Economics

“Sustainable consumption” is a comprehensive measure of household economic well-being that integrates income, assets, debt, transfers, and rates of return to estimate a feasible lifetime consumption path. Sustainable consumption anchors actual spending, with deviations in one period adjusting back toward the sustainable level in subsequent periods. After the Great Recession, sustainable consumption fell more sharply than actual consumption, in part due to lower real asset returns. Decomposing sustainable consumption into its components reveals primary support from taxable income, but its share has declined while Social Security’s has grown. Substantial differences are also evident across race-ethnicity and educational levels.

We develop adjustments to align the NIPA measures of key household variables with cash flow concepts that reflect household budgets and actual demand generated by households. The adjusted variables have substantially different behaviors across time than NIPA measures of household spending and saving. Furthermore, household income aggregated from micro data sets like the CPS, SCF, and PSID differs significantly from NIPA personal income. But the micro survey data likely reflect cash flow concepts rather than NIPA definitions. Indeed the adjusted cash flow measure of income eliminates much of the gap between micro data income variables and NIPA household income.

Rising inequality reduced income growth for the bottom 95% of the US personal income distribution beginning about 1980. To maintain stable debt to income, this group’s consumption-income ratio needed to decline, which did not happen through 2006, and its debt-income ratio rose dramatically, unlike the ratio for the top 5%. In the Great Recession, the consumption-income ratio for the bottom 95% did finally decline, consistent with tighter borrowing constraints, whilst the top 5% ratio rose, consistent with consumption smoothing. We argue that higher inequality and the associated demand drag helps explain the slow recovery.

The 2008 U.S. financial upheaval raises important questions about the sources of household consumption and debt growth, along with their macroeconomic effects. We argue that spending and financial preferences evolve as social norms interact with both cultural trends and institutional changes in household finance. We identify historical forces that raised consumption and debt over the past quarter century and interpret these events with Hyman Minsky's financial cycle framework. Strong consumption helped moderate recessions and boost growth since the mid 1980s. But unprecedented household debt has now culminated in a financial crisis that threatens to cause a deep recession.

This paper focuses on the role of sweep programs in properly measuring money. We propose new monetary aggregates that adjust the conventional measures to account for the medium of exchange capability of funds in sweep programs. Using data on swept funds in retail and commercial demand deposit (DD) sweep programs, we provide time series of monthly data on the sweep-adjusted money measures. By the twenty-first century, DD sweeps have led to distortion in reported MZM of approximately 3%, 5% for M2, and 6% for M2M. Underreporting of M1 due to retail and DD sweep programs is almost 70%.

This study focuses on sweep programs in establishing conceptually appropriate and reliable measures of narrow money. We propose the aggregates M1RS = M1 + holdings of funds swept in retail sweep programs, and M1S = M1RS + holdings of funds swept in commercial demand deposit sweep programs. Based on quarterly observations from 1959:1-2002:4, cointegration tests indicate the existence of long-run relationships between the velocity of M1S and the corresponding opportunity cost of holding money, using either short-term or long-term interest rates. Tests find weaker evidence for M1RS and little support for MZM.

This paper investigates the effect of sweep programs on M1 using dynamic simulations of money demand over 1994-2000. The postsample period constitutes when sweep programs have been in effect. All models generate predictions systematically above reported M1. Using data on newly initiated programs, test findings indicate that sweeps account for the overprediction within the conventional money demand model with a long-term interest rate. We construct a medium of exchange measure, M1S, equal to M1 plus estimated holdings of sweep balances. M1S velocity compares favorably with that of broader aggregates. Evidence indicates cointegration within M1S money demand.