My first thought is that over the last 15 or so years we've seen historically low inflation. So, to reverse the scenario, you'd probably need higher inflation (driven by non-labor costs of production (energy costs? tariffs?)), along with a labor market in which COLAs + real increases in wages were the norm (which would probably require unions).
You'd see big numeric gains in the stock market, but smaller real gains.
A lot more progressive taxation, like during the world wars?
OK so to answer this I downloaded US annual GDP growth figures since 1929 and the annual growth in the S&P 500 over the same period.
First finding is that the correlation is pretty weak at .26. The scatterplot is just all over the place.
For most of the last 60 years, economic growth - market growth has been positive (so for example the economy grows 5% over the year and the S&P only goes up 2%).
The years when this was most positive were 1940 and 1941 - coming off the Great Depression when it was strongly negative, and going into crash rearmament programmes.
The decade when it was overall most positive was the 1970s.
Since the mid-eighties it has been remarkable stable around the 5% mark but that's really just because the S&P is so stable. It hasn't ended the year more than 1% away from its starting mark since 1983.
Ah yes, inflation would also help. Everyone hates inflation but
A) It hurts people more who have a lot of savings/investments
B) It theoretically doesn't hurt you at all if your wages also go up, which is an essential part of inflation in theory but actually only happens if people can negotiate with their employers, meaning people need to be in unions
I'm not sure how the stock market can tank without "wrecking ordinary people's retirement savings". AFAIK just about everyone, even people with state pensions, has their retirement savings ultimately tied to the stock market.
What I can't find is a good source of wage growth information going back that far. I got one going back to the late 70s for median weekly earnings and did the same - looked at the size of wage growth-market growth.
This figure spends most of its time since 1980 below zero - market grows faster than wages. The exceptions are, in order of spike size, 2008-10 (because the market crashed and wages didn't), 1982, 1990, and 2000-2002. Last year it was right around zero.
All I've discovered, I think, is that the market is much less sticky than wages.
6: could we just have wage growth without the inflation, then?
It took years for the Dow Jones Industrial Average to return to its 1929 peak--it happened again in 1954. Between 1950 and 1960, median income gains for families were massive. I don't know if 1945-55 or 1950-60 fits what you're describing exactly, because the latter was a bull market, just one that far fewer people engaged in. But yeah, post-war is probably the place to look.
6: You're measuring the 1 Jan to 31 Dec change in the headline S&P 500 index? Wouldn't measuring total returns over the year make more sense? Or if you're going to use the headline number, make it something less susceptible to daily and/or seasonal variations?
Since the mid-eighties it has been remarkable stable around the 5% mark but that's really just because the S&P is so stable. It hasn't ended the year more than 1% away from its starting mark since 1983.
I'm not sure I understand how that can be the case, just from eyeballing the historical chart -- to pick an obvious example, Jan 2008-- Dec 2008.
I think retirement and the size of the cohorts at various ages will matter. Right now, the Boomers are working there way into retirement so I would expect them to be demanding large amounts of stock in anticipation of their retirement. Or maybe that has already peaked?
6: could we just have wage growth without the inflation, then?
Talking off the top of my head: if the cost of other factors increases that makes labor more valuable (by increasing the cost of substitutes for labor). If workers have bargaining power and the price of labor (wage) goes up to capture the increase in value then you have both labor and non-labor costs going up which is, by definition, inflationary.
If labor doesn't have bargaining power then you'll see companies cut labor costs (or defer raises) to balance the extra money they're spending elsewhere. Wages won't go up and the inflation numbers will be lower.
So, I think, the connection between wage growth and inflation is not merely coincidental.
11.last: because I made a typo on the spreadsheet, obviously. Whoops.
Have you tried pasting into an OCR mouse?
OK you should just ignore all of 4 because it's completely wrong.
Right, so it looks like:
Economic growth minus market growth is highly variable - it oscillates wildly year to year. No obvious conclusions at all.
