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Netizens-Digest Volume 1 Number 351
Netizens-Digest Saturday, January 15 2000 Volume 01 : Number 351
Netizens Association Discussion List Digest
In this issue:
[netz] Internet, Growth - Not Inflation - Define the New Century
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 00:31:19
From: John Walker <jwalker@networx.on.ca>
Subject: [netz] Internet, Growth - Not Inflation - Define the New Century
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- ------------
Greenspan to Economists: (US)
Internet, Growth - Not Inflation - Define the New Century
By Lawrence Sterne
Managing Editor, Internet Stocks Channel
January 13, 2000 -
http://www.internetstockreport.com/reporter/article/0,1785,1941_283491
,00.html
In a speech that is likely to set the tone for the 21st century,
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan fully endorsed the
internet economy and threw out inflation as a gauge for Federal
Reserve Policy last night. Greenspan uses phrases like "profoundly
different", "awesome" and "remarkable" to discuss a phenomena that
"may well gather speed and force" and become "even more potent". Near
the end, the Chairman hints that Fed policy has shifted to sustaining
growth from containing inflation - in fact, the speech is all the
more remarkable for its lack of inflation mania.
Below is a reprint of the speech, with highlighting courtesy of our
friends at Economic Analysis Associates, Inc. All investors should
read it:
Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan
Technology and the economy
Before the Economic Club of New York, New York, New York
January 13, 2000
We are within weeks of establishing a record for the longest
economic expansion in this nation's history. The 106-month expansion
of the 1960s, which was elongated by the Vietnam War, will be
surpassed in February. Nonetheless, there remain few evident signs of
geriatric strain that typically presage an imminent economic
downturn.
Four or five years into this expansion, in the middle of the 1990s,
it was unclear whether, going forward, this cycle would differ
significantly from the many others that have characterized
post-World War II America. More recently, however, it has become
increasingly difficult to deny that something profoundly different
from the typical postwar business cycle has emerged. Not only is the
expansion reaching record length, but it is doing so with far
stronger-than-expected economic growth. Most remarkably, inflation
has remained subdued in the face of labor markets tighter than any we
have experienced in a generation. Analysts are struggling to create a
credible conceptual framework to fit a pattern of interrelationships
that has defied conventional wisdom based on our economy's history of
the past half century.
When we look back at the 1990s, from the perspective of say 2010,
the nature of the forces currently in train will have presumably
become clearer. We may conceivably conclude from that vantage point
that, at the turn of the millennium, the American economy was
experiencing a once-in-a-century acceleration of innovation, which
propelled forward productivity, output, corporate profits, and stock
prices at a pace not seen in generations, if ever.
Alternatively, that 2010 retrospective might well conclude that a
good deal of what we are currently experiencing was just one of the
many euphoric speculative bubbles that have dotted human history.
And, of course, we cannot rule out that we may look back and conclude
that elements from both scenarios have been in play in recent years.
On the one hand, the evidence of dramatic innovations--veritable
shifts in the tectonic plates of technology--has moved far beyond
mere conjecture. On the other, these extraordinary achievements
continue to be bedeviled by concerns that the so-called New Economy
is spurring imbalances that at some point will abruptly adjust,
bringing the economic expansion, its euphoria, and wealth creation to
a debilitating halt. This evening I should like to address some of
the evidence and issues that pertain to these seemingly alternative
scenarios.
What should be indisputable is that a number of new technologies
that evolved largely from the cumulative innovations of the past half
century have now begun to bring about awesome changes in the way
goods and services are produced and, especially, in the way they are
distributed to final users. Those innovations, particularly the
Internet's rapid emergence from infancy, have spawned a ubiquity of
startup firms, many of which claim to offer the chance to
revolutionize and dominate large shares of the nation's production
and distribution system. Capital markets, not comfortable dealing
with discontinuous shifts in economic structure, are groping for
sensible evaluations of these firms. The exceptional stock price
volatility of most of the newer firms and, in the view of some, their
outsized valuations, are indicative of the difficulties of divining
from the many, the particular few of the newer technologies and
operational models that will prevail in the decades ahead.
