One of the worst financial fears most Americans have is being laid off and unfortunately, this is becoming more common. What should you do if this were to happen to you? Here are some steps you can take to deal with the financial implications:
1)File For Unemployment Benefits
The first thing you’ll want to do is replace as much of your income as possible and a good place to start is by filing for unemployment benefits in the state you worked in. How much and how long you’ll collect varies by state but benefits are typically 50% of your previous income up to a cap and generally last about 26 weeks or half a year.
2)Make Sure You’re Covered By Health Insurance
Your income isn’t the only thing you’ll want to replace. You’ll also want to make sure you’re covered by health insurance. If you’re married, see if you can get covered under your spouse’s plan. Another option is to continue your current health insurance under COBRA for 18 to 36 months, but that insurance is likely to be more expensive than what you paid as an employee.
Finally, you can enroll through the Health Insurance Marketplace and possibly qualify for subsidies based on your income. These options have deadlines to enroll after your employment ends so don’t delay. (If you have a health savings account, you can use it to pay health insurance premiums tax-free while you’re collecting unemployment benefits.)
3) Don’t Forget Life Insurance
While it may not feel as urgent, it’s important to make sure your family continues to be protected by life insurance as well. You may be able to continue any coverage you had under your employer if the policy is portable. If not, you can use this calculator to estimate how much insurance you should have and search for low-cost term life insurance policies here.
4) Get A Handle On Your Budget
If you’ve never created a budget or even tracked your expenses, now is the time to start. After all, you may have to live on a reduced income for an indefinite period of time, so you’ll want to watch every penny.
Go through the last three months of your bank and credit card statements and record your expenses on a worksheet like this. Once you know where your money is going, look for places to cut back. Keep in mind that this is only for a limited period of time until you find a new job, so you’ll want to be even more frugal than usual.
If you’re still having trouble making ends meet, make sure you prioritize your rent or mortgage payments, basic utility bills, car payments, and food and medical care over payments on unsecured debt like credit card bills. Keeping a roof over your head, the lights on, your car in the driveway, food on the table, and you and your family healthy are all more important than your credit score. See if you can negotiate an affordable payment plan with your creditors or work with a non-profit credit counseling agency to negotiate for you.
5) Decide What To Do With Your Former Employer’s Retirement Plan
The three basic options are to leave it there (if they let you), cash it out, or roll it into an IRA. Leaving your plan where it is can make sense if you want to keep a unique investment option that you can’t purchase anywhere else or if you have employer stock that you’d like to eventually pay a lower tax rate on the gain.
Cashing out your plan rarely is the best option since you’d have to pay taxes on any pre-tax money plus a 10% penalty if you don’t turn age 55 or older in the year you leave the company. Rolling your account into an IRA can allow you to continue deferring taxes while also providing you more flexibility in how the money is invested and withdrawn.
If you need to tap your savings and are younger than age 55, you’ll generally want to access your non-Roth retirement accounts last. Start with taxable accounts like bank or regular brokerage accounts. Then go to any Roth IRA contributions you have since they can be withdrawn tax-free and penalty-free. However, that’s still just a next-best option since you sacrifice the potential for tax-free growth. Only after those options are exhausted should you consider dipping into retirement accounts that would be subject to taxes plus a 10% early withdrawal penalty.
Of course, the most beneficial thing you can do after a layoff is to find a new job so don’t forget to update your resume, get in touch with your network, brush up on your networking and interviewing skills, and start job hunting. When you do land a job, try to build your emergency savings up to at least three to six months’ worth of necessary expenses. At least now you’ll have a better idea of just how beneficial that is.
I’m a Senior Resident Financial Planner at Financial Finesse, primarily responsible for providing financial education and guidance to employees of our corporate….
If you’ve been on LinkedIn recently, you’ve likely seen posts about someone being laid off or having a dream job offer rescinded, often by a high-profile, once hot startup. According to the tracker Layoffs.fyi, so far this year, 349 startups have laid off more than 53,000 employees.
Startups looking at the prospect of falling venture capital valuations are scrambling to conserve the cash they have. Just yesterday, OpenSea, the early leader in the once bubbly non-fungible token (NFT) market, cut 20% of its workforce. Earlier this month, virtual office startup Gather let a third of its 90 employees go. Last month, high-flying ID verification unicorn Socure laid off 13% of its employees.
