Bad News for Workers = Worsening Economic News!

Popular Economics Weekly

Personal incomes have been increasing just 2.5 percent on average for several years. But that doesn't boost GDP growth enough to pay down the $10 trillion in worldwide debt that’s been issued since 2008 to get us out of the Great Recession.  We need at last 3 percent GDP growth, which is closer to the long term average; or raise taxes, which this administration won't do.

So where have all the profits gone that were generated since 2009 for corporate execs and their stockholders? Executive Pay Watch, in a report conducted by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Last year, CEOs were paid 335 times the average worker. The average production and non-supervisory worker earned $37,600 annually in 2016. “When adjusted for inflation, the average wage has remained stagnant for 50 years,” the report said.

That’s not a formula that will pay down the $10 trillion accumulated since 2009 by central banks. The conundrum is why so much debt with so little economic growth, and the US at near full employment? With the Federal Reserve finally becoming serious about selling some of its $4.5 billion hoard of excess reserves, we could see a serious slump in economic growth coming.

“When looking for the next financial crisis, it’s hard to escape from the fact that we’re seemingly in the early stages of the ‘great unwind’ of global monetary stimulus at the same time as global debt remains at all-time highs following an increase over the past decade—at the government level at least—which has been unparalleled in peacetime history,” wrote Deutsche Bank strategists led by Jim Reid in an 88-page study entitled, “The Next Financial Crisis,” and cited by Marketwatch.

Why? Interest rates will finally begin to rise (i.e., less money in circulation), and less money also means credit tightening when weak household income growth has already stretched budgets.

A recent employer survey tells us exactly why personal incomes haven’t grown with corporate profits; still at record levels as a percentage of GDP. Corporations have been able to successfully resist their employees’ demands for higher wages. The top 1 percent have garnered 96 percent of all income generated since the Great Recession, since most of their profits have come from cheap money printed by the central banks. It has only enriched the banks and Wall Street, in other words.

Marketwatch reported on the Aon survey, recently: “Pay raises for U.S. employees are not expected to improve next year, according to a survey released Monday by global professional services company Aon, based on a survey of over 1,000 companies. Base pay is expected to rise 3 percent in 2018, up slightly from 2.9 percent in 2017. Spending on variable pay — incentives or bonuses — will be 12.5 percent of payroll, low levels not seen since 2013. This suggests a “pessimistic view of corporate performance in the coming year,” Ken Abosch, a strategy and development analyst at Aon, said in a statement.

Ah, but not for the CEOs of these companies that have used most of those profits to buy back their stock, and so enhance their earnings. CEO pay spiked 19.6 percent last year, before inflation.
The median total compensation for CEOs at S&P 500 companies totaled $11.5 million last year, an 8.5 percent increase from the previous year and the largest increase since 2013, according to a joint report by the Associated Press and the executive pay data firm Equilar released earlier this year. 

So, we could be seeing a growth slowdown next year, or worse, unless we can reverse the huge redistribution of wealth that has occurred since 2009. But that would mean raising the nationwide minimum wage from its current $7.25/hour, last set in the 1990's, for starters.

And, then stopping the Trump administration and Republican congress from cutting taxes of the already wealthy, and cutting spending that supports the poorest and elderly in the new tax and budget proposals.

Their most blatant attempt to increase their profits further, while hurting those in most need, has been the repeated attempts to repeal Obamacare (another tax cut for them). Otherwise, all that stimulus has gone for naught, and we could see this Great Recession turn into another Great Depression.

Harlan Green © 2017

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