How did we arrive at such a fascinating and, to some, unsettling
point in history? The process of innovation, of course, is
never-ending. Yet the development of the transistor after World War
II appears in retrospect to have initiated an especial wave of
innovative synergies. It brought us the microprocessor, the computer,
satellites, and the joining of laser and fiber-optic technologies.
These, in turn, fostered by the 1990s an enormous new capacity to
disseminate information. To be sure, innovation is not confined to
information technologies. Impressive technical advances can be found
in many corners of the economy.
But it is information technology that defines this special period.
The reason is that information innovation lies at the root of
productivity and economic growth. Its major contribution is to reduce
the number of worker hours required to produce the nation's output.
Yet, in the vibrant economic conditions that have accompanied this
period of technical innovation, many more job opportunities have been
created than have been lost. Indeed, our unemployment rate has fallen
notably as technology has blossomed.
One result of the more-rapid pace of IT innovation has been a
visible acceleration of the process of "creative destruction," a
shifting of capital from failing technologies into those technologies
at the cutting edge. The process of capital reallocation across the
economy has been assisted by a significant unbundling of risks in
capital markets made possible by the development of innovative
financial products, many of which themselves owe their viability to
advances in IT.
Before this revolution in information availability, most
twentieth-century business decision making had been hampered by wide
uncertainty. Owing to the paucity of timely knowledge of customers'
needs and of the location of inventories and materials flowing
throughout complex production systems, businesses, as many of you
well remember, required substantial programmed redundancies to
function effectively.
Doubling up on materials and people was essential as backup to the
inevitable misjudgments of the real-time state of play in a company.
Decisions were made from information that was hours, days, or even
weeks old. Accordingly, production planning required costly
inventory safety stocks and backup teams of people to respond to the
unanticipated and the misjudged.
Large remnants of information void, of course, still persist, and
forecasts of future events on which all business decisions
ultimately depend are still unavoidably uncertain. But the remarkable
surge in the availability of more timely information in recent years
has enabled business management to remove large swaths of inventory
safety stocks and worker redundancies. Information access in real
time--resulting, for example, from such processes as electronic data
interface between the retail checkout counter and the factory floor
or the satellite location of trucks-has fostered marked reductions in
delivery lead times and the related workhours required for the
production and delivery of all sorts of goods, from books to capital
equipment.
The dramatic decline in the lead times for the delivery of capital
equipment has made a particularly significant contribution to the
favorable economic environment of the past decade. When lead times
for equipment are long, the equipment must have multiple capabilities
to deal with the plausible range of business needs likely to occur
after these capital goods are delivered and installed.
With lead times foreshortened, many of the redundancies built into
capital equipment to ensure that it could meet all plausible
alternatives of a defined distant future could be sharply reduced.
That means fewer goods and worker hours are caught up in activities
that, while perceived as necessary insurance to sustain valued
output, in the end produce nothing of value.
Those intermediate production and distribution activities, so
essential when information and quality control were poor, are being
reduced in scale and, in some cases, eliminated. These trends may
well gather speed and force as the Internet alters relationships of
businesses to their suppliers and their customers.
The process of innovation goes beyond the factory floor or
distribution channels. Design times and costs have fallen
dramatically as computer modeling has eliminated the need, for
example, of the large staff of architectural specification-drafters
previously required for building projects. Medical diagnoses are more
thorough, accurate, and far faster, with access to heretofore
unavailable information. Treatment is accordingly hastened, and hours
of procedures eliminated.
Indeed, these developments emphasize the essence of information
technology--the expansion of knowledge and its obverse, the
reduction in uncertainty. As a consequence, risk premiums that were
associated with all forms of business activities have declined.
Because the future is never entirely predictable, risk in any
business action committed to the future--that is, virtually all
business actions--can be reduced but never eliminated. Information
technologies, by improving our real-time understanding of production
processes and of the vagaries of consumer demand, are reducing the
degree of uncertainty and, hence, risk. In short, information
technology raises output per hour in the total economy principally
by reducing hours worked on activities needed to guard productive
processes against the unknown and the unanticipated. Narrowing the
uncertainties reduces the number of hours required to maintain any
given level of production readiness.
In economic terms, we are reducing risk premiums and variances
throughout the economic decision tree that drives the production of
our goods and services. This has meant that employment of scarce
resources to deal with heightened risk premiums has been reduced.