Wage growth minus market growth is positive when there's a market crash, but spends most of its time negative.
Why do you hate progressive taxation?
My first thought is that over the last 15 or so years we've seen historically low inflation.
Closer to 40 years, no?
Actually, this chart makes it look like the 70s were the aberration and 2-4% is natural.
18: good lord. Probably safest to just ignore everything I say.
the 70s were the aberration
In this respect and so many others.
Right now, the Boomers are working there way into retirement so I would expect them to be demanding large amounts of stock in anticipation of their retirement. Or maybe that has already peaked?
That's interesting. What happens when a lot of people cash out their stocks?
AIHMHB, the stock market is bizarrely confusing to me. I am so hung up on the fact that it's speculative and pulled out of the ether that I can't follow ordinary discussions because I never feel like I entirely understand it from the ground up.
What happens when a lot of people cash out their stocks?
All other things being equal, that should lower the price of stocks.
On the other hand, if a lot of people decide to buy stocks the price of stocks should go up.
I should give a Ted Talk!
What happens when a lot of people cash out their stocks?
As long as they quit voting, it should be fine.
I don't even have a mistyped spreadsheet, so ignore me. But, from the thread:
1) Stock prices are highly volatile.
2) Most investors/traders seem essentially to be speculating.
3) But, some fund managers, like Warren Buffet, do get consistently above-market returns AFAIK by doing their research and actually investing for dividends rather than speculation.
4) So, while returns to labor (excluding retirement funds) may have little or no relation to stock prices, they should have some basic connection to profitability (as profits represent actual value added, and everyone's salaries have to come out of that value).
5) So, it should be possible for labor (excluding retirement) to be largely immune to stock prices, so long as a big enough share of profits go to salaries. Therefore,
6) Unions.
It seems obvious when seven or eight of you all say "Unions".
If seven or eight of us all said "Jump off the cliff!" would you do it?
My big-picture take on this is that stock market valuations are, at the level of "fundamentals", based on the expected ability to extract $$ from the corporation, whether through dividends or stock repurchases or whatever. Measures that limited this ability *without affecting wages or growth* would hurt valuations without hurting most people, if you could find any; it's true that it would hit funded pensions, but it would still be worth doing, since stocks are incredibly unequally distributed, far more so than income.
ISTR that historically, German companies had considerably lower price/earnings ratios than American ones, which largely reflected the fact that worker codetermination, and German model more generally, limited the ability of finance to extract wealth from stock ownership compared to in American. So my half-assed response to the OP would be: mandate that workers pick 50% + 1 of the board members of every corporation with over $5m in revenue, and you'd probably see a shift in the overall capital/labor share, which I imagine would get priced in as lower asset values.
Please let me know if I'm totally wrong about this, since this is the model of finance in my head when I'm teaching kids econ...
If seven or eight of us all said "Jump off the cliff!" would you do it?
If it hurts the stock market, I can't afford not to jump.
Heebie would be fine, she'd have literally six dead-cat bounces.
(My thinking on this was shaped by JW Mason's "Disgorge the cash" arguments; original blog post here, longer study here, I think Konczal's done stuff on this too. And I think there was stuff on this in Streeck's Capitalism book.)
