jobs

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Jobs; Trade; Banks … Ho Hum And Bun Fights

This is getting dull. Really dull. The economy refuses to shift gears. Wall Street twitters on about nothing in particular. Central Bankers are even more confused and surly than usual. Businesses are sitting on piles of cash and complaining that no one cares about them. Banks are in a snit over being asked to play nicely. Consumers have all but disappeared. Government policy makers wring their hands and smile at the same time. The dark clouds of currency wars have rolled into view. And we go nowhere fast.

Welcome to the crisis part 2.

Oh: the very slightly good news is that new claims for unemployment assistance fell again last week. Whoopee. The drop was by 11,000 all the way to 445,000, which, in normal times, would be viewed as hopelessly inadequate, or a mere blip not worth mentioning, but was the reason that Wall Street roared briefly to life this morning. We exist – I won’t dignify our current state by using the word “live” – in such diminished times that even the most modest step in the right direction can be viewed as a triumph of the first order. Our era has so perverted our language that we no longer can use the word “modest” without feeling slightly apologetic. Personally I blame corporate America for its incessant hyperbole that has undermined the value of words that used to mean something.Modest used to mean, well, modest. Now it means a mix of useless and wimpy. Thus when we run into a putrid performance we have and reach for a proper descriptor we are apt to bring pablum out of our bag. This ends up confusing everyone, and allows the incompetent folks who buy and sell stocks for a living to justify anything. Thus today’s new claims data, which can only be described as the greyest of greys, is greeted in the manner once reserved for the returning Caesars of Rome.

My advice: ignore the hoopla. The claims number represents one of a long series of indifferent and indistinguishable data points, none of which tells us much other than that our malaise continues. Allow me to repeat: we need that claims number to be under 400,000. Better yet, we need it to drop to the mid 300,000 range before we reach for the celebratory fireworks.

Meanwhile ignore Wall Street. Remember they are the folks who trashed the place in the first place. The one fact we have at present is that they know nothing worth our learning.

In other news we are reading a great deal about the brewing trade and currency wars about to blight the world.

The reason is simple: practically every government facing a domestic crisis has written into its escape plan that it will grow out of crisis by pumping up exports. Those of you with an eye for detail will notice that there is a slight problem with this. Someone has to import. Not everyone can export. Whoops. In the old days the game was extremely simple. Japan, Germany, and China exported. The US and the UK imported. That meant that German, Japanese, and Chinese workers lived below their means while Americans and Brits lived above theirs. A better way to look at this is that the Germans, Japanese and Chinese exported unemployment by deliberately under-consuming goods that they made. The surplus was sent abroad. Further: the spare cash that this generated for those economies was recycled back into the US and UK where it pumped up asset prices. This “surplus” of savings on world markets created by the deliberate under consumption in the exporting nations was a major factor in the real estate bubble. At least that’s one theory doing the rounds. Bernanke is a leader of that train of thought.

Now, in the depths of crisis, the importers need to rebalance their economies and reduce the import inflow. But that implies the exporters have to adjust as well. Therein lies the source of tension. The exporters do not want to change their game. Too many local jobs depend on trade. In the case of China, whole industries depend on it, which means millions of recently displaced agricultural workers do too. That’s a big social problem waiting to burst if exporters have to change course. China’s middle class is insufficient to buy all those goods. At least not yet. So they need to keep on exporting. To us.

Which is why they rig their currency and try to play beggar-thy-neighbor with the rest of the world, and particularly with the US. If China were to allow its currency to float by unfixing its relationship with the dollar, it would be revalued upwards. That would make Chinese goods more expensive in foreign markets like the US and would thus reduce their exports. The displaced goods would have to be sold internally within China or those factories would have to close down. Either way the adjustment could be difficult. It would cramp Chinese growth which has averaged 8% a year for a while now. A slowdown from that pace would – potentially – hit their agricultural and poor workers the most since it would remove their opportunity to earn higher wages. The result? Civil unrest. The entire structure of the Chinese elite would feel the strain. It has already been hit by waves of strikes as workers lobby for better conditions and wages. Add in the loss of export industry jobs and the country gets shaky quickly.

Hence the current stand off.

