Tape 131 - Mid-year turnaround?
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| - | Welcome once again as MIT Professor Paul Samuelson | 0:02 |
| discusses the current economic scene. | 0:04 | |
| This program series is produced | 0:06 | |
| by Instructional Dynamics Incorporated. | 0:08 | |
| This recording was made June 28th. | 0:10 | |
| - | We're now in the middle of 1973, | 0:13 |
| and this is truly a branching period | 0:16 | |
| when even the experts are no longer so closely agreed | 0:21 | |
| on the probabilities with respect to the future. | 0:27 | |
| The preponderance of opinion still is that | 0:33 | |
| the American economy will go through a growth recession. | 0:35 | |
| Indeed, I know people who follow | 0:38 | |
| the business scene very closely who believe | 0:43 | |
| on the basis of the preliminary data available | 0:47 | |
| for April and May that in the second quarter itself | 0:51 | |
| we dropped well, well, well below the 8% real growth rate | 0:56 | |
| of the first quarter, that in fact the first | 1:01 | |
| GNP estimates will show for the second quarter | 1:06 | |
| less than a 4% real rate of growth. | 1:11 | |
| Most of those same experts don't believe the numbers | 1:16 | |
| because as they look at the overtime that still | 1:19 | |
| is taking place, as they look at the behavior | 1:21 | |
| of the Federal Reserve Board index of production, | 1:24 | |
| and as they wet their finger and hold it up | 1:27 | |
| in the wind, they feel that there still is strength | 1:31 | |
| in the economy, and they may be right, | 1:36 | |
| even though the first estimate of the real GNP | 1:39 | |
| numbers for the second quarter may be on the low side. | 1:43 | |
| They may be right, and the Department of Commerce | 1:49 | |
| may come later to revise those numbers upward. | 1:51 | |
| Still, I think we're being told something | 1:54 | |
| by the data, and you're a very rash person | 1:58 | |
| if every time you learn from the newly issued statistics | 2:01 | |
| something which is not accord with your expectation, | 2:07 | |
| if you substitute your own a prior judgment | 2:10 | |
| for the brute facts, you may find yourself | 2:13 | |
| very much at odds with what's going to happen in the future. | 2:19 | |
| We have established then I think that | 2:24 | |
| we are past the inflection point | 2:26 | |
| of the most rapid rate of growth. | 2:28 | |
| We don't know whether the drop, substantial as it is, | 2:32 | |
| is the prelude to a imminent still greater drop, | 2:38 | |
| but we certainly must face that possibility. | 2:44 | |
| Is it a good thing or is it a bad thing? | 2:48 | |
| Well, since I thought that the over-strength | 2:50 | |
| of the first quarter was a bad thing, | 2:52 | |
| I should feel somewhat cheered by the relaxation, | 2:56 | |
| and with qualifications, that is true. | 3:01 | |
| There is however the possibility that the slow down | 3:05 | |
| in the rate of growth is not due | 3:09 | |
| to a healthy relaxation of demand factors. | 3:11 | |
| Now, I don't mean by this that there has been | 3:17 | |
| a strong relaxation of demand, | 3:21 | |
| but it's gone beyond the healthy stage, | 3:23 | |
| and is actually turning towards | 3:26 | |
| malignant weakness of demand. | 3:27 | |
| That is a possibility, but that isn't what | 3:30 | |
| I have in mind at this point. | 3:32 | |
| I think there is the alternative hypothesis | 3:33 | |
| that the weakness of growth in the second quarter | 3:36 | |
| is because the economy is still running flat out, | 3:38 | |
| but it is bumping up against strong | 3:42 | |
| bottlenecks and barriers. | 3:46 | |
| And so, it's not primarily a demand factor at all, | 3:48 | |
| but is really a supply factor. | 3:52 | |
| This is not encouraging from the standpoint | 3:55 | |
| of controlling inflation. | 3:58 | |
| This is not encouraging from the standpoint of prolonging | 4:01 | |
| a health, healthy, prosperous expansion, | 4:05 | |
