduce statutory rates, increase the dependent exemption, and raise the AMT exemption level. In addition to also changing statutory rates and raising the AMT exemption, Senator Obama would modify existing deductions and tax credits and introduce several new ones. The numerous phase-ins and phaseouts that these credits entail would affect marginal rates, lowering them for some taxpayers and raising them for others.

Overall, the Obama plan would lower effective marginal tax rates for the majority of households. In 2009, only about 1 in 7 households would see an increase in their marginal rate. Only at the top of the income distribution—households making at least $500,000 a year—would a majority of taxpayers face higher rates. Obama’s plan would leave the average marginal rate on wages and salaries for the economy as a whole unchanged at 24 percent in 2009. In that same year, close to 80 percent of the population would see no change in their marginal rates under Senator McCain’s plan and most other tax units would face lower rates; only about 1 percent of households would experience a marginal rate increase under the fully phased in McCain plan. Overall, Senator McCain’s plan would reduce the average marginal tax rate on wages and salaries by about 1 percentage point, to 23 percent in 2009.

Senator Obama’s proposal would result in an average marginal tax rate of 25 percent on wages and salaries in 2012, lower than under current law but higher than if the tax cuts are extended. Because Obama would leave the top two statutory rates at 36 and 39.6 percent and reinstate PEP and Pease, taxpayers with more than $1 million in income would face an average marginal rate of 40 percent, 6 percentage points higher than under the McCain plan. Overall, because it would extend all of the individual income tax components of the 2001–06 cuts and increase the dependent exemption, the McCain plan would lower the average EMTR for all households slightly relative to a tax cuts extended baseline and significantly compared with current law.

For the full report, click here.

Location, Location, Location

This past week I spent time at the Researchers Conference at the SNA (Southern Nursery Association) Trade Show in Atlanta. I talked with a number of growers and retailers and found the conversations similar to those at previously attended conferences -- some folks have really struggled this year, some have held even, and others have done "quite well" having both increased their prices and experienced increased sales.

It certainly causes one to reflect on the reasons why this diversity in business experiences have occurred this year. There are several factors, as we have discussed previously within these blog pages. Some are pertinent to the individual firms themselves (e.g. a well-grounded differentiation strategy for instance) and other factors are purely external to the firms strategy (e.g. the effects of a down economy).

I pondered another possible external factor that we have often referred to a "location, location, location" as I read this week's BusinessWeek. It has an interesting slide show and article about the "Real Estate Boom and Bust in the Same Metro Areas" (article here) which looks at the best and worst-performing zip codes in the 20 largest metro areas. EconomicPicData blog summarizes the BusinessWeek data in the chart below.

For example, in Dallas' Preston Hollow area (75220 zip code) there has been a +33% increase in asking price over the last year, with a median list price of $310,564 and average marketing time of 125 days. In the Fort Worth area (76110 zip code) of the Dallas metro area, asking price has decreased by -19%, with a median list price of $104,538 and average 118 days on the market.

The bottom line -- There is no "national real estate market," it's thousands and thousands of local real estate markets. As these data show, there's not even a single "local real estate market" by metro area, it all comes down to zip code areas. Since there are about 43,000 zip codes in the U.S., that 's probably an approximation of the minimum number of local real estate markets, and many local markets probably vary within a zip code. So where you live and operate your business certainly affects business performance.

Well put, Bob.

Robert Barr, an economist in the Washington, D.C. area, and frequent contributor to the SAF Floral Trend Tracker offered the following comment in the latest issue:

These are confusing times for consumers and businesses. Gas prices are way up, home prices in many places are dropping, and employment has shrunk in each of the first five months of the year. If we're not in a full-blown recession now, we're just skirting past one.

So this has been a time of fear and concern. Our economic health is vulnerable, and we know it. But while we batten down the hatches, keep in mind how resilient our economy has been. Economic conditions aren't as bleak as you probably imagine them to be, or as the popular media usually suggests. Growth was at a low 0.8% annual rate in the six months ending in March, surprising many experts who expected to see an outright contraction. Despite all of the problems and concerns, the economy continues to expand, albeit it mildly.

Naturally, consumers are holding back, as purchases of big-ticket items are being deferred, particularly in real estate and autos. On the other hand, business owners are more encouraged, as durable goods orders outside the auto sector are doing quite well. And, and in a big switch from recent years, net exports are contributing to, not detracting from, economic growth (actually accounting for most of it lately).

Feds to the rescue? One important development in early June suggests that the Federal Reserve will be acting soon to counteract one major economic threat: the weak dollar, as Chairman Bernanke cited the weak dollar as a major culprit in pushing up consumer prices. That's reassuring, as the Fed needs to reassert itself as an inflation fighter. As discussed in this column in the last issue of the Floral Trend Tracker, a few months ago the Fed was cutting interest rates to help cushion the economy from the fallout from the credit crisis. But those low rates were causing the foreign-exchange value of the dollar to slide. Now, the Fed has signaled no more rate cuts for a while, as it waits both for its previous rate cuts to have their peak impact and for the tax rebates to course their way through the economy.

