Contrarian’s case: Why US could slip into ‘recession’

‘Worrisome signs’ out there

NEW YORK, July 23, (AP): Just as the US economy is strengthening, other countries are threatening to drag it down.

Employers in the US are creating jobs at the fastest pace since the late 1990s and the economy finally looks ready to expand at a healthy rate. But sluggish growth in France, Italy, Russia, Brazil and China suggests that the old truism, “When the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold,” may need to be flipped. Maybe the rest of the world will sneeze this time, and the US will get sick.

That’s the view of David Levy, who oversees the Levy Forecast, a newsletter analyzing the economy that his family started in 1949 and one with an enviable record. Nearly a decade ago, the now 59-year-old economist warned that US housing was a bubble set to burst, and that the damage would push the country into a recession so severe the Federal Reserve would have no choice but to slash short-term borrowing rates to their lowest levels ever to stimulate the economy. That’s exactly what happened. Now, Levy says the United States is likely to fall into a recession next year triggered by downturns in other countries, the first time in modern history.

Worse

“The recession for the rest of the world ... will be worse than the last one,” says Levy, whose grandfather called the 1929 stock crash and whose father won praise over decades for anticipating turns in the business cycle, often against conventional wisdom.

Levy’s forecast for a global recession is an extreme one, but worth considering given so much is riding on the dominant view that economies are healing. Investors have pushed US stocks to record highs, and Fed estimates have the US growing at an annual pace of at least 3 percent for the rest of the year and all of 2015. Investors have also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into emerging market stock funds recently on hopes economic growth in those countries will pick up, not stall.

Worrisome signs are already out there. Unlike their US counterparts, European banks are still stuck with too many bad loans from the financial crisis. Household and business debt there is too high. And confidence is fleeting, as investors saw earlier this month when stocks sold off on worries over the stability of Portugal’s largest bank.

In China and other emerging markets, the old problem of relying on indebted Americans to buy more of their goods each year and not selling enough to their own people means a glut of underused factories.

“The world hopes to ride on the coattails of the US consumer,” says Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University, “but the US consumer isn’t in a position to take on the burden.”

Emerging markets bounced back faster from the financial crisis than did rich countries, but Levy thinks a big reason for that has made things worse. Overseas companies plowed money into factories, machines and buildings used to make things on the assumption that exports, after snapping back from recession lows, would continue to grow at their prior pace. They have not, a big problem since companies had been investing too much to expand production before the crisis, too.

Compared to such fragile economies, Levy says the US is in decent shape. Like most economists, he’s not worried about the nation’s 2.9 percent drop in economic output in the first quarter, attributing it to harsh winter weather. He expects growth to return, but not for long, as a recession in either Europe or emerging markets spreads to the US

Levy says the US is more vulnerable to troubles abroad than people realize. Exports contributed 14 percent of US economic output last year, up from 9 percent in 2002. That sounds like a good development, but it also makes the country more dependent on global growth, which, in turn, relies more on emerging markets. Those markets accounted for 50 percent of global output last year, up from 38 percent in 2002.

Levy predicts a US recession will throw its housing recovery in reverse, and push home prices below the low in the last recession. He says panicked investors are likely to dump stocks and flood into US Treasurys, a haven in troubled times, like never before. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite to its price, is likely to fall from 2.5 percent to less than 1 percent — an unprecedented low. In 2012, when investors feared a breakup of the euro-currency bloc, the 10-year yield fell to 1.4 percent.

His forecasts may seem a bit much, but Levy comes from a family with a good record of running against the crowd.

His grandfather, Jerome, didn’t just call the Great Crash of 1929, he sold all his stock and liquidated his wholesale goods business in anticipation of it. Immediately after World War II, when many experts thought the US was sure to fall into another depression, his father, Jay, accurately predicted a rapid expansion instead. In late 1999, his uncle, Leon Levy, a hedge fund manager and collector of antiquities, invited this reporter into his office, pointed to a bust of a rich Roman near his door and mused on the fleeting nature of fortune. He then predicted a new generation of wealthy would be laid low soon in a coming dot-com crash.

Those stocks began their long dive a few months later.

Origin

For all the prescience from this latest Levy, he thinks the origin of the world’s economic malaise is far more complex and deep than investors focused on the housing collapse think. The problem is not just that people in the US took on mortgages they couldn’t afford, but too much borrowing of many kinds in many countries, and by businesses as well as individuals. This buildup of excessive debt started so long ago — Levy dates it to the 1980s in the US — that people no longer know what’s prudent.

Many economists, for instance, are impressed that debt held by US households has fallen from 130 percent of annual take-home income before the crisis to 104 percent, suggesting that people aren’t borrowing too much. But what is a healthy level? Levy is not sure, but he’s suspects it’s a lot lower, noting that, in 1985, it was 74 percent of people’s income.

Whether all this means a US recession is a different matter.

Steven Ricchiuto, chief economist at Mizuho Securities, also thinks people are missing signs of a coming global slowdown, but that the US economy will continue to grow anyway. Daniel Alpert, author of a grim book called “Age of Oversupply” about the glut in exports from foreign countries that so worries Levy, doesn’t think the US will fall into recession, either.