| because we know from past experience, | 4:13 | |
| and from plausible analytical reasoning, | 4:16 | |
| that coming up against bottlenecks of supply | 4:19 | |
| tend themselves to be inflationary. | 4:23 | |
| So, on this possibility, this hypothesis, | 4:25 | |
| we may be running into even more inflation ahead. | 4:30 | |
| More than that, and a more subtle point, | 4:35 | |
| is the fact that many a downturn in the past | 4:38 | |
| from a period of expansion to a period of recession, | 4:43 | |
| growth recession and absolute recession, | 4:49 | |
| has come about because of the economy's bumping | 4:52 | |
| against the ceiling of full capacity full employment output. | 4:56 | |
| The economy becomes geared to a sizable rate of growth. | 5:02 | |
| It becomes geared to it in somewhat the fashion | 5:10 | |
| that an addict becomes geared at an early stage | 5:12 | |
| to his habit, and he needs the repeated equal, | 5:16 | |
| perhaps high, dosages of his opiate | 5:23 | |
| to continue to feel so well. | 5:27 | |
| It's like an airplane which must be going | 5:29 | |
| at a certain speed, or else it'll fall. | 5:31 | |
| So, it's not enough for the economy | 5:33 | |
| to level off to a high plateau of prosperity. | 5:35 | |
| According to what economists call | 5:39 | |
| the principle of the accelerator, | 5:41 | |
| or the acceleration principle, | 5:43 | |
| which says that the rate of growth of final sales | 5:45 | |
| and of output is one of the important determinants | 5:48 | |
| of the level of capital formation, | 5:52 | |
| well, according to this particular principle, | 5:57 | |
| which goes back at least half a century, | 5:59 | |
| and which has had a considerable measure | 6:03 | |
| of empirical verification, the approach | 6:05 | |
| to full employment when output is no longer expansible | 6:10 | |
| means that like the airplane which is no longer | 6:14 | |
| going at the requisite rate and with the requisite | 6:18 | |
| angle of climb will in fact begin to turn down | 6:21 | |
| and to fall toward Earth. | 6:25 | |
| And so, there is a possibility that | 6:27 | |
| what we're seeing in the second quarter, | 6:32 | |
| and what we will see in the next two quarters of the year, | 6:34 | |
| is a classical case of an economy turning around, | 6:39 | |
| not from an overheated level to a healthfully | 6:43 | |
| vigorous level, temperature 98.6, | 6:47 | |
| or if you want to be geared for a really very successful | 6:51 | |
| games and battles let's make it 99, | 6:56 | |
| not an ominous temperature, | 6:59 | |
| but instead we're on our way down. | 7:02 | |
| On the other hand, you remember those leading indicators | 7:08 | |
| which in April had turned adverse. | 7:12 | |
| On revision, those April leading indicators | 7:16 | |
| turned even more adverse. | 7:19 | |
| But I see from the morning newspaper that | 7:21 | |
| the May figures have bounced back, | 7:23 | |
| and the leading indicator is something | 7:26 | |
| like six out of eight that are available at this time, | 7:28 | |
| have again gone towards the green light signal, | 7:31 | |
| and away from the orange and red light signal. | 7:36 | |
| It just shows of course that one month's observations | 7:40 | |
| are not enough upon which to base any changed view | 7:45 | |
| of the economy. | 7:51 | |
| We have to look at the broad picture. | 7:51 | |
| Before, however, accepting the hypothesis | 7:55 | |
| which I've just enunciated, that it is | 7:59 | |
| supply conditions primarily that explain the slow down | 8:01 | |
| in the second quarter, I ought to point out | 8:05 | |
| that there has been some relaxation of consumers' demand | 8:07 | |
| at the retail level. | 8:10 | |
| This is true at the durable goods level, | 8:12 | |
| and there has been some relaxation of automobile sales. | 8:15 | |
| And there has been some relaxation of housing. | 8:19 | |
| Housing starts, it's true, in May again went up, | 8:24 | |
