A colleague emailed me a link to this piece by Harvard's Ed Glaesar .... and the following resulted ...
To begin with, issues such as rocketing home price was not country-wide at all. I don't think speculators were "flipping" homes in North Dakota as they were even in Bakersfield. Which also means that foreclosures are not a country-wide problem at all. To a large extent, the physical aspect of the housing crisis is highly geographic in nature. That is the physical, real, stock.
Similarly, the real, tangible, manufacturing was also geographically concentrated. If I remember correctly, the relative importance of manufacturing in Oregon--in terms of percentage of jobs--was higher in our state than in the Northeast.
Money on the other hand was flowing in from everywhere, including the unfortunate and greedy investors from Iceland.
Economists almost always aggregate all these issues, and space does not matter to them. Thus, if at all, Glaesar is a tad late to the game. Richard Florida provided an interesting analysis in the March issue of the Atlantic, with a provocative title: How the crash will reshape America. in that piece, Florida noted that:
Financial positions account for only about 8 percent of the New York area’s jobs, not too far off the national average of 5.5 percent. By contrast, they make up 28 percent of all jobs in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois; 18 percent in Des Moines; 13 percent in Hartford; 10 percent in both Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Charlotte, North Carolina.
Anyway, I agree with Glaesar's thoughts there. California is in a mess, and will get worse before it can remotely get better. This crisis, I think, is worse than the impacts of the aerospace/defense contraction of the 1990s. Because, that one helped the skilled folks apply their talents to other fields, including IT. Now, there is nothing to be gained from empty and sprawling McMansions.
The politics and the government there is not helping either. If it were not for immigrants, California would have tanked a long time ago--almost half the new tech firms were founded or co-founded by immigrants!
CA, AZ, NV are in the same housing crisis .... Again, from Florida's essay:
To an uncommon degree, the economic boom in these cities was propelled by housing appreciation: as prices rose, more people moved in, seeking inexpensive lifestyles and the opportunity to get in on the real-estate market where it was rising, but still affordable. Local homeowners pumped more and more capital out of their houses as well, taking out home-equity loans and injecting money into the local economy in the form of home improvements and demand for retail goods and low-level services. Cities grew, tax coffers filled, spending continued, more people arrived. Yet the boom itself neither followed nor resulted in the development of sustainable, scalable, highly productive industries or services. It was fueled and funded by housing, and housing was its primary product. Whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes.
I simply resonate with his description that the entire economy essentially became one massive ponzi scheme. Sickeningly true. This is a HUGE difference between the post-IT boom and now--then, we were at least left with miles and miles of fiber optics, for instance, which then helped as the economy recovered. I don;t see anything productive out of the mansions that are now sitting empty, and turning into slums.
Oregon is in deep shit as well--perhaps not as bad as California is. Earlier today I was speculating at a semi-serious conversation that our unemployment might top out at 14 or 14.5 percent before things begin to improve. This is going to be brutal. I don't see an emerging economic activity that can suddenly provide an upward momentum .... Kulongoski seems to be betting on electric cars. I am not sure if that is a winning bet. It is still a car with a lipstick, to paraphrase the election-season nastiness about lipstick on a pig -)
Unfortunately, to a large extent, Americans are not as geographically mobile as we think we are. I.e., not many unemployed Oregonians are going to move to New Hampshire where the probability of employment is higher. One of the main reasons as it turns out--housing. Owning a home drastically makes us immobile! It is easier for a renter to pack up and move. So, while economists assume that the probability of jobs might be a huge incentive for migration, apparently we have firmly established disincentives that discourage the move. To quote from that same essay by Florida,
“If you no longer can sell your property, how can you move elsewhere?” said Robin Boyle, an urban-planning professor at Wayne State University, in a December Associated Press article. But then he answered his own question: “Some people just switch out the lights and leave—property values have gone so low, walking away is no longer such a difficult option.”
The next forecast by the state economist will be on May 15th. We will all be yelling "mayday, mayday, mayday" then :-(
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