And it’s not just startups. Coinbase, the nation’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, laid off 1,100 employees and rescinded some job offers. Elon Musk’s Tesla is cutting 3.5% of its workforce. Meta has plans to slash hiring of engineers this year by at least 30%.While most of the layoff news has come from tech companies, the mortgage industry, too, has been slashing away as higher interest rates crush mortgage volume.
Despite such high-profile layoffs, unemployment remained at a low 3.6% in June as the economy added 372,000 jobs. Moreover, interviews with recent job–or job offer–losers, as well as hiring managers, suggest that so far at least, most of those cut are landing on their feet with new offers.
Yet the sense of dread is unmistakable, with more consumers now pessimistic than optimistic about the short-term labor market, according to the Conference Board. And the layoffs could just be getting started: Oracle recently considered letting go of thousands of employees as early as August.
“In the tech industry, this is dejà vu all over again,” observes economist Anthony Carnevale, who has been involved with employment and education policy for four decades and is now director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
“This is pretty much precisely what happened in the late 1970s, early 80s, when technology was not penetrating American industry rapidly enough and [former Fed Chair] Paul Volcker put on the brakes. We get high interest rates, high unemployment rates, and basically that shuts down technology investment and secondly, it chokes the industry.”
Given the current low unemployment rates, Carnevale adds, it’s still a question whether the slowdown will ultimately “create dislocation of substantial sorts in tech or any other industry.” His answer? “Yes and no,” he says. “The yes is yes, specific technology-based industries might be affected, interest rates being the culprit here. But what we’re seeing in the churn is that people who are seeking jobs are getting jobs.
And we haven’t come to the point yet where it’s a classic recession…in which people don’t get jobs.” He noted that in general, wages are increasing — though those increases are generally offset by inflation.“So what does that mean going forward? It may mean a slowdown in startups and in the expansion of particular technology companies, in even the overall industry if it’s strong enough, but so far, it has not meant that people can’t find jobs,” Carnevale said.
“And it does not reflect on the possibilities for college graduates, at least so far, we don’t really see that.” Indeed, a recent survey of almost 200 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that almost 90% of respondents will be hiring new graduates for both full-time and intern/co-op positions — up from last spring’s figure of 83%.
But while early-career recruiting is still strong, it can’t erase the memory of what happened in the wake of the Great Recession, with its large jobs loss and unusually slow recovery. Some new grads caught in the undertow experienced what economists call “permanent scarring”—meaning poor economic conditions when they graduated from college contributed to a long-term reduction in their employment prospects.
Again, that’s the scary prospect, but not, as of now, the reality. Aidan Deery, associate director at the global talent partner X4 Technology, reports that among tech companies, “largely, everyone is still hiring” and “the demand for experienced professionals is at an all-time high.” He adds that those laid off from crypto companies like Coinbase are generally “very employable” and “highly sought after in the finance and technology world.”
Danny, 23, whose last name and former employer are not being included due to a nondisclosure agreement he signed, was let go in June from his engineering job at a sales productivity company. “I know I’ll be able to find a job,” he said, estimating that of the roughly 30 jobs he applied to since being laid off, 8-10 got back to him. “Three of them actually were like, ‘Yeah, just kidding, we’re not hiring for this role.’”
Some of the other companies he started interviewing with stopped the process because of hiring freezes. However, Danny has already turned down one offer for reasons including the pay, and says he is still being picky in his job search.
Curio Health, a startup working to improve remote patient care, is among the companies still hiring. CEO Yuchen Wang worries that layoffs among startups may encourage job seekers to look to more established companies for future opportunities, but insists startups will retain their appeal because, “you take a broader responsibility, and you can grow faster and learn more.”
Wang has seen both sides of this job-cutting drama. He himself lost his job in 2001, shortly after earning a Masters in computer science at Georgia State, and in a later role, had to lay off employees himself because a contract did not pan out as well as expected. “These things kind of happen, even if you do everything 100% perfectly,’’ he says. “Treat it as a new start — there are more opportunities ahead than the one you just lost.”
Still, for some job-losers, the new start carries a unique challenge–one imposed by the U.S.’ dysfunctional system for retaining foreign tech talent. Twenty-seven-year-old software developer Amitesh Singh Baghel was laid off in late June while on STEM OPT, a visa program allowing graduate international students to gain work experience in the U.S. in their field. The catch: he lost his job as a software engineer at a data security startup before he completed his visa extension — about two weeks before his employment authorization document was set to expire.