| and not insignificantly. | 8:29 | |
| But still, the general profile of housing expenditure | 8:31 | |
| is on the down side. | 8:37 | |
| We're still living on the backlog of building permits. | 8:38 | |
| They are not going up. | 8:42 | |
| They are being used off the shelf, | 8:43 | |
| and we're still completing housing | 8:47 | |
| started at an earlier time. | 8:48 | |
| Now, I don't mean to suggest that the vacancy rate | 8:50 | |
| for single homes is ominous. | 8:52 | |
| It's not all that high, nor is the vacancy rate | 8:55 | |
| for multiple apartments, townhouses, so-called. | 8:58 | |
| What we used to call row houses we now | 9:04 | |
| euphemistically call townhouses, | 9:05 | |
| and we seem to want them. | 9:07 | |
| Well, we had better because with the cost of building | 9:09 | |
| so high, very many of us cannot afford | 9:12 | |
| single detached dwellings in the previous fashion, | 9:16 | |
| and we feel we get a better buy for our money, | 9:19 | |
| even though we have less privacy and less space, | 9:22 | |
| less serenity, less garden, in multiple dwellings. | 9:25 | |
| Well, that picture is still pretty good, | 9:30 | |
| but when you take into account that the flow | 9:32 | |
| of funds to the savings and loan associations | 9:35 | |
| is definitely off, off to the mutual savings banks, | 9:38 | |
| these are the prime sources of housing finance, | 9:43 | |
| then you will not be surprised to see housing go down. | 9:46 | |
| I think we had one month in which inventories | 9:51 | |
| grew faster than sales, but that was a fluke, | 9:54 | |
| and it was a fluke which upon examination | 9:57 | |
| resulted not from the fact that | 10:01 | |
| inventories were growing very fast. | 10:03 | |
| Indeed, they were growing very slowly, | 10:04 | |
| more slowly than is credible, more slowly | 10:06 | |
| than is par for the course, but in that particular month | 10:09 | |
| sales as reported, net grew even more slowly, | 10:13 | |
| and I don't think that we have come anywhere | 10:18 | |
| near the inventory orgasm which many of the forecasters | 10:22 | |
| who expect a real recession in 1974 are anticipating | 10:28 | |
| will happen late in the year. | 10:33 | |
| We haven't had that upswing in the rate | 10:36 | |
| of inventory accumulation to 12, 15, $20 billion per year, | 10:38 | |
| which will, when it happens, and after it's happened | 10:44 | |
| for some time, lead to an accumulation | 10:48 | |
| of a stock of inventories that grows relative | 10:50 | |
| to the sales of business, and which leads, | 10:53 | |
| if past experience is a guide, to a surplus | 10:56 | |
| of inventory on the part of business. | 11:03 | |
| So, they have to get rid of it, | 11:04 | |
| which means forced sales, which means low profits, | 11:05 | |
| which means cutting down on the production line, | 11:08 | |
| because in the last analysis the only way | 11:10 | |
| you can get rid of inventory is by producing | 11:12 | |
| less than you are selling. | 11:15 | |
| Well, that inventory accumulation hasn't yet happened. | 11:17 | |
| I've commented I think before on the fact that the official | 11:20 | |
| SEC Department of Commerce estimate of plant | 11:25 | |
| and equipment expenditure for the quarters ahead | 11:29 | |
| is on the more modest side, from the McGraw Hill survey. | 11:32 | |
| Instead of the 19% increase expected in the McGraw Hill | 11:37 | |
| survey I think we have something like a 13% increase | 11:40 | |
| reported by the SEC and the Department of Commerce. | 11:45 | |
| It's hard to reconcile that last | 11:48 | |
| writing down with the capital appropriations data | 11:54 | |
| which are coming into us from the conference board | 12:00 | |
| and from other sources, and it's been suggested to me | 12:04 | |
| that actually what McGraw Hill picked up | 12:08 | |
| in the way of empirical seismographic readings | 12:11 | |
| and what the Department of Commerce picked up | 12:15 | |
