There’s a “broader paradigm shift away from discussions of fiscal austerity to a new mainstream view that fiscal policy should become a more active tool to stimulate growth,” Pimco’s Joachim Fels and Andrew Balls wrote in a recent summary of a March advisory forum. “Rising support for a more active, expansionary fiscal policy should contribute to a steeper yield curve and upside risks to future inflation.”
Also worth a read this week:
Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor
Automation -- particularly in manufacturing -- seems to be displacing workers more quickly and creating new jobs more slowly, research from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Daron Acemoglu and Boston University’s Pascual Restrepo suggests. A slowdown in productivity in recent decades has further cut into labor demand.
The point here? If future productivity growth comes from automation, “the relative standing of labor, together with the task content of production, will decline,” the authors write. Finding new tasks for laborers will be “vital for continued wage growth commensurate with productivity growth.”
Introducing the Distributional Financial Accounts of the United States
Federal Reserve statisticians are combining two data sources -- the Financial Accounts of the United States and the Survey of Consumer Finance -- to produce a more real-time measure of America’s wealth distribution. The figures will be published about ten or eleven weeks after the end of each quarter, according to the paper, and "could be especially valuable during turning points or times of economic turmoil."
Initial findings are consistent with what slower-moving indicators have suggested: wealth concentration has increased markedly over the past three decades. More recently, the researchers find that increased concentration continued through the third quarter of 2018 but actually decreased at the end of the year as the stock market swooned.
This article provided by Bloomberg News.