This doesn't directly answer the question but my understandings are:
(a) the stock market is a significant but not very significant part of the overall financial economy;
(b) the overall value of the stock market isn't a very good indicator of economic growth
(c) the only long-run way in which economic measures of value to ordinary people can improve is through growth, but
(d) that has extremely little to do with the stock market;
(e) in the shorter run, the allocation of share between labor and capital can matter a lot for how "ordinary" people do in the overall economy but
(f) the capital/labor share doesn't really have much at all to do with the overall value of the stock market, it may have somewhat more to do with unions (I like unions and they are important for basic human dignity but you guys are way overrating their importance on this issue, I think, for example Germany has strong unions but has been willing to effectively depreciate itself in order to keep capital investment flowing into Germany) but the main driver is growth, will all of this complicated by
(g) in the contemporary world the *overall* financial system is huge and both autonomous from and deeply embedded in the underlying economy (with retirement savings being one of a zillion ways in which this is true -- business can't function on a daily basis without short-term lines of credit), meaning that financial crises can have terrible lasting effects in the underlying economy even when there's no obvious reason for the underlying economy to crash, one version of which happened in 2008, meaning that yes disasters that show up as disasters in the stock market are going to show up as disasters in the real world. Thus
(h) Sure, the stock market can in principle be relatively depressed (and corporate profits low) while there is overall growth/labor market tightness/whatever that is producing gains in the real economy for any number of reasons, and the overall value of a particular share index isn't particularly useful one way or another for assessing the overall state of the economy. With that said, a major stock market crash is generally an indicator of a financial crisis that will have large real-world effects, and a booming stock market often tracks growth that benefits "ordinary" people (e.g., the late 90s), even if they aren't directly connected.
I guess (h) does directly answer the question. Have at it!
You might be all subtle and sophisticated, Halford, but can you convince heebie to jump off a cliff?
Only somewhat related to the issue, but about both wages and high finance: has it been posited as an explanation for the apparent monopsonistic characteristics of the labor market the understood norm that the Fed will intervene aggressively whenever wages start to seriously go up?
I don't understand why that would show up as a "monopsony" as opposed to just a restriction on overall access to credit/avoidance of overheating. You could easily have steady non-monopsonistic wage growth combined with fed interventions. Maybe I'm missing something.
||
Can we start a "Crowley can go fuck himself" thread? I don't want to derail this one. He's apparently taking advantage of NY's weird election laws to stay on the ballot despite the fact that Ocasio-Cortez won the primary.
|>
24: AIHMHB, the stock market is bizarrely confusing to me.
You're not the only one. From what I can tell, investors look at holding stocks vs. bonds. When bond yields trend higher, especially beyond 3% for a so-called 10-year T-note (treasury bond*), investors tend to pull out of the stock market and move the money into bonds, simply because the latter are safer.
* There is apparently a difference between treasury bonds and treasury notes. I need to look into (understand) that.
At any rate, to one of the OP's questions, the "fundamentals" of the US economy are seemingly fine, but Trump's trade war is a real problem for stocks -- so that divorces the two things from one another. I imagine that if the trade war isn't resolved, it will catch up to the domestic fundamentals in 3 or 6 months. It's already affecting farmers.
Such is my very rudimentary understanding thus far, anyway.
Is that up to Crowley though? Democrats in NYC usually also run as "Working Families Party", which is more of an endorsement than an actual party but still shows up on the ballot (and can withhold its endorsement from the Democrat and give it to a more progressive person, but rarely does that as can be seen from the fact that they didn't endorse Ocasio).
Can he ask to be removed from that? LB?
Didn't Crowley alteady enthusiastically endorse her and stop running? May I just say that I trust absolutely no one hyping up this issue.
I'm not saying the Fed and wage equity are fundamentally incompatible, but isn't there evidence (old minutes) that in booms, the FOMC looks very closely at wage trends and even unionization actions in interest rate decisions, maybe even to the detriment of other data like inflation? So if there's a standard Fed practice of reacting to that, plus the expectation by employers of such practice, overall employers might rarely be that challenged, except at the tippy-top peaks, to raise wages - not technically a monopsony, but the result would look much the same. And of course, consistent with minimum wage increases resulting in much more wage increase than employment decrease.
Reporter C. Ingraham pointed out that the Crowley twitter account still said "Running for Congress", and then the twitter account deleted that part an hour later. Seems like an oversight.
43: It looks the WFP nominated him by their process the many technical tricks typically used in this case to get off the ballot are not acceptable to him? But he tweeted back at her "I've made my support for you and the fact that I'm not running." If he makes fully clear going into the election he doesn't want people to vote for him even though he's on the ballot, rather than going full Lieberman, it seems petulant but not malevolent.