| in empirical seismographic readings | 12:18 | |
| are essentially the same. | 12:21 | |
| The only difference is that the Department of Commerce | 12:23 | |
| has adjusted differently the raw data | 12:25 | |
| which it picked up from the way McGraw Hill adjusted them. | 12:29 | |
| What the Department of Commerce has done, | 12:33 | |
| and I by the way approve of this, | 12:35 | |
| is that it second guessed the raw numbers | 12:38 | |
| on the basis of past patterns of experience. | 12:40 | |
| If in the past in this phase of the business cycle | 12:43 | |
| businessmen said they were going to accomplish | 12:46 | |
| more investment than three out of four times | 12:49 | |
| they were able to accomplish or succeeded and accomplished | 12:53 | |
| or did accomplish then the Department of Commerce | 12:56 | |
| adjusts the number saying this time too | 12:59 | |
| they probably will not achieve the capital formation | 13:03 | |
| which they say they want to achieve. | 13:06 | |
| So, it's a difference in adjustment that is involved, | 13:09 | |
| and I think we must still look upon plant | 13:13 | |
| and equipment expenditure as a plus. | 13:15 | |
| Another warning against looking at any one | 13:18 | |
| month's straw in the wind and forming a strong view | 13:22 | |
| or changing your view on that basis comes to us | 13:26 | |
| from the international counts. | 13:29 | |
| We've had lots of good news. | 13:31 | |
| We had an improvement in March of our balance | 13:32 | |
| of merchandise trade. | 13:36 | |
| It went from a sizable deficit to a smaller deficit. | 13:38 | |
| Then, glory be, in April, I think it was, | 13:41 | |
| we actually went into surplus | 13:48 | |
| in the merchandise balance of trade. | 13:51 | |
| This isn't the whole picture, just the merchandise. | 13:54 | |
| We get those numbers on a monthly basis. | 13:56 | |
| Well, we were all feeling very happy. | 13:58 | |
| We were all saying, yes, it's true. | 14:00 | |
| The Smithsonian depreciation of the dollar | 14:03 | |
| is a medicine that finally has begun to do its work, | 14:08 | |
| and the depreciation of the dollar in February | 14:12 | |
| and in March of this year, that's more of that | 14:15 | |
| same medicine, and by gosh, | 14:18 | |
| the medicine seems to be working. | 14:20 | |
| The balance of payments is improving the way it should. | 14:22 | |
| Japanese goods have become expensive. | 14:25 | |
| By the way, Japanese exports to the United States, | 14:28 | |
| our imports from them are definitely down. | 14:30 | |
| Go to your friendly Sony dealer, or your friendly | 14:33 | |
| Toyota dealer and you'll find that to be the case. | 14:37 | |
| So, we were kind of congratulating ourselves that | 14:40 | |
| although the crazy speculators in Europe | 14:43 | |
| who are buying gold as if it was going out of existence | 14:47 | |
| and who've been having a bear rate against the dollar, | 14:51 | |
| trying to get into marks and francs and anything else, | 14:55 | |
| and we've been saying, boy, | 14:58 | |
| they're really moving into a noose, an ambush. | 15:00 | |
| They're going to be sandbagged because although the dollar | 15:04 | |
| used to be overvalued it now is correctly valued, | 15:07 | |
| or maybe even undervalued, and speculation in a regime | 15:10 | |
| of floating currencies is a two way street, | 15:15 | |
| and they're putting their head in the noose | 15:17 | |
| and they're gonna lose it, and of course many people | 15:19 | |
| have said it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys. | 15:21 | |
| Well, along came the first quarter comprehensive data | 15:24 | |
| from the government, and by gosh, | 15:28 | |
| when you went beyond the merchandise balance of payments | 15:32 | |
| to the basic deficit, I'm leaving out the speculative | 15:38 | |
| cool and hot money as it flows around. | 15:42 | |
| It's very hard to keep track of those | 15:44 | |