The relationship between businesses and consumers already is being
changed by the expanding opportunities for e-commerce. The forces
unleashed by the Internet are almost surely to be even more potent
within and among businesses, where uncertainties are being reduced
by improving the quantity, the reliability, and the timeliness of
information. This is the case in many recent initiatives, especially
among our more seasoned companies, to consolidate and rationalize
their supply chains using the Internet.
Not all technologies, information or otherwise, however, increase
productivity--that is, output per hour--by reducing the inputs
necessary to produce existing products. Some new technologies bring
about new goods and services with above average value added per
workhour. The dramatic advances in biotechnology, for example, are
significantly increasing a broad range of productivity-expanding
efforts in areas from agriculture to medicine.
Indeed, in our dynamic labor markets, the resources made redundant
by better information, as I indicated earlier, are being drawn to the
newer activities and newer products, many never before contemplated
or available. The personal computer, with ever-widening applications
in homes and businesses, is one. So are the fax and the cell phone.
The newer biotech innovations are most especially of this type,
particularly the remarkable breadth of medical and pharmacological
product development.
At the end of the day, however, the newer technologies obviously can
increase outputs or reduce inputs and, hence, increase productivity
only if they are embodied in capital investment. Capital investment
here is defined in the broadest sense as any outlay that enhances
future productive capabilities and, consequently, capital asset
values.
But for capital investments to be made, the prospective rate of
return on their implementation must exceed the cost of capital. Gains
in productivity and capacity per real dollar invested clearly rose
materially in the 1990s, while the increase in equity values,
reflecting that higher earnings potential, reduced the cost of
capital.
In particular, technological synergies appear to be engendering an
ever-widening array of prospective new capital investments that
offer profitable cost displacement. In a consolidated sense, reduced
cost generally means reduced labor cost or, in productivity terms,
fewer hours worked per unit of output. These increased real rates of
return on investment and consequent improved productivity are clearly
most evident among the relatively small segment of our economy that
produces high-tech equipment. But the newer technologies are
spreading to firms not conventionally thought of as high tech.
It would be an exaggeration to imply that whenever a cost increase
emerges on the horizon, there is a capital investment that is
availableto quell it. Yet the veritable explosion of high-tech
equipment and software spending that has raised the growth of the
capital stock dramatically over the past five years could hardly
have occurred without a large increase in the pool of profitable
projects becoming available to business planners. As rising
productivity growth in the high-tech sector since 1995 has resulted
in an acceleration of price declines for equipment embodying the
newer technologies, investment in this equipment by firms in a wide
variety of industries has expanded sharply.
Had high prospective returns on these capital projects not
materialized, the current capital equipment investment boom--there
is no better word--would have petered out long ago. In the event,
overall equipment and capitalized software outlays as a percentage of
GDP in nominal dollars have reached their highest level in post-World
War II history.
To be sure, there is also a virtuous capital investment cycle at
play here. A whole new set of profitable investments raises
productivity, which for a time raises profits--spurring further
investment and consumption. At the same time, faster productivity
growth keeps a lid on unit costs and prices. Firms hesitate to raise
prices for fear that their competitors will be able, with lower costs
from new investments, to wrest market share from them.
Indeed, the increasing availability of labor-displacing equipment
and software, at declining prices and improving delivery lead times,
is arguably at the root of the loss of business pricing power in
recent years. To be sure, other inflation-suppressing forces have
been at work as well. Marked increases in available global capacity
were engendered as a number of countries that were previously members
of the autarchic Soviet bloc opened to the West, and as many
emerging-market economies blossomed. Reductions in Cold War spending
in the United States and around the world also released resources to
more productive private purposes. In addition, deregulation that
removed bottlenecks and hence increased supply response in many
economies, especially ours, has been a formidable force suppressing
price increases as well. Finally, the global economic crisis of 1997
and 1998 reduced the prices of energy and other key inputs into
production and consumption, helping to hold down inflation for
several years.
Of course, Europe and Japan have participated in this recent wave of
invention and innovation and have full access to the newer
technologies. However, they arguably have been slower to apply them.
The relatively inflexible and, hence, more costly labor markets of
these economies appear to be an important factor. The high rates of
return offered by the newer technologies are largely the result of
labor cost displacement, and because it is more costly to dismiss
workers in Europe and Japan, the rate of return on the same
equipment is correspondingly less there than in the United States.