Of course this scenario is being played out across the globe as countries seek to devalue their currencies to dampen Chinese and other exports and boost their own. It is particularly acute in Europe where the German refusal to rebalance their economy is weighing heavily on places like Spain. Since Spain and Germany use the same currency the poor Spanish cannot devalue. They have only one option which is to throw themselves into massive austerity programs. The Germans meanwhile preach such austerity, apparently oblivious that their failure to boost domestic demand created the excess cash that blew Spanish real estate into its bubble – all those German second homes on the Mediterranean coast, not to mention the tourists and their wads of Euros – and is now exporting unemployment along with those BMW’s.

I won’t mention the dire straits the poor Irish are in. Suffice to say that they make the Icelanders look like amateurs when it comes to self destruction.

So, all of a sudden, attention worldwide is on how to rebalance the flow of trade so that excess cash doesn’t slop about creating bubbles, and the exporting nations don’t foist unemployment on everyone else. The recipe for a full blown trade war is nearly complete. Which is very worrisome, since one of the factors that made the Great Depression truly “great” was the trade war of the 1930’s.

And, finally, on a more comical note: the banks are at it again.

This time they are all in a huff over the new capital regulations introduced by the folks in Basel, which is where the organization that dictates these things is based.

The banks argue, rightly, that higher capital implies less credit available. This is correct because capital is held in proportion to assets. So if that proportion is forced higher, the banks have two choices: they can raise more capital and not deploy it as loans; or they can keep their current capital, and reduce the amount of loans from where they now are. Either way the level of lending will drop. The entirely neutral analysts at Goldman Sachs tell us that the drop could cut about 1% off of GDP over the next few years. Conveniently we are not told how much GDP was destroyed by the excess lending of the last few years – that would mess up the story. In any case, the bleating from the banks is now very loud. Fewer loans means lower profits. And we all know what that means: lower bonuses. So I think we can ignore the warnings of lower GDP and cut straight to the one thing we know they care about: that fifth New York apartment. Or: how awful that they might have to forgo the Hamptons home and the Aspen retreat. How mean spirited of us to force such choices on the poor dears. Now this is a true national policy issue.

Not really.

A cursory review of Hyman Minsky and his financial instability hypothesis tells us that less lending is a very good thing. It reduces long run volatility because more of the economy’s wealth relies on equity funding and not debt. That makes it less susceptible to the swings of interest rates and thus more stable. This is good. Very good. The cost for getting this stability is that we will generate less wealth on paper. GDP will, indeed, grow less quickly. But, as we recently learned, wealth that relies on debt is often an illusion – just as illusory as Lehman’s asset values were.

Frankly we could do with less illusion and more reality. Hence we should gird ourselves to ignore the weeping and wailing of Wall Street, even if they have a technically correct point. After all our economy is not theirs to play with. It’s ours.

Not only that, but we want it back.

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Weak Jobs News, So Where’s The Stimulus?

The payroll processing company ADP released its regular report on payroll growth today. The news was not good. The private sector payrolls covered by ADP shed 39,000 jobs in September. Anyway you cut it this is a weak performance. The consensus amongst Wall Street analysts had been an expectation of poor growth, by about 20,000, so an outright decline like this is something of a shock. Clearly the summer doldrums took their toll.

The decline was also widespread which is a blow to those who argue we are facing some sort of structural employment problems. Usually such a problem manifests itself as a lopsided jobs market: some industries growing while others are fading. The ADP data has weakness everywhere except in services, and even there the addition to payrolls was a paltry 6,000. Meanwhile manufacturing lost 17,000, which along with the weaker reports coming from the Institute of Supply Management portray an economy stuttering along rather than in strong recovery mode. The latest ISM report had their manufacturing index at 54.5% down from its 2010 peak of 65.9% back in January. While any reading over 50.0% is good – it means that over half of all companies are expanding activity – the trend is disturbing. There is no momentum we can look to as the driving force for growth.

The ADP jobs data simply confirms this weak trend.

We have now reached a pivotal moment. Either we take up the challenge and do what is necessary to fix our ills, or we wallow in the morass. I suspect we will choose to wallow. As a nation we don’t have the courage to deal with this problem. Or at least the current signs are that we don’t.

There is a weariness in our policy elite that is almost fatalistic. They simply cannot bring themselves to convince the public of the effort required. They elide, dodge, and confuse instead of leading.