| volatile people, but look at the basic deficit | 15:46 | |
| in terms of not only our merchandise exports and imports, | 15:50 | |
| but our services exports and imports, our invisible items, | 15:55 | |
| our earnings from abroad in the form of royalties, | 16:01 | |
| in the form of dividends, in the form of repatriated | 16:04 | |
| corporate earnings, multi-national corporations | 16:08 | |
| and otherwise, and when you add to this the long term | 16:10 | |
| foreign investment which business enterprise wants to make | 16:16 | |
| net counting of the amount of money that comes in here | 16:19 | |
| as Sony begins to assemble their goods in this country, | 16:22 | |
| and as Volkswagen begins to think, gee, | 16:27 | |
| maybe we'd better get a toehold and have an assembly line | 16:29 | |
| in America because that may be the cheapest place | 16:31 | |
| to produce cars in the future, well, taking into account | 16:33 | |
| all of those things, there was a very comforting | 16:37 | |
| improvement in the balance of payments | 16:41 | |
| basic deficit in the first quarter. | 16:44 | |
| Well, just as that was happening | 16:48 | |
| I see the latest figures are in. | 16:50 | |
| I guess those are the figures for May, | 16:52 | |
| and the (mumbles) they have turned | 16:53 | |
| not only lackluster but they've turned somewhat bad, | 16:56 | |
| and I think that the deficit on merchandise account | 17:01 | |
| has worsened to the tune of somewhere between | 17:05 | |
| 100 and $200 million. | 17:10 | |
| Mean time, we still have Watergate with us | 17:14 | |
| every week with arrests, | 17:18 | |
| but during the Brezhnev visit, | 17:21 | |
| there are new revelations on network time TV. | 17:24 | |
| These revelations are known and followed | 17:32 | |
| on the continent, they're followed abroad, | 17:36 | |
| and there can't be much doubt that | 17:38 | |
| this political factor is one factor | 17:43 | |
| in the weakness of the dollar abroad. | 17:46 | |
| In my judgment it is a factor having to do | 17:48 | |
| with the buoyancy of the equity markets. | 17:53 | |
| How much you want to give in the way | 17:56 | |
| of a price earnings multiple to whatever | 17:57 | |
| profile of earnings you expect does depend in part | 18:02 | |
| upon how you feel other people with money | 18:06 | |
| are going to feel in terms of buoyancy. | 18:09 | |
| If you had been relying on the mandate | 18:13 | |
| of President Nixon at the 1972 election | 18:16 | |
| to reverse the trend of humanitarian legislation | 18:20 | |
| on the part of the government, reverse the trend | 18:27 | |
| of expenditure patterns on the part | 18:30 | |
| of the federal government, and if you had built that | 18:32 | |
| into the price earnings multiple that you felt | 18:36 | |
| ought to be applied to your typical General Motors, Ford, | 18:39 | |
| IBM, Xerox, Avon products stock, | 18:44 | |
| notice I've only mentioned the blue chips here. | 18:49 | |
| There are, what shall I say, purple chips | 18:51 | |
| that don't qualify for the adjective blue, | 18:56 | |
| which you can buy today at four | 19:00 | |
| and five times price earnings. | 19:02 | |
| Well, if you had built in that | 19:04 | |
| favorable political factor, favorable in your mind, | 19:08 | |
| into your evaluation, then it seems to me | 19:13 | |
| it would not be a rational view | 19:17 | |
| to call up your friendly broker and say let's unload some | 19:18 | |
| and let's sell down to the sleeping point | 19:22 | |
| where we're not gonna be so worried about | 19:26 | |
| the political events. | 19:27 | |
| As far as any sober econometrician's estimate | 19:30 | |
| of what the rate of growth | 19:36 | |
| of real product will be throughout the decade | 19:39 | |
| of the 1970s and what the general share | 19:42 | |
| of that national product will be that goes to wages | 19:47 | |
| and goes to profits, I don't think that | 19:50 | |
| Watergate is an important factor. | 19:54 | |
