We may, as I argued last month in the Financial Times, be in a period of “secular stagnation” in which sluggish growth and output, and employment levels well below potential, might coincide for some time to come with problematically low real interest rates.
Since the start of this century, annual US gross domestic product growth has averaged less than 1.8 per cent. The economy is now operating nearly 10 per cent – or more than $1.6tn – below what was judged to be its potential path as recently as 2007. And all this is in the face of negative real interest rates for terms of more than five years and extraordinarily easy monetary policy.
It is true that even some forecasters who have had the wisdom to remain pessimistic about growth prospects for the past few years are coming around to more optimistic views in 2014 – at least in the US. This is encouraging but should be qualified by the recognition that, even on optimistic forecasts, output and employment will remain well below previous trend for many years. More troubling, even with today’s high degree of slack in the economy, and with wage and price inflation slowing, there are signs of eroding credit standards and inflated asset values. If we were to enjoy years of healthy growth under anything like current credit conditions, there is every reason to expect we would return to the kind of problems we saw in 2005-07 long before output and employment returned to trend or inflation picked up again.