This weakness translates into inaction or inadequate action. That, in turn, fails to solve the problem and is interpreted as confirmation that our policy choices are exhausted. That leads to ennui and a feeling of powerlessness. We have lost our will to fight.

The problem is this: we have two weapons to use. Monetary policy, and fiscal policy. Monetary policy is the preferred option, as it has been for decades. That means using lower interest rates to boost borrowing and thus consumption and the economy overall. The problem as we all know is that rates are now so low we have nowhere to go. It’s worse in Japan, where just this week rates were dropped to 0.1%. Even that is thought not to be enough. Here we have marginally more room left, but given the size of the problem there is no way we can reduce rates to have sufficient impact. Using the rule of thumb measure I have described before, we need rates at about -5.0% to get traction against the current malaise. That’s not possible. So we are stuck. As they say in the trade we have hit the “zero bound” where normal policy fails.

This leaves the Fed with little option but to use abnormal and creative ways to pump liquidity into the economy.

The term used to describe these unusual policies is “quantitative easing”. This policy involves the Fed buying securities in the open market and holding them on its balance sheet. The idea being that the cash they use to buy the securities adds to the money available in the economy.

But even this is beginning to fade in its effect.

The problem is that when the Fed buys US bonds and other low risk securities, which is its first choice, it is simply substituting one risk free instrument, cash, for another. It isn’t shifting the yield curve, and it isn’t shifting the propensity to save. The reason for this is that the economy is already awash with liquidity. People are hoarding cash. Giving them more doesn’t alter their desire to hoard. Taking their US bonds and giving them cash simply means they hoard cash instead of risk free bonds which most investors regard as equivalent to cash anyway.

One way around this would be for the Fed to get even more funky and buy high risk assets. This would reduce the risk profile of investor portfolios and presumably allow them to hold less cash as a risk hedge. Look for the Fed to play this game, by purchasing commercial paper, medium term paper of various sorts and maybe even some more distressed assets. Whether this will work is open to doubt. The clouds hanging over the economy are dark enough that even this effort may fail. Or at least it may not prove to be as effective as we need.

Besides, as I have reported here before, there is an intense debate going on within the Fed as to whether it needs to take any action at all. So looking for leadership there might be a fool’s game.

That leaves us with one reliable approach: fiscal policy. The problem here is that the country is now gun shy of the debt needed to make this work. We have used one round of moderate stimulus which was hobbled by its poor design and slow implementation. Far too much of it was in the form of tax cuts which are well known to be ineffective as a stimulant. Political concessions to ameliorate opposition further weakened that effort. So while it was an unqualified success – much to the chagrin of the opposition – is was barley enough to slow the fall, much less induce a recovery.

It was a massive national failure of will. The price for which we are now paying.

But fiscal policy remains our only hope. We need to summon up the fortitude to do the right thing and pile on the deficit until the economy hums again. this implies running up the debt to GDP ratio to levels we have not seen in peacetime. Then again, we have not had to deal with a crisis like this since the Depression, so it is not unreasonable for our response to break records.

For those of you who fear the repercussions of that debt let me repeat my warning: the alternative is worse. The cost of the additional debt has to be weighed against the amount of lost wealth and the damage to our businesses and households. Since we are now operating at about 6% below our potential, that loss of wealth is accumulating at an alarming rate. Issuing enough debt to get us back on track, and thus to close that gap, is a worthwhile investment in our future. Not to do so is to succumb to a false short term perspective, and to fail to understand that we have the power to stop the rot.

I won’t hold my breath of course.

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Health Care Revisited

It seems a very long time ago that I last commented on health care reform. I felt I had exhausted the topic and so I have let it rest. But today’s nice article by David Leonhardt in the New York Times reminds me that reform rumbles on, and is having a number of odd consequences.

The most interesting problem surfacing is with the so-called “mini-med” programs offered by the likes of McDonald’s. The fast food chain offers its employees a “benefit” that costs $730 a year, for which they get a grand total of $2,000 in coverage. There is a richer plan that costs $1,660 and provides $10,000 of coverage. Neither of these plans amounts to much if you get really sick. The main objective is to provide some minimal benefit to people who are basically well. If they get really sick, tough. The country is full of these plans. They are totally insufficient for anything but the barest minimum, yet count as health care coverage in the existing pre-reform system.

