Wednesday, January 14, 2009

How to Watch our Long Term Potential in GDP



One market to watch to qualify the "non-noisy" market expectations of how the Obama-Biden Plan is faring is to follow the 10 year interest rate swap level 10 years forward.

This is a good way to see what market expectations are for nominal GDP (versus real or inflation adjusted GDP).

It is very alarming as it shows that the USA has made a possibly permanent trend potential nominal GDP growth change from 5 1/2% to 3 to 3 1/2%. Assuming inflation corrects to 1 1/2% and Obama is successful in reflating - the deleveraging in financials will permanently lower productivity numbers and result in lower nominal trend GDP. Furthermore if we succeed in this ill thought of crusade against Mexican immigration, the population growth then drops to 1 1/2% form the effective 2%. So - take your pick, either inflation expectations, or population, or productivity make up the 3 1/2% nominal. The drop in nominal GDP to 3 1/2% is sufficient in its own right to justify a 850 SPX.

One more reason to be very keen to reflate, get this O-B Plan at least doubled in expectations of the real spend (not taxes which in a deflationary or no inflation environment just disappear into the "bizaro world" 4th dimension), and perhaps be friendly to those hard working Mexicans in the Hormel plants in MN.

1 comment:

  1. Good post. One group I have noticed is that action in the key infrastructure names in the last 7 days. They just fell off a cliff and Siemens in particular. SI is a good name to watch as it is not just a proxy for US infra plans, but also Chinese. Perhaps their downbeat guidance for not only 2009 but 2010 was the cause. But everything else got hit pretty hard too: ABB, etc.

    The market may be realizing that it's not easy to suddenly start spending huge sums of money on complex infra projects, which usually take a year or two of plans, testing, study.

    G

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