He had been offered other jobs while working there but turned them down out of “goodwill” and because his manager, who also was let go, provided good mentorship. “I had other offers coming, but I chose to stay ignoring the red flags,” such as a manager being fired and not replaced, he said.
“I tried to negotiate. I was like, ‘Instead of giving me the severance pay, keep me on the payroll so that I can finish with the extension process and I’ll still work,’” he said. “I offered them a solution…but they didn’t want to do the extra work, which is understandable. I mean, it’s not their problem.”
And then there’s the experience of Jenna Radwan, 22, who recently earned her BS in Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the University of San Francisco. She originally accepted a job at San Francisco-based startup Hirect, which helps other tech startups recruit and hire.
When she heard Hirect would pay her a base salary of $80,000 plus uncapped commission that could push her total compensation to a multiple of that, she cut short other interviews to accept the offer, “My ears perked up, my eyes got big, and I didn’t even see any of the other companies as even close competition,” she said. But two weeks before her start date, Radwan got thrown a curveball. Her offer had been rescinded “due solely to the current unforeseen circumstances & drastic turn in the market.”
“Due to the very volatile market conditions, the business & leadership team has decided to halt/freeze all forms of external hiring at this time, and we have entered an immediate hiring freeze and a round of layoffs,” reads an email from a recruiter that Radwan shared on LinkedIn. (A spokesman for Hirect confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that it had rescinded two job offers due to the slump in tech hiring.)
Radwan was “in shock,” but quickly tapped into her network and reached out to recruiters she’d previously been in the process of interviewing with, and ultimately landed a job as a recruiter at Insight Global. “It was a wild ride but I know that I’m exactly where I am meant to be,” Radwan said, adding that she hadn’t really considered her values in terms of a career before then. “I just thought of money, but I realized that you can have money plus other things, like good company culture, like good job security, like good benefits, like good PTO,” she said.
Her advice for recent grads entering the job market amid the growing fear of offers being rescinded? Do your research, ask questions like how the company reacted to COVID in 2020 (i.e. was it quick to lay off workers?), talk to current employees and take time to weigh all your offers.
If you’re looking for an indication of the current gestalt, it may come from Radwan’s new employer. Insight Global is still hiring. But in June, it surveyed 1,000 workers and found 23% were “extremely worried” about losing their job in the next recession. Or, as Insight put it, the “Great Resignation” is giving way to the “Great Apprehension.”
Katherine Huggins is an editorial intern for Forbes Money and Markets. Before joining Forbes, Katherine covered media and politics as a reporter at Mediaite…
Vanguard, others predict bonds will rival single-digit returns on stocks; best bets are overseas.The era of big returns on stocks is over. It’s time for investors to recalibrate their expectations. That’s what many Wall Street firms and advisors are telling their clients.
Look for lower returns from U.S. stocks during the next decade compared with what has historically been the case, and expect U.S. bond returns that are on a par with equities. The best returns are projected for overseas stocks and bonds. Returns from most asset classes are projected to be positive.
“The next 10 years will be different than the last 10 years,” says Jim Masturzo, partner and chief investment officer of multi-asset strategies at Newport Beach, California-based Research Affiliates. “It will be more normal.”
Expect Single-Digit U.S. Stock Returns
With inflation at the highest levels in 40 years, against a backdrop of rising interest rates and a decline in valuations, long-term returns for U.S. equities are projected to be in the low- to mid single-digit territory. That’s compared with a historical yearly average of 12%-13% before inflation, and well below the nearly 16% average annual returns of the past decade.
This is clearly a whole new world to which investors are unaccustomed after decades of low inflation and the near-zero interest rates of the past 10 years. “Returns will be more muted compared with history and especially the past two years, especially for equities,” says Roger Aliaga-Diaz, head of portfolio construction and chief Americas economist at The Vanguard Group.
Bond Returns to Rival Stocks
On the brighter side, bonds are seen giving equities a run for their money, as fixed-income returns are projected to rival those of stocks.
“Bond market returns could equal equity returns with less risk,” says Joseph Carson, economic consultant and former chief economist at AllianceBernstein. Returns on stocks in the next decade will appear “minuscule” at 4%-5%, he says, mainly because “equity returns for three of the last four decades were far above average.”