There's some number of hoops he apparently has to jump through to get his name off the ballot so the charitable explanation here is that he couldn't be arsed. (I guess the really charitable explanation would be that the WFP official the NYT talked to in the article that apparently started all of this didn't know what he was talking about.)
There's nothing that Crowley can do to remove himself from the ballot. WFP would have to nominate him for another election--maybe state senate or state assembly--to get off the ballot for NY-14. And he'd have to accept it. Or he could drop dead.
The Times article was super unclear about this, since it quotes a WFP official as saying he asked Crowley to get off the ballot. He can't!
I'd bet that Ocasio-Cortez's campaign pushed this story to the Times because it's another good small-dollar fundraising push. It's not like Crowley's name on the ballot is a sincere threat.
There's nothing that Crowley can do to remove himself from the ballot. WFP would have to nominate him for another election--maybe state senate or state assembly--to get off the ballot for NY-14. And he'd have to accept it. Or he could drop dead.
I don't see anyone saying the nomination would have to be from WFP specifically. And NYT lists a more plausible option:
There are no residency requirements, however, for some offices, and election lawyers say Mr. Crowley could put his name in nomination for any number of positions.
The Times article was super unclear about this, since it quotes a WFP official as saying he asked Crowley to get off the ballot.
Right. The stories I was seeing were unclear about whether this was an obscure technicality or deliberate ratfucking. I've probably just been played by clickbaiters.
We can all get back to figuring out how to crash the stock market now.
43. Crowley claims there's no way for him to get off the ballot (NYPost). OC's camp claims he could but won't. Drama!
12 et al. The advice you always get is to switch your investments from stocks to bonds as you age. If you sell your stocks someone else buys them, and except in an already bad market, they won't necessarily sell at a loss.
6. Another reason companies like (some) inflation is that it gives them the chance to effectively cut some employees' wages. If inflation is 3% and most people get a 3% or more raise, they feel pretty good but might just be breaking even. If they get a lower-than-3% raise their wages have been cut, but tough luck for them. You can't do that without inflation!
I'd bet that Ocasio-Cortez's campaign pushed this story to the Times because it's another good small-dollar fundraising push.
This is plausible and if true probably reflects well on her as Machiavellian (a good thing in politics!) but is also depressing about the state of this eternal infighting bullshit, as we all already know. I guess it might also be freelance intra-dem shit-stirrers, of which there's certainly no shortage! So fucking depressing but so predictable and I guess inevitable.
I'm just a humble unfrozen caveman intellectual property lawyer, so let's clearly demarcate all of the following as bullshitting. However,
the FOMC looks very closely at wage trends and even unionization actions in interest rate decisions, maybe even to the detriment of other data like inflation?
I think this is true, or at least used to be. The wage-price spiral of the 70s (which also devalued the wage increases, not pure nefarious evil).
So if there's a standard Fed practice of reacting to that, plus the expectation by employers of such practice, overall employers might rarely be that challenged, except at the tippy-top peaks, to raise wages
Don't see how that follows. If there's a market for labor that favors higher wages, the employer will benefit from raising wages more than its competitors regardless of what the Fed does. The Fed can put brakes on overall expansion of the money supply, but in a competitive market why would that affect the decision to make an individual wage increase versus your competitors?
Does AOC need to be fundraising at this point? Isn't it the safest of seats following the primary win?
Don't pummel the stock market. This is the first time in my life that I have owned any.
I honestly don't know the rights and wrongs of the Crowley thing. My sense, and I could be confused here, is that WFP can't get him off their ballot unilaterally: he needs to cooperate in the process and he hasn't yet (and from the Times article there seems to be a claim that he's said he isn't going to: something saying that his camp said he was going to be 'on the ballot' in the fall.) So I think this issue is to some extent something in his hands to fix.