No short-term solution. A shift to inflation-fighting policies probably won't have much impact in the short run for consumers and small-business owners, whose day-to-day buying and selling decisions will ultimately determine whether the rest of 2008 is able to improve on the low growth of its opening months.

Part of the answer will lie with oil prices and our adjustment to gasoline at $4 a gallon (as we write this. We hope that price doesn't sound like a deal as you read this). On the other hand, a recommitment from the Federal Reserve to maintaining price stability could quickly boost financial markets. They would need to realize that the Fed is more satisfied with a smoothly functioning credit market and that its concentration is back on suppressing inflation.

On net, we expect to see sluggish growth in the rest of 2008 and well into 2009. Most of the current problems holding down the economy - residential real estate, high (and rising) energy costs, and the credit crunch - will take time to reverse. Meanwhile, the recessionary feeling of today will probably linger in many big-ticket consumer industries.

I particularly appreciate Bob's comment regarding the resiliency of the economy and despite how things look, we have managed some growth overall. As I have said before, the impacts of this economic contraction are not universal and are quite worse in some areas of the country than others. The next several months leading into the fall will be interesting to track as far as economic indicators are concerned.

Stay tuned for more commentary about fall marketing strategies in light of these economic trends.

.

Increase marketing now!

It really has been an interesting week of economic news:

• Real GDP growth has been better than expected (good).
• Real personal disposable income grew at highest rate in months in April (good).
• Consumer confidence dropped for a fourth-straight month to 59.8, the lowest since 1980 (bad).
• Unemployment’s only running at 5% while interest rates are quite low (good).
• One-year inflation expectations grew to 5.2% (bad).
• Falling housing prices continue to be a significant source of down-side risk to the economy (bad).
• The EIA is forecasting gas prices below $3.50 by the end of this year, and below $3.00 by the end of next year (good).

Bottom line for green industry firms: As I have said many times, stay the course. Also consider increasing your marketing expenses. Yes, you read that correctly. Increase your spending on marketing right now! As others are making cutbacks (and marketing is usually the first thing to go during hard times), increase your marketing efforts to gain increased "mindshare." While you should be spending 3-5% of gross sales on marketing normally, consider increasing this to 5-8%.

Speak when others are quiet and even a whisper can be heard. Imagine if you shout.

Real Disposable Income

Buried inside yesterday's BEA report on April Personal Income (tables available here, see Table 10) is the statistic that "Real Disposable Personal Income" grew at an annual rate of 1.82% in April 2008 compared to April 2007, the highest rate of growth since December 2007 (see chart above). This will probably not get a lot of attention from the media, but provides some additional evidence that the U.S. economy is not on the verge of recession, and might in fact actually be "moderately" healthy.

Recent GDP Growth

Revised real GDP estimates were released yesterday. Data are on an annual percent change basis from a year ago and the shaded area represents the 2001 recession. Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words...click on the graph to enlarge.

Mergers and Aquisitions slowing

Sluggishness in the U.S. economy is affecting mergers and acquisition activity in various industrial products sectors, namely industrial manufacturing, metals and chemicals, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers reports on first-quarter M&A. Although M&A deal activity remains steady, the value and volume of the transactions is not expected to surpass 2007 levels. I think the same can be said of M&A activity in the Green Industry. Modern Distribution Management (5/14)

Latest labor data doesn't support recession scenario

From today's BLS employment report, here's what probably won't get reported. According to the more comprehensive Household Survey Data (which unlike the establishment data, includes the self-employed, unpaid family workers, agricultural workers, and private household workers), there were 146.331 million Americans employed in April (see chart below), which is 618,000 higher than April of last year (145.733 million jobs) and 362,000 higher than March of 2008 (145.969 million). Note also what happened to employment levels for both measures during the 2001 recession. Much different than 2008. Hmmmm.

Also, in case you're wondering. Neither the establishment nor household survey is designed to identify the legal status of workers. Thus, while it is likely that both surveys include at least some undocumented immigrants, it is not possible to determine how many are counted in either survey.

Yet another 1/4 point

The Federal Reserve lowered the benchmark U.S. interest rate by a quarter point to 2 percent and indicated it's ready to pause after seven cuts since September. It said that "economic activity remains weak," but added that its measures "should help to promote moderate growth over time."

The action came just hours after the Commerce Department reported that gross domestic product GREW in the first quarter. The increase was a meager 0.6%, the same as in the fourth quarter of 2007, but it was still above zero. It may be semantics, but just the same, don't count on any official recession announcement any time soon!

We economists sifted the Fed's statement for hints of whether the Fed was done cutting but there were no obvious clues, indicating that the Fed doesn't want to paint itself into a corner on future actions.

Also noticeably absent was any mention of recession. It said, "Household and business spending has been subdued and labor markets have softened further. Financial markets remain under considerable stress, and tight credit conditions and the deepening housing contraction are likely to weigh on economic growth over the next few quarters." On inflation, the Fed said it "expects inflation to moderate in coming quarters."