Private-sector leverage says that it’s not Bill Clinton

What’s your answer? “Thinking about the past few decades… to the best of your knowledge, which ONE of the following U.S. Presidents do you think did the best job of managing the economy?”

  • Bill Clinton
  • Ronald Reagan
  • Barack Obama
  • Lyndon B. Johnson
  • George W. Bush
  • Richard Nixon

That’s question #11 of the the Allstate-National Journal Heartland poll. 42% of the 1201 adults polled last month answered Bill Clinton.

I wonder why near half of those polled think that Clinton did the best job of “managing the economy”. Using one simple metric, private-sector financial leverage (accumulated dissaving), Clinton ranks among the top three worst economic managers, behind George Bush (Jr.) and Ronald Reagan.

The chart illustrates private-sector leverage as a stock of debt to GDP indexed to the start of each Presidential term. Therefore, the numbers are not the debt ratios, rather the appreciation of the debt ratios since the onset of each President’s term. The data are from the Fed’s Flow of Funds Accounts.

The sector financial balances model of aggregate demand posits that fiscal policy must shift in order to normalize GDP amid deviations of the private-sector surplus (desire to save) and the current account (see Scott Fullwiler’s article on the sector financial balances model of aggregate demand, which references similar work by Bill Mitchell and Rob Parenteau; or you can see last week’s answers and discussion to Bill Mitchell’s quiz for a simple outline).

When the private sector is levering up, the public sector is not doing its job. Since the 1990’s, the private sector loaded up on debt (ran private-sector deficits) in order to maintain GDP closer to full employment in the face of shrinking government deficits relative to those of the current account (since 1991 the current account trended down as a % of GDP). Deregulation, of course, contributed as well.

According to this metric, Barack Obama ranks highest to date, thanks to the automatic stabilizers and the ARRA. But we’ll see what happens when 2011 rolls around: the waning stimulus will drag economic growth; the Congressional tides may turn; and the immediacy of the crisis continues to fade. Unless firms start to “dissave” and pass on profits to households via hiring and wage growth, we may be in for a rocky ride, since the household desire to save will hover at very high levels for years to come (see David Beckworth’s post on the growing mismatch between mortgage debt load and real estate valuations).

Rebecca Wilder