Is it a big deal at all? Probably not. It might just be petulance, and no big deal. Or he might be retaining the option to run against her for real in case he decides he wants to, either out of straightforward Joe-Lieberman-esque awfulness, or in case she somehow implodes between now and the election. I'd prefer if he got himself off the ballot, but I think it's probably not that important.
Here's a tweet from the WFP saying that they want him off their line, but he won't cooperate: https://twitter.com/nywfp/status/1017475534023004161?s=21
LB, that's my read, too. Based on the followup Times story, it seems clearer that he's being petulant. But the more I think about it, this kerfuffle is great for AOC. She's still fundraising and for that purpose the centrist Democratic machine is a much better opponent than the GOP.
It is for her specific fundraising, but failures of party unity are a bad dynamic nationally -- 'socialist' (at whatever level) candidates and the party machine should be joining hands and singing kumbaya together while they fight the real enemy. Crowley should be ashamed, and I'm not sure AOC is handling it right.
(But I am in love, generally. A science-nerd Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx? She is ten years too old, but other than that she's all my kids' school friends. If she has serious feet of clay, I'll be heartbroken.)
Possibly still preferable to Al Franken's unserious feet of clay.
Does AOC need to be fundraising at this point? Isn't it the safest of seats following the primary win?
Of course she does, because it allows her to be a power broker with a war chest and throw her weight around, this time with a "socialist" brand. It's almost as if politics requires an establishment and actual power struggles and money.
Does AOC need to be fundraising at this point? Isn't it the safest of seats following the primary win?
Of course she does, because it allows her to be a power broker with a war chest and throw her weight around, this time with a "socialist" brand. It's almost as if politics requires an establishment and actual power struggles and money.
Get disappointed by someone new.
Crowley should be ashamed, and I'm not sure AOC is handling it right.
My guess here is that AOC's camp pushed this story to the NYT to try to pressure Crowley to drop the WFP line, but it didn't work.
If it's right that Crowley would need to declare for state leg or a district where he doesn't live, even just symbolically, to get off the WFP line, then it seems obvious to me why he wouldn't want to do that. The press would cover that story, the left would dunk on him some more, presumably the candidates actually running in that race or holding that seat would have something to say about it, and he would be treated to a few more days of general embarrassment.
Possibly he is craven and hoping for an outside shot, but there isn't any chance and I'm sure he knows that. And maybe he should suck it up and do it anyway. If I had to choose I'd say that it's AOC's campaign that is acting without grace here, but I think it's a (slightly aggressive) miscommunication.
If it's right that Crowley would need to declare for state leg or a district where he doesn't live, even just symbolically, to get off the WFP line, then it seems obvious to me why he wouldn't want to do that. The press would cover that story, the left would dunk on him some more, presumably the candidates actually running in that race or holding that seat would have something to say about it, and he would be treated to a few more days of general embarrassment.
This seems wrong to me -- that is, it's a purely administrative thing to do, and anyone covering it as if he were really running for the other office would have to report him saying "No, I'm not really running for state legislature, I'm doing this to get off the WFP line, and will withdraw once I'm off the line." What's the story, why would the left dunk, why would the candidates in the race care?
I suppose a dishonest media outlet could gin up something by lying about the purpose, and failing to report the clear explanation, but who's motivated to lie about Crowley like that under those circumstances?
BROOKLYN, N.Y. - NOV 9
Barricaded in the restaurant of a supporter, former congressman Joe Crowley, surprise winner of the election for Broome County Tax Assessor, frantically reiterated his pre-election insistence that "if elected I will not serve" despite overwhelming pleas from the adoring Binghamtonians who were inspired by his unassuming third-party candidacy
* There is apparently a difference between treasury bonds and treasury notes. I need to look into (understand) that.
There's no fundamental difference, they're just naming conventions for government bonds of differing maturities (T-Bills are the really short-dated ones).