Here, labor displacement is more readily countenanced both by law and
by culture, facilitating the adoption of technology that raises
standards of living over time.
There, of course, has been a substantial amount of labor-displacing
investment in Europe to obviate expensive increased employment as
their economies grow. But it is not clear to what extent such
investment has been directed at reducing existing levels of
employment. It should always be remembered that in economies where
dismissing a worker is expensive, hiring one will also be perceived
to be expensive.
An ability to reorganize production and distribution processes is
essential to take advantage of newer technologies. Indeed, the
combination of a marked surge in mergers and acquisitions, and
especially the vast increase in strategic alliances, including
across borders, is dramatically altering business structures to
conform to the imperatives of the newer technologies.
We are seeing the gradual breaking down of competition-inhibiting
institutions from the keiretsu and chaebol of East Asia, to the
dirigisme of some of continental Europe. The increasingly evident
advantages of applying the newer technologies is undermining much of
the old political wisdom of protected stability. The clash between
unfettered competitive technological advance and protectionism, both
domestic and international, will doubtless engage our attention for
many years into this new century. The turmoil in Seattle last month
may be a harbinger of an intensified debate.
However one views the causes of our low inflation and strong growth,
there can be little argument that the American economy as it stands
at the beginning of a new century has never exhibited so remarkable a
prosperity for at least the majority of Americans.
Nonetheless, this seemingly beneficial state of affairs is not
without its own set of potential challenges. Productivity-driven
supply growth has, by raising long-term profit expectations,
engendered a huge gain in equity prices. Through the so-called
"wealth effect," these gains have tended to foster increases in
aggregate demand beyond the increases in supply. It is this imbalance
between growth of supply and growth of demand that contains the
potential seeds of rising inflationary and financial pressures that
could undermine the current expansion.
Higher productivity growth must show up as increases in real incomes
of employees, as profit, or more generally as both. Unless the
propensity to spend out of real income falls, private consumption
and investment growth will rise, as indeed it must, since over time
demand and supply must balance. (I leave the effect of fiscal policy
for later.) If this was all that happened, accelerating productivity
would be wholly benign and beneficial.
But in recent years, largely as a result of the appreciating values
of ownership claims on the capital stock, themselves a consequence,
at least in part, of accelerating productivity, the net worth of
households has expanded dramatically, relative to income. This has
spurred private consumption to rise even faster than the incomes
engendered by the productivity-driven rise in output growth.
Moreover, the fall in the cost of equity capital corresponding to
higher share prices, coupled with enhanced potential rates of return,
has spurred private capital investment. There is a wide range of
estimates of how much added growth the rise in equity prices has
engendered, but they center around 1 percentage point of the somewhat
more than 4 percentage point annual growth rate of GDP since late
1996.
Such overall extra domestic demand can be met only with increased
imports (net of exports) or with new domestic output produced by
employing additional workers. The latter can come only from drawing
down the pool of those seeking work or from increasing net
immigration.
Thus, the impetus to spending from the wealth effect by its very
nature clearly cannot persist indefinitely. In part, it adds to the
demand for goods and services before the corresponding increase in
output fully materializes. It is, in effect, increased purchasing
from future income, financed currently by greater borrowing or
reduced accumulation of assets.
If capital gains had no evident effect on consumption or investment,
their existence would have no influence on output or employment
either. Increased equity claims would merely match the increased
market value of productive assets, affecting only balance sheets,
not flows of goods and services, not supply or demand, and not labor
markets.
But this is patently not the case. Increasing perceptions of wealth
have clearly added to consumption and driven down the amount of
saving out of current income and spurred capital investment.
To meet this extra demand, our economy has drawn on all sources of
added supply. Our net imports and current account deficits have
risen appreciably in recent years. This has been financed by foreign
acquisition of dollar assets fostered by the same sharp increases in
real rates of return on American capital that set off the wealth
effect and domestic capital goods boom in the first place. Were it
otherwise, the dollar's foreign exchange value would have been under
marked downward pressure in recent years. We have also relied on net
immigration to augment domestic output. And finally, we have drawn
down the pool of available workers.