| If I were jotting down some regression equations, | 19:57 | |
| or some judgmental relations to form a judgment on this, | 20:01 | |
| and this by the way is what explicitly or implicitly | 20:06 | |
| every rational, thoughtful investor should be doing, | 20:10 | |
| if he's not capable of doing it for himself, | 20:14 | |
| then he should be having somebody invest his money | 20:18 | |
| and advise him who is capable of having a reasoned judgment. | 20:21 | |
| I don't say that he should find somebody with a glass ball | 20:26 | |
| that reveals the future. | 20:31 | |
| There doesn't exist any such person, | 20:33 | |
| but he should be well informed in weighing the odds, | 20:35 | |
| and I don't think that Watergate has any great importance | 20:39 | |
| in terms of such a calculation. | 20:43 | |
| But we know that the ups and downs of Wall Street | 20:45 | |
| going above the trend of so-called value and below | 20:48 | |
| is a much more volatile thing than that, | 20:51 | |
| and it does depend on what people of means, | 20:53 | |
| people of some affluence are thinking, | 20:57 | |
| and how well they're feeling with their world, | 20:59 | |
| and I don't suppose that too many of such people | 21:03 | |
| are feeling all that great in these weeks | 21:07 | |
| of the summer of 1973, and I think it's taken its toll. | 21:11 | |
| Let's ask, what about some of the objective factors | 21:17 | |
| that operate upon the economy? | 21:22 | |
| What about the money market? | 21:23 | |
| What about the interest rate? | 21:25 | |
| What about that money crunch that Albert Wolgenhauer | 21:26 | |
| and Henry Kaufman each in their differing | 21:29 | |
| degrees had forecast? | 21:32 | |
| I want to remind you that I spoke about | 21:34 | |
| Wolgenhauer's speech before the Boston Economics Club | 21:38 | |
| and I described to you his belief that it would be | 21:42 | |
| necessary and in fact was inevitable that there would be | 21:46 | |
| a money crunch in the middle of the year, | 21:49 | |
| and I wrote down in my little black book I just looked | 21:52 | |
| at this morning to be sure that my memory was correct | 21:54 | |
| that this would start some time around May 15th. | 21:57 | |
| This was about a month before that | 22:00 | |
| that the speech took place, and would develop | 22:02 | |
| into the 4th of July period. | 22:06 | |
| Well, according to my calendar we're now at June 28th. | 22:08 | |
| The 4th of July is just next Wednesday, | 22:11 | |
| and I don't think that one can hold one's breath | 22:15 | |
| for the money crunch having developed. | 22:19 | |
| Now, it's possible that all of our throats have been slit, | 22:22 | |
| and we haven't yet turned our heads, | 22:26 | |
| and we don't realize that we are the victims | 22:27 | |
| of a money crunch, but I don't think that the, | 22:30 | |
| a feel of the situation will bear that out. | 22:34 | |
| Now, I shouldn't be overly critical here, | 22:37 | |
| because nobody can be held to fine tuning | 22:41 | |
| and to nice picking of the exact moment of the money crunch | 22:46 | |
| and there was a safety valve which Dr. Wolgenhauer | 22:51 | |
| very properly introduced into | 22:55 | |
| his discussion and qualification. | 22:57 | |
| He said, well, if it won't be the 4th of July, | 22:59 | |
| then make it Labor Day, and Labor Day's a good time off, | 23:00 | |
| and we can by Labor Day have a much tighter money market | 23:05 | |
| than we now have. | 23:11 | |
| As a matter of fact, Dr. Otto Eckstein | 23:13 | |
| of Harvard University and Data Resources Incorporated | 23:17 | |
| has made a study of all past crunches. | 23:20 | |
| And we've had about three or four money crunches | 23:24 | |
| in the postwar period, post World War II period. | 23:28 | |
| I believe he traces one in 1957. | 23:34 | |
| I would say by the way that | 23:37 | |
| I think there was a little money crunch in April | 23:40 | |
| and May of 1953. | 23:43 | |