65: I imagine there would be headlines like "Why Crowley Is on the Ballot in the Bronx After His Defeat by AOC" or what have you. It's news in the sense that it merits explanation. And the candidates in whatever race might care for the same reasons that AOC does. At a bare minimum, Crowley still has name recognition. But you could say better than me--maybe there is an uncontested race that would serve as precisely the right kind of valve for this maneuver.
If Crowley is holding out hope for pulling off a stunner after being thoroughly thumped, and for a party that does not support him, he's delusional. If he's promising his support for the primary winner but not actually delivering any, that's familiar.
It's news in the sense that it merits explanation.
Not really? There's a complete, clear explanation and the other office could be something like judge in Orange County, which Crowley clearly doesn't intend to run for. I can't see why there'd be new coverage worth avoiding.
I don't think it's hugely important, but I don't think there's much of a legit excuse for how he's behaving.
I am the very model of a very stable genius
I like to watch the hookers pee while playing with my penius
I have a high IQ and also have the finest memory
And I intend to make my country grate again (like emery)
I am the very model of a modern US President
Tremble at my wrath if you aren't a legal resident
Simliar to Crowley running as part the Connecticut for Lieberman party, the DSA-endorsed candidate for Montgomery County, MD county executive won the primary, but apparently thats not good enough for a centrist dem who has decided to mount an independent run.
So, MoCo is going to be Paul LePage'd into having a Republican county exec. And who is the lucky Republican candidate? None other than legendary sports heckler Robin F/cker!
74: But the DSA candidate in MoCo is awful.
You might not like it but I guarantee there are a lot of MoCo voters who like that agenda just fine. Its not an unreasonable position for a Democrat for a suburban base.
That's not a niche position in SF/Berkeley either! NIMBYs, NIMBYs everywhere, though they won't cop to it.
As if the centrist Panera third-party Democrat lady would be any less NIMBY.
It's not easy to find a chart of median wage vs. S&P 500, which is the closest to what you really want. But the ratio of the total value of all stocks to the GDP is easy to find and it fluctuates greatly.
1950: local minimum, stock market worth just 1/3 of the annual GDP
1968: local maximum, stock market worth 87% of annual GDP
1982: global minimum, stock market worth 1.3 of GDP
2000: global maximum, stock market worth 1.5x GDP
2008: local maximum, stock market worth 60% of GDP
today: 1.32x
So clearly, from 1968-1982 and 2000-2008, the stock market was doing much worse than the overall economy. I think this reflects variations in stock market variation much more than GDP variation.
x. trapnel's 31 is basically the conventional wisdom. The stock price is like a weighted sum of the individual cash flows from the firm (dividends or stock repurchases), adjusted for risk. So stock prices can go up because the economy improves for everyone, but it can also go up if companies get better at squeezing their employees.
The stock market is a leading indicator, so any correlations should be done with a lag. For example, up until recently the stock market has been predicting that future economic news will be good (which has largely been true).
That sounds like a stupid thing to have my entire retirement depend on. Maybe I'll buy a soybean farm instead, as a lagging indicator.
I found the data I was looking for. Here's an estimate for the ratio between the total value of all stocks and the total amount of employee pay:
1970: 1.0
1975: 0.65
1980: 0.5
1985: 0.6
1990: 0.8
1995: 1.0
2000: 2.3
2005: 1.5
2010: 1.3
2015: 2.1
now: 2.15
79: There is just too much noise to use the metrics you are looking at to find a correllation. GDP (Backwards looking) and stock market value (forwards looking, in basic corporate theory) are simply not correlated at the reporting time frames you are comparing.
Add in currency issues, accounting for the international nature of many of the larger companies that would be in highly material to any stock market metric you wanted to review, and I don't think you can compare it to any country's GDP figure, or even a global figure, to derive anything useful.
Wages could be considered, but it would have to be a really narrow hypothesis that holds up for employment criteria over decades to get a reasonable dataset.
I'm just the gardener though, so I have all my money in the english hedge funds.
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