The bottom line, however, is that, while immigration and imports can
significantly cushion the consequences of the wealth effect and its
draining of the pool of unemployed workers for awhile, there are
limits. Immigration is constrained by law and its enforcement;
imports, by the willingness of global investors to accumulate dollar
assets; and the draw down of the pool of workers by the potential
emergence of inflationary imbalances in labor markets. Admittedly,
we are groping to infer where those limits may be. But that there are
limits cannot be open to question.
However one views the operational relevance of a Phillips curve or
the associated NAIRU (the nonaccelerating inflation rate of
unemployment)--and I am personally decidedly doubtful about
it--there has to be a limit to how far the pool of available labor
can be drawn down without pressing wage levels beyond productivity.
The existence or nonexistence of an empirically identifiable NAIRU
has no bearing on the existence of the venerable law of supply and
demand.
To be sure, increases in wages in excess of productivity growth may
not be inflationary, and destructive of economic growth, if offset
by decreases in other costs or declining profit margins. A protracted
decline in margins, however, is a recipe for recession. Thus, if our
objective of maximum sustainable economic growth is to be achieved,
the pool of available workers cannot shrink indefinitely.
As my late friend and eminent economist Herb Stein often suggested:
If a trend cannot continue, it will stop. What will stop the
wealth-induced excess of demand over productivity-expanded supply is
largely developments in financial markets.
That process is already well advanced. For the equity wealth effect
to be contained, either expected future earnings must decline, or the
discount factor applied to those earnings must rise. There is little
evidence of the former. Indeed, security analysts, reflecting
detailed information on and from the companies they cover, have
continued to revise upward long-term earnings projections. However,
real rates of interest on long-term BBB corporate debt, a good proxy
for the average of all corporate debt, have already risen well over a
full percentage point since late 1997, suggesting increased pressure
on discount factors.3 This should not be a surprise because an excess
of demand over supply ultimately comes down to planned investment
exceeding saving that would be available at the economy's full
potential. In the end, balance is achieved through higher borrowing
rates. Thus, the rise in real rates should be viewed as a quite
natural consequence of the pressures of heavier demands for
investment capital, driven by higher perceived returns associated
with technological breakthroughs and supported by a central bank
intent on defusing the imbalances that would undermine the expansion.
We cannot predict with any assurance how long a growing wealth
effect--more formally, a rise in the ratio of household net worth to
income--will persist, nor do we suspect can anyone else. A
diminution of the wealth effect, I should add, does not mean that
prices of assets cannot keep rising, only that they rise no more than
income.
A critical factor in how the rising wealth effect and its ultimate
limitation will play out in the market place and the economy is the
state of government, especially federal, finances.
The sharp rise in revenues (at a nearly 8 percent annual rate since
1995) has been significantly driven by increased receipts owing to
realized capital gains and increases in compensation directly and
indirectly related to the huge rise in stock prices. Both the
Administration and the Congress have chosen wisely to allow unified
budget surpluses to build and have usefully focused on eliminating
the historically chronic borrowing from social security trust funds
to finance current outlays.
The growing unified budget surpluses have absorbed a good part of
the excess of potential private demand over potential supply. A
continued expansion of the surplus would surely aid in sustaining the
productive investment that has been key to leveraging the
opportunities provided by new technology, while holding down a
further reliance on imports and absorption of the pool of available
workers.
I trust that the recent flurry of increased federal government
outlays, seemingly made easier by the emerging surpluses, is an
aberration. In today's environment of rapid innovation, growing
unified budget surpluses can obviate at least part of the
rebalancing pressures evident in marked increases in real long-term
interest rates.
As I noted at the beginning of my remarks, it may be many years
before we fully understand the nature of the rapid changes currently
confronting our economy. We are unlikely to fully comprehend the
process and its interactions with asset prices until we have been
through a complete business cycle.
Regrettably, we at the Federal Reserve do not have the luxury of
awaiting a better set of insights into this process. Indeed, our
goal, in responding to the complexity of current economic forces, is
to extend the expansion by containing its imbalances and avoiding the
very recession that would complete a business cycle.
If we knew for sure that economic growth would soon be driven wholly
by gains in productivity and growth of the working age population,
including immigration, we would not need to be as concerned about
the potential for inflationary distortions. Clearly, we cannot know
for sure, because we are dealing with world economic forces which are
new and untested.