| There was a day there when all the people | 23:44 | |
| in the big banks and the big insurance companies | 23:47 | |
| were calling each other up and saying, by God, | 23:49 | |
| we can't let the credit of the United States government | 23:52 | |
| go down the drain. | 23:54 | |
| We can't let there be a panic in the money market. | 23:55 | |
| This was in the first flush of the Eisenhower | 23:57 | |
| first administration when you may remember | 24:01 | |
| Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey was | 24:06 | |
| in the cabinet and W. Randolph Burgess | 24:10 | |
| was his under secretary, and the Burgesses | 24:14 | |
| which were issued really went to a great discount. | 24:18 | |
| Well, there are certain features in common, | 24:24 | |
| namely the crunches don't happen overnight. | 24:27 | |
| They always come as a surprise to everybody. | 24:30 | |
| They certainly come according to Dr. Eckstein's analysis | 24:32 | |
| as a surprise to the Federal Reserve, | 24:35 | |
| and not only are they a surprise to the Federal Reserve | 24:37 | |
| before the event, but after the event the Federal Reserve | 24:39 | |
| never admits that it had anything to do with the situation. | 24:43 | |
| The worst of these crunches, by the way, | 24:47 | |
| I think has to be thought of as 1966 in, | 24:49 | |
| July 1st, and we're coming right to another July 1st, | 24:53 | |
| there was tremendous fear that when all the savings | 24:56 | |
| and loan associations, particularly in California, | 25:00 | |
| would pay their July 1 interest that | 25:02 | |
| an awful lot of people were gonna take their marbles and run | 25:05 | |
| because by government fiat the savings banks | 25:08 | |
| do not let us poor people get a very high rate of interest. | 25:13 | |
| You can get 6% and that's the most you can get, | 25:16 | |
| and that's only for a very special kind of account. | 25:18 | |
| Well, in the regular money market | 25:20 | |
| you can these days get 7% and 8% | 25:23 | |
| if you're a man of any means at all, | 25:28 | |
| or if you're a corporation of any means. | 25:30 | |
| Well, individuals aren't so foolish that you can keep | 25:32 | |
| fooling them all the time, and so the smart money | 25:35 | |
| did in '66 leave the S and L's, | 25:38 | |
| really never to return. | 25:42 | |
| Well, the government I know, because I was an advisor | 25:44 | |
| to it at that time, was very fearful | 25:46 | |
| that there would be a big runoff, | 25:50 | |
| and the Under Secretary of the Treasury Joseph Barr, | 25:52 | |
| later to be secretary of the treasury, | 25:57 | |
| had a kitty, a rescue fund, | 25:59 | |
| or some several billions of dollars | 26:02 | |
| to tie the situation over. | 26:04 | |
| Well, we just got over that situation | 26:06 | |
| without undue intermediation. | 26:09 | |
| But there was a time in August of 1968 | 26:11 | |
| when the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh finally | 26:14 | |
| hard pressed for reserves, said, we're just gonna dump | 26:18 | |
| our municipal bonds for whatever they can bring, | 26:20 | |
| and you had a really sticky period in the money market | 26:23 | |
| for a couple of days. | 26:27 | |
| In fact, the Federal Reserve had to act very strongly | 26:27 | |
| by sending a letter out to everybody that they would | 26:30 | |
| provide the money and not to panic. | 26:31 | |
| It was a good act. | 26:34 | |
| It was successful in ending the crunch, | 26:35 | |
| in turning the crunch around. | 26:39 | |
| I can only compare it with the forceful action | 26:40 | |
| by the present Chairman of the Board of Governance | 26:47 | |
| of the Federal Reserve System Arthur Burns | 26:51 | |
| at the time of the Penn Central failure. | 26:52 | |
| When Penn Central failed in the background | 26:54 | |
| there was quite a tottering of the whole | 26:57 | |
| house of cards. | 27:00 | |
| It was shaking, and even companies like Chrysler | 27:02 | |
