Kevin Hasslet, WH econ advisor just gave presentation about "trends"

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etc all looked like a big U

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did they all start in 2016?

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did they all start in 2016?

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Haha. He actually addresses that question in his presentation.

Video in link.

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He actually addresses that question in his presentation.

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well did they? frick a video, i'd read the presentation itself though

We need to try to find some racist tweet by Hasslet from several years ago immediately (or just assert that the tweet is racist even if its not). This cannot stand!

LINK

Unfortunately, the charts are not included.

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Q: Thanks, Kevin. What credit, if any, does former President Obama deserve for the current state of the economy?

CHAIRMAN HASSETT: You know, I think that attributing blame or credit to individuals requires that I identify policies and then talk about, well, what affected this policy or that policy. And I prefer to give blame or credit to policies than to individuals. I think that President Obama sometimes, on the partisan trail, gets criticized with numbers that are clearly incorrect because people blame him for the Great Recession, which was there when he started, and it’s not fair.

If I look specifically at President Obama’s policies, there are a whole bunch of policies that I think were very negative for growth. I think the Affordable Care Act lifted marginal tax rates on individual workers, so much so that the CBO even said that it would have a negative effect on growth. He increased marginal tax rates on small businesses, and that’s why small-business creation wasn’t so high.

And so I could look at a lot of policies, and we could talk about them one by one and say, did they help or hurt growth. I think he also advocated policies that he said would help growth that clearly did not. And really, I kind of wonder about what was going on in the heads of the economists that told him they would, like Cash for Clunkers, and so on, that really didn’t have much effect at all.

But to say he destroyed the economy, or something like that, that’s not what the CEA chair should be doing.

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But to say he destroyed the economy, or something like that, that’s not what the CEA chair should be doing

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I don't think he destroyed the economy, but his policies were definitely not leading to robust recovery or periods of prosperity that we see today. It was restricting growth to such a degree that the level of inflation was outpacing the growth (particularly in wage growth).

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Kevin Hasslet

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It's "Hassett," and he's one of the co-authors on this 1999 economics classic, which said this concerning its titular level (per Amazon reviewer), "'A sensible target date for Dow 36,000 is early 2005,but it could be reached much earlier', p.140."



As for his charts yesterday, did anyone notice where his (short term) "trends" began, and that many of them either (a) continued the current trend, or (b) merely recaptured levels from 2014? If you can't remember, some are copied here:

LINK

So what do you want to see?

thanks for the link. it's not my favorite thing, but i'll read a transcript.

I hate being in the position of shitting on hassett, because he's probably the best thing trump has on his team. But an economist should be talking about the long-run growth path, not oscillations around that trend. That's what supply-side economics is supposed to be focused on, and in that context it's the only "trend" of concern. The economy is not a collection of 2- or 4-year "trends."

I've said this before, but it sucks that he has to depend on soft data like surveys of optimism or even purchasing managers' plans, because plans and sentiment don't move potential GDP, or the standard of living. Those soft data points do reflect that firms like Trump (or maybe republicans), but they don't mean as much as harder data points that reflect actual decisions. Like actual dollars invested, or orders for capital/durable goods, or shipments.

He does thankfully at least talk a bit about some of those items in this short-run context. And he uses what I would agree is a good method, pinpointing where the 2nd derivative goes from negative to positive. The problem is that for the data points he uses, he takes credit despite the inflection points (for historical data) that appear to predate the election and even the RNC nomination.

This is the most important one he mentions. All of these are monthly y/y growth rates, with a quarterly value overlaid for clarity:

He says that we're up 10%. First of all, we're not. Second of all, if we were that wouldn't be a huge deal.

For orders of capital goods, that 2nd derivate switch appears to happen in Q1 or Q2 2016:


For orders of durable goods, it also appears to happen in Q1 or Q2:


Same deal for shipments of cap goods, and that happens with a lag from orders:


Even blue-collar employment looks the same:


Note: if you're going to disagree on that second-derivative switch and where it happens, please double check that you remember what a second-derivative change looks like. It's not the same as slope going from negative to positive, although in economic data, it usually precedes it.

Oh, he pretty smart guy.