The unintended consequence of the reform process is that these plans fail to meet the minimum requirements – as they should – and need to be replaced by something resembling proper coverage. The problem is that the cost of decent coverage would blow a hole in the budget of the employers providing these derisory plans. So drastic is the damage to profits that McDonald’s announced it was dropping coverage entirely, leaving its 30,000 hourly wage workers completely uncovered.

This is, of course, absurd.

The underlying and more intractable problem, is that our health care system is mainly funded as if health care is an employee benefit. It is thus a major cost for employers. Over the years this aspect of the system has inspired the need to provide employers with tax breaks in order to stop them simply abandoning coverage as a way to boost profits. Once McDonald’s went public with its decision to drop coverage the Obama administration was forced to open up loopholes in the new law to soften its impact in similar cases. Opponents of the reform immediately jumped in and argued that this was an example of how bad the reform is and that it should be shelved.

This, too, is absurd.

Our issue, once again, is the half hearted approach we took to reform.

Our system is irretrievably broken. It is very high cost. It provides those with means and adequate coverage access to very high quality medical treatment. It also completely underserves the majority of regular people. The result is a litany of bad results, poor health services, shorter lifespans, higher incidences of illnesses, higher error rates, misdiagnoses, and general waste. Our system has become a major burden on the economy and is likely to have an even worse impact in the future.

Both households and businesses are ill served by the current system. Households because they get inadequate service at high cost, and business because they carry the cost of coverage as a labor cost. This labor cost discourages job creation. This, obviously, is not in our best interest at a time when every job created is extremely valuable.

Into this mess came Obama. His reaction was typically understated. He sought to reform with a minimum of disruption. What he failed to realize was that the system is so riven through with faults that even a minor reform, such as the effort to bring mini-med programs up to a basic level of coverage, creates a major problem to businesses who operate on thin margins and have hourly wage workforces. So minimum disruption is very hard to achieve. In fact it may well be impossible.

As each step towards reform is taken we will expose more weak links and kluged responses. The edifice is rotten. It was cobbled together to avoid the responsibility for a thorough overhaul. The result is a high cost, low result, system that should be tossed out and replaced with a totally revamped alternative modeled on one of the very successful and lower cost foreign versions. This would require political will. Since we don’t have any of that I will not hold my breath.

Needless to say, though, this is only the beginning. As the current system unravels in the face of the puff ball reform being foisted on it, we will all realize we have been laboring under a massive illusion: our old system was not the envy of anyone but those who profited from it. Everyone else in the advanced world has made more progress and have better systems. We linger in that old dream that anything made here is, inevitably, better than anything made elsewhere.

As far as I can tell there is no perfect solution to the provision of health care. Inevitably the specter of rationing enters the calculation. Difficult decisions have to be made as to the efficacy of high cost treatments that provide only ameliorative or temporary results. This is especially true of end of life care. As I have mentioned many times do not be confused over that word “rationing”. All economic systems ration. Even free markets. Rationing is simply another word for allocation, and markets allocate via prices. If you cannot afford something you don’t get it. That’s allocation. That’s rationing by another name. The only issue, therefore, is how to ration.

And since health care is a universal requirement, and has many of the features of a “public good” – disease prevention being paramount amongst them – is makes little or no sense for the system to rely on business provided benefits. Health care should not be a component of labor costs. Removing it from the business realm would reduce employer costs, help create jobs, and make our businesses more competitive. That seems like it should fit on any right wing business oriented agenda. That it doesn’t is because the implication of removing the burden from the private sector is that it is moved to the public sector. Health care would have to be funded out of taxes rather than wage offsets and tax credits. It would be transparent and not hidden. And it would be cheaper. But it would be public, and that is too difficult a hill to climb for our right wing politicians.

So we are stuck with yet another kluge. A monumental fudge. An avoidance of the fact staring at us in that face: our current system is a joke. A very expensive joke. The minimal disruption of which threatens to bring the whole house of cards down.

Just for once I wish this country had the courage and will, or the imagination, to be bold.

We fudged bank reform. We fudged health care reform. We fudged stimulus.

For some reason we are hell bent on being mediocre.

I wonder why that is.

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Consumer Confidence Slips Again

It’s tough to have a vibrant economy when the people who comprise that economy are in a funk. So the news that consumer confidence has slipped a little more and is now below where it was at the beginning of the year is not good news.

