US resilience helped by loose fiscal policy

The US budget is still deep in the red this far into the economic recovery.
Kieran Davies

Coolabah Capital

US economic resilience has been helped by large budget deficits.  

In his final parliamentary testimony last week, RBA Governor Lowe remarked,

"I go to a lot of international meetings of central bank governors, and the two words I hear most frequently are 'persistence' and 'resilience'. I hear about persistence of services price inflation. I talked about that in Australia, but it's the same in most other advanced economies. And the other word is 'resilience'—the resilience of the labour market. Our unemployment rate is the lowest since the early seventies. I think in the US it's the lowest since the late sixties. Many countries have had very significant reductions in unemployment and have strong labour markets. That's the combination we're dealing with: persistent services price inflation and low unemployment."

One reason for the resilience of many advanced economies appears to be the ability of consumers to draw on substantial excess savings built up during the pandemic, although on CCI's calculation US households will largely exhaust their buffers by late this year. 

However, in the US there is still what seems to be a significant stimulus from fiscal policy, where the budget remains significantly in the red, with the trend in the deficit holding at around 8% of GDP early this year 

There is no unique way of measuring the economic effect of fiscal policy, but a very crude way of demonstrating how the US budget remains stimulatory is that the extremely low unemployment rate of about 3½% would normally suggest that the budget should be closer to balance.

   
US fiscal policy is still stimulatory … 
US fiscal policy is still stimulatory … 


...even as US households seem likely to exhaust their excess savings later this year
... even as US households seem likely to exhaust their excess savings later this year
........
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Kieran Davies
Chief Macro Strategist
Coolabah Capital

Based in Sydney, Kieran Davies is Chief Macro Strategist at Coolabah Capital Investments, an asset manager with 40 executives and over $8 billion in fixed-income strategies. Kieran is responsible for macroeconomic research and investment strategy,...

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