While we endeavor to find the proper configuration of monetary and
fiscal policies to sustain the remarkable performance of our
economy, there should be no ambiguity on the policies required to
support enterprise and competition.
I believe that we as a people are very fortunate: When confronted
with the choice between rapid growth with its inevitable insecurities
and a stable, but stagnant economy, given time, Americans have chosen
growth. But as we seek to manage what is now this increasingly
palpable historic change in the way businesses and workers create
value, our nation needs to address the associated dislocations that
emerge, especially among workers who see the security of their jobs
and their lives threatened. Societies cannot thrive when significant
segments perceive its functioning as unjust.
It is the degree of unbridled fierce competition within and among
our economies today--not free trade or globalization as such--that is
the source of the unease that has manifested itself, and was on
display in Seattle a month ago. Trade and globalization are merely
the vehicles that foster competition, whose application and benefits
currently are nowhere more evident than here, today, in the United
States.
Confronted face-on, no one likes competition; certainly, I did not
when I was a private consultant vying with other consulting firms.
But the competitive challenge galvanized me and my colleagues to
improve our performance so that at the end of the day we and, indeed,
our competitors, and especially our clients, were more productive.
There are many ways to address the all too real human problems that
are the inevitable consequences of accelerating change. Restraining
competition, domestic or international, to suppress competitive
turmoil is not one of them. That would be profoundly
counterproductive to rising standards of living.
We are in a period of dramatic gains in innovation and technical
change that challenge all of us, as owners of capital, as suppliers
of labor, as voters and policymakers. How well policy can be
fashioned to allow the private sector to maximize the benefits of
innovations that we currently enjoy, and to contain the imbalances
they create, will shape the economic configuration of the first part
of the new century.
- -------------
Also in this issue:
- - UNESCO to Web: Go to Hell (US)
A new multimedia project allows visitors to explore Dante's
700-year-old vision of Hell, purgatory, and Paradise.
- - Virtual education (Canada)
No panty raids or beer chugging as frosh week begins at Canada's
first Internet university
- - Bill's big adventure: Windows as universal Web platform (UK)
Yet another version of Windows? Unsurprisingly the Next Generation
Windows Services plan (strategy is too strong a word, as yet)
Microsoft unveiled yesterday as Bill Gates cashed his chips went
largely unnoticed. But an examination of the admittedly small
quantity of information Microsoft has released so far reveals
something rather larger than some vague vision intended to justify
Gates' new "software architect" role -- this could turn out to be
bigger than anything Microsoft has done so far.
- - The Deaf Can Chat in New Cyber Community (US)
A Kent State University professor has embarked on building a
worldwide cyber community for the deaf, their parents and their
current and future teachers.
- - UK to Offer Radio Internet Licenses by Summer (UK)
LONDON Some say mobile phones are the future of the Internet,
others that it's super-powerful cable, but Friday the British
government offered a third way radio.
- - Alabama chapter of KKK investigated for Web site threat (US)
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- The Mississippi attorney general is
contacting state authorities after discovering an Alabama Klan
group's Web site said he had ``earned a death sentence.''
- - Experts Ponder Netscape's Future (US)
Eclipsed by America Online's proposed acquisition of Time Warner is
Netscape, AOL's previous blockbuster purchase.
- - Greenspan to Economists: (US)
Internet, Growth - Not Inflation - Define the New Century
In a speech that is likely to set the tone for the 21st century,
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan fully endorsed the
internet economy and threw out inflation as a gauge for Federal
Reserve Policy last night. Greenspan uses phrases like "profoundly
different", "awesome" and "remarkable" to discuss a phenomena that
"may well gather speed and force" and become "even more potent". Near
the end, the Chairman hints that Fed policy has shifted to sustaining
growth from containing inflation - in fact, the speech is all the
more remarkable for its lack of inflation mania.
- - New Lists and Journals
* programacion-visual-basic - Programming in Microsoft Visual Basic
in Spanish
* programacion-java - Programming in Java in Spanish
* auditoria-sistemas - Systems Audit in Spanish
On-line Learning Series of Courses
http://www.bestnet.org/~jwalker/course.htm
Member: Association for International Business
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End of Netizens-Digest V1 #351
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