The Conference Board calls the 48.5 reading for September on its overall confidence gauge as “quite grim”. This was a decline from the August reading of 53.2. The index has a base of 100 back in 1985, and has been bouncing around in the 40 to 60 range for about 18 months.

While consumer confidence is not an economic factor in the way that spending is, it does give us insight into the likely trajectory of those more direct measures of activity. So this period of decline so far in 2010 does not augur well for the near term. We should expect consumption to wallow in its current range and savings to track higher as households either hoard cash or pay down debt rather than spend.

If this turns out to be the case GDP will be weighed down and will also stumble along at an unacceptably low level.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of today’s report was the number of people who are expecting things to deteriorate. Whether it is business conditions or the employment outlook respondents in September’s survey were appreciably more pessimistic than those a month earlier.

The lingering malaise shows no signs of abating.

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Greenspan, Debt, and What To Do

Alan Greenspan who spent his life advocating free market solutions to every imaginable problem recently appeared on television, and with all the humility of a totally discredited thinker, went straight on advocating his old ideas. This only accomplishes two things: it perpetuates out of date thinking, and it confuses discussion. Perhaps worse: it validates wrong headed policy. We have plenty of that presently, so Greenspan’s comments only make thing more difficult.

Let me explain:

Basically Greenspan argues that economists are lousy at forecasting the economy – duh – and thus they should always choose the more conservative option when confronted with policy choices. This is an analogy to the old medical ethical statement of “first do no harm”.

The big problem is, of course, deciding which is the more conservative option.

During his television appearance Greenspan showed his old colors and declared without any empirical backing, that greater indebtedness was a bigger threat to the American economy than the current slow growth malaise. He consequently argued that we should, therefore, allow the Bush tax increases go into effect. As opposed to making any more effort to stimulate growth.

This is the option being pressed on us by a multitude of austerity advocates. They are completely indifferent to the consequences of such a policy, and seem inured to future of high unemployment, slow growth, and misery for millions of Americans.

The issue I have is that they are wrong both morally and in terms of theory. My position is that we should doing everything humanly possible to stimulate the economy, and if that implies adding more and more debt so be it.

Debt is the least we have to worry about.

The austerity argument starts with a false premiss and then proceeds to build on that wrongheaded foundation by piling up erroneous policy suggestions. The route that they head us down is called the road to depression.

Our economy suffers from a drastic drop in demand. People are simply not spending at the rate they used to. This means that savings are piling up, and that businesses are sitting on large amounts of idle capacity. The economy is awash with cash. No one is using it productively. Liquidity is not an issue. Opportunity is.

The austerity supporters diagnose things differently: they see issues on the supply side of the economy. They argue that we have a structural employment problem where labor costs are high because of government interference in the market – payroll taxes and pro-labor laws are oft cited examples; where labor skills are ill fitted to the current demand for labor; or where wages are simply too high. Each of these ‘structural impediments’ reduces the willingness of businesses to hire workers. Were they removed – were workers to take much lower wages for example – then our unemployment issue would go away.

The austerity crowd then augment this by suggesting that we cannot keep borrowing at our current pace. Sooner or later, they argue, we will hit a wall and our creditors will punish our profligacy. That punishment will come in the form of higher interest rates and even an unwillingness to borrow. The more aggressive amongst these folks ague we are fast approaching such a moment. To make matters worse, they also talk of a ‘crowding out’ of private investment by public borrowing. Crowding out is when private businesses of households find it hard to raise debt because the government has syphoned off the available cash for its own use through its own borrowing.

This argument is a non-starter.

Let’s attack the crowding out argument:

First, there is no evidence in the markets of the telltale rise in interest rates that would indicate the onset of creditor concern. On the contrary US rates are falling and are historically low levels. The evidence directly contradicts the austerity argument.

Second, as I mentioned earlier there is no crowding out going on. Businesses are knee deep in cash. They have accumulated historically high war chests of the stuff. There is no pressure in the credit markets from a conflict between the private and public sectors.

Third, in any case all the evidence – and I mean all the evidence – shows that the private sector is reducing debt. There is no demand for debt coming from that side of the economy. Deleveraging is still the order of the day.

So, lastly, with demand for debt non-existent, the private sector awash with cash, and debt reduction the order of the day, we have a massive potential problem: where does all that implied saving go? Into government debt. In simple terms the government’s huge increase in debt has simply offset the private sector’s equally huge reduction in debt and increase in savings. The money flooding the economy is being deployed usefully: it is helping forestall a depression.