| found that in the money market their commercial paper | 27:06 | |
| was becoming suspect. | 27:10 | |
| So, the president, this was President Nixon, | 27:12 | |
| called a lot of money people down to Washington, | 27:19 | |
| and Arthur Burns talked to them and said that he was | 27:23 | |
| gonna provide the money, and that they shouldn't panic, | 27:25 | |
| and actually no macroeconomic panic resulted. | 27:28 | |
| If this had been 1907 or 1903 | 27:33 | |
| or if it had been the bad old days of 1929 | 27:36 | |
| I think that it might have been another story. | 27:39 | |
| There's a book I believe by a man named Ellis | 27:41 | |
| on the second stock market crash. | 27:44 | |
| It's a hypothetical book. | 27:47 | |
| It's about the crash that didn't happen, | 27:49 | |
| but which could have happened, and it documents | 27:51 | |
| in great detail exactly what happened | 27:53 | |
| as we had a rerun, a very painful, catastrophic rerun | 27:57 | |
| of 1929, I guess with all the brokers jumping | 28:01 | |
| out the windows and all the multimillionaires saying | 28:04 | |
| this is a good time for my sons and I to be | 28:08 | |
| accumulating good common stocks. | 28:11 | |
| So, the sort of thing we always hear | 28:13 | |
| from government officials. | 28:15 | |
| The Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz said | 28:17 | |
| that if he had any money he'd be buying stocks now. | 28:19 | |
| He was in a good precedent, because that's what | 28:23 | |
| Secretary of the Treasury Dillon had said. | 28:26 | |
| By the way, he had some money I think at that time. | 28:29 | |
| It's kind of comical that a government official | 28:33 | |
| would know what the proper price earnings ratio is, | 28:36 | |
| but I believe President Nixon on several occasions | 28:38 | |
| has said this is a good time to buy stock, | 28:41 | |
| and if you had bought stock at the time he said so | 28:43 | |
| probably at least until recently you'd be ahead of the game. | 28:45 | |
| Maybe you still would be ahead of the game. | 28:48 | |
| Well, I don't know whether there's gonna be a money crunch. | 28:51 | |
| I think we have a much more sophisticated | 28:56 | |
| Federal Reserve board this time, | 28:58 | |
| and I don't think it's important for us | 29:01 | |
| to try to work out the odds of that. | 29:04 | |
| What I think is true is that the Federal Reserve | 29:07 | |
| has definitely been tightening up. | 29:10 | |
| It's been slowing down the rate of growth | 29:12 | |
| to the money supply over what would be needed | 29:14 | |
| to keep interest rates from floating upward, | 29:19 | |
| and interest rates have been floating upward. | 29:22 | |
| The short term interest rates are very high, | 29:25 | |
| federal funds rate above 8% much of the time. | 29:27 | |
| Treasury Bill rates are up. | 29:31 | |
| Acceptance rates are up. | 29:34 | |
| I think that long term rates will still be hardening. | 29:37 | |
| The notion that the peaking out would take place | 29:42 | |
| early in the year, or early in the middle of the year | 29:46 | |
| it seems to me is wishful thinking. | 29:49 | |
| Until we know more where we stand on the question | 29:52 | |
| of inflation, how the freeze works out | 29:56 | |
| and how it succeeded, and until we know more | 29:58 | |
| whether we're definitely in that growth recession, | 30:01 | |
| in that mini-recession, or even in a real recession, | 30:03 | |
| then I don't think you can expect the Federal Reserve | 30:06 | |
| to swing around and to begin to lean against the winds | 30:09 | |
| of stagnation and of slow growth. | 30:13 | |
| We still are in a period of watchful waiting. | 30:18 | |
| - | If you have any comments or questions | 30:23 |
| for Professor Samuelson address them | 30:24 | |
| to Instructional Dynamics Incorporated, | 30:26 | |
| 166 East Superior Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60611. | 30:28 |
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