Aug

6

The upside down man's objection: "If wealth or real GDP was only being created at an annual rate of 3.5% over the same period of time, then somehow stockholders must be skimming 3% off the top each and every year" is easily rebutted by Philip Carret's observation that common stock is like a leveraged investment. Bondholders are first in line to be paid, but their claims are fixed, so all upside of earnings beyond a fixed percentage belongs to stockholders (as does all downside if the company fails to perform). If the typical capital structure is 50% debt and 50% equity, the typical common stock is a 2:1 leveraged investment, so an expected return approaching 2x GDP growth would not be unreasonable.

Stefan Jovanovich writes: 

There is a complimentary explanation. GDP figures are a sub-set derived from the monetary Marxist notion that nominal expenditure by the government is just the same as voluntary private spending. (This is the same notion that the CIA and all the Galbraithians depended on to decide in the 1970s and 1980s that the Soviet Union had matched or even surpassed the US in economic output.) Er, no. Sherman Tanks may be useful and necessary but their "cost" is not the same measure as the spending to buy a combine harvester. The same applies to civil service pay versus private payrolls; the one measures a Keynesian cost, the other measures an expenditure in search of profit. It should hardly be surprising that, in order to support the dead weight of wars and "public" investments that no private market demands, the equity residual has to grow at twice the rate of the overall "economy" measured in nominal Marxist terms.

Ralph Vince writes: 

Stefan,

Yes, this was the case I made on this or a related list about 4-8 weeks ago and had my economic naivete was assailed. In fact, I would posit that not only should government expenditures NOT be included in the positive column of GDP, but rather might best be place in the negative column. A good portion of government spending is in the form of capital outflows, interest payments to foreign entities, outright gifts to foreign entities (when we give the UN a billion dollars, is that really a billion dollars added to out GDP? 10 billion to Israel, does not increase our GDP by 10 billion), nation building (building schools in Afghanistan does not increase GDP). Outflows such as exports, count on the negative side of the GDP ledger — so too should government spending, or at best, it should be a wash.

If GDP growth is anemic now, remove the YoY increase in government spending from GDP and it's a pretty bleak picture in recent years (and no, I'm not being political about the Oreo presidency of the past 11 1/2 years. Same guy, same party, same people, different faces and names).


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