And there is a massively important point to make here: we are getting a very high return on this debt.

Huh?

The reason is that for every day we linger in the doldrums we are foregoing the creation of wealth. An economy that operates well below capacity, as ours is, is missing the opportunity to turn that capacity into wealth. A further slide would make the loss of wealth worse. We should remember that this wealth is lost permanently. It cannot be earned back.

Now for the structural employment argument. There is no evidence to support it. When an economy develops structural issues it suffers from imbalances. High unemployment in one sector is accompanied by shortages in another with the result being a mix of high unemployment and high wage inflation. This kind of stagflation is a sure signal of supply side imbalances of one sort or another.

But we don’t have any such stagflation. We have high unemployment associated with low and declining inflation. Some would argue we are headed for a bout of deflation. These are symptoms not of structural supply side issues, but of a shortfall in aggregate demand.

Withdrawing government stimulus by allowing the Bush tax increase to come into effect can only make matters worse. Much, much worse.

One more thing: the austerity crowd overlooks history. Governments that cut spending in order to balance budgets have often so depleted demand that their economies shrink. Thus they collect less revenue – the tax base is smaller – their deficits grow rather than diminish, and they are forced to cut even more. In order to avoid this fate a government can cut less, but then it fails to achieve its goal also.

All of this leads us to the following set of conclusions:

  1. An economy in distress is forgoing wealth
  2. That wealth has more value than the cost of the debt required to forestall it
  3. Therefore more debt is the conservative option
  4. Rather than austerity which assuredly increases the loss of wealth
  5. Especially when there is no evidence of an impending credit crisis

So people like Greenspan are arguing something else. His argument boils down to the claim that economist’s really don’t know how to deal with this crisis, so we should throw in the towel and “allow nature to take its course”. What he really means is that the theories he has always advocates have failed, so we should just give in. Just because he has no idea, doesn’t mean that the rest of us don’t. The same goes for all the austerity advocates.

What makes me angry is that the policies do exist. And that this argument has been had many times before, with the same outcome. That the old guard persist and get attention detracts from our getting on with the job.

I think we have a moral obligation to mitigate the human misery caused by the failure of our market based system. That system went through a classic “Minsky moment” when ponzi financial practice imploded and produced a massive shift towards savings as businesses and households rebuilt their balance sheets. The outcome was a near depression as demand collapsed. A variety of government efforts simply put a bottom to the decline, but were not sufficient to impel a self sustaining recovery. So we are stuck in limbo with government debt accumulating and the private sector meandering along neither in sharp growth nor in sharp decline. Those government efforts were small with respect to the size of the problem: we built 10 foot levees to keep out a 20 foot wave. Yes, the damage was limited, but we are still under water. Those efforts were even more reduced in effect by their construction. Political pressures prevented them from being direct job creating activities such as government infrastructure programs. Instead the money went into tax reductions which were saved not spent, thus adding to savings and not demand, or into indirect spending that had a lesser impact, and which eventually found its way into company bank accounts rather than continuing to ripple on throughout the economy.

And while I am on the subject: we should ignore any debt to GDP ratio that uses current GDP. Why? Because it is depressed. The ratio of debt to GDP is often tossed about as if it represents an accepted rule for credit markets. It doesn’t. Were we to accelerate the economy GDP would rise quickly and the debt/GDP ratio would fall even if we kept exactly the same amount of debt. Debt ratios are helpful indicators not policy targets. We have to be mindful that we are solving the right problem.So when we assess the amount of debt appropriate for an economy, we have to take into account its wealth generating potential. A relatively fast growing economy can absorb a higher debt level than a moribund economy. That’s why it is vital we get our economy moving faster than its current 1.5% to 2.5% range.

This will be impossible if we give in to the austerity argument and reduce demand by cutting the deficit. At the moment we have enormous spare wealth generating potential waiting to be deployed. Plus we are facing low interest rates and a worldwide surplus of cash waiting for us to borrow. It makes sense, indeed it is the safest option, to take advantage of these circumstances and borrow that money, pile it into our economy, and get back to work.

No. Alan Greenspan has it backwards: the conservative policy is the one that energizes wealth creation. Not the one that limits growth.

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