Stocks benefited from declining inflation and lower bond yields in the 1980s. Stable inflation and expectations of “a new era of long cycles of growth and earnings” pushed stock returns higher in the 1990s. And “in the decade ending 2020 it was zero rates and inflated market multiples” that led to outsize gains in stocks, says Carson.
The Lost Decade
The outlier decade proved to be 2000 through 2009, a period that included the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as well as two punishing recessions and accompanying bear markets that dragged down returns and set the stage for easy money conditions. In what became known as the Lost Decade, stocks delivered a negative annualized total return of 0.95%, the only decade outside the Great Depression in which total returns for the period were negative.
At the start of the decade, a bubble in technology, telecommunications, and media stocks burst, resulting in a recession and the bear market of 2000-02, when stocks fell nearly 50%.
Not long afterward came the global financial crisis of 2007-09, precipitated by a housing meltdown brought about by banks and mortgage companies extending credit and making nontraditional interest-only and adjustable-rate loans to high-risk borrowers that were then packaged into mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations and sold as stable and safe investments.
With home prices skyrocketing, the Federal Reserve started raising rates to cool the market, which prompted a wave of mortgage defaults and a subsequent liquidity crisis. The result: the deepest and longest-lasting recession since World War II. Stocks fell about 55%. The unemployment rate more than doubled.
The interventions to rescue the financial system and the economy during the crisis introduced ultraloose monetary policies that were reintroduced more recently during the pandemic crisis of 2020, creating a boom in asset prices and driving inflation to the highest levels since the 1980s. Aiming to rein in spiraling prices, the Fed has boosted the federal-funds rate six times this year at an aggressive pace and plans to continue until it sees clear signs that inflation is abating and heading back to its target rate of 2% from more than 8%.
That’s driven up yields on bonds, driving their prices lower, and sent stocks sliding. No one expects inflation and interest rates to stay at current levels over the next 10 years, but they will be at higher levels than has been the case in the past decade. And that will affect valuations.
The Case for Bonds
“Definitely, the case for bonds in the portfolio is coming back,” says Aliaga-Diaz of Vanguard. “Higher yields make the case for bonds stronger.” Over the next 10 years, Vanguard is forecasting annualized nominal returns, that is before adjusting for inflation, on U.S. equities of 4.7%-6.7% and U.S. bonds at 4.1%-5.1%.
Research Affiliates projects annualized nominal returns on U.S. equities of 2.3% over the next decade. Its forecast for U.S. bonds is 5.1% on an annualized nominal basis. Morningstar Investment Management projects U.S. stocks will deliver 5.5% in annualized nominal returns and 4.8% for U.S. bonds.
Of course, stock and bond returns will vary from year to year, but these long-term annualized forecasts provide a gauge that helps firms construct diversified asset-allocation portfolios that can be tailored to optimize returns for different risk tolerances.
Investment firms also calculate these projections in real terms, which means they factor inflation into their models in addition to other variables such as valuations, earnings growth estimates, and dividend yields to obtain a more accurate assessment of potential total returns. Still, it has become standard practice for firms to issue forecasts in nominal terms because that is what is reflected in client accounts.
As Vanguard’s Aliaga-Diaz explains: “If you start with a $1,000 investment in 2022 and your portfolio returns 10% in nominal terms in 2023, your account will be $1,100. In real terms, your account would be worth $1,080 measured in 2022 dollars.”
Many investors may be gun-shy about embracing bonds, burned by steep double-digit losses this year in their portfolios at a time when stocks fell into a bear market.
The popular investment strategy of structuring portfolios with a mix of 60% stocks and 40% bonds to achieve attractive risk-adjusted returns with lower volatility, the so-called 60/40 portfolio, failed to provide the diversification and balance that made it a tried-and-true investment approach for so long, delivering 10.6% average annual returns for the past 40 years.
The Morningstar US Moderate Target Allocation Index, which serves as a benchmark for the 60/40 strategy, is down 17.53% this year, while the Morningstar US Market Index is down more than 21%. But what worked so well for so long will work again, say strategists.
“There is a fear and concern that what we saw this year with stocks and bonds coming down together represents a new regime,” says Aliaga-Diaz. “But we will get back to the normal relationship.”
That view has been echoed by others, including Morgan Stanley’s chief cross-asset strategist Andrew Sheets, who has forecast a 10-year annualized return of 6.2% for the strategy. “While we do expect the 60/40 portfolio to deliver lower risk-adjusted returns compared with those over the last four decades, that doesn’t mean it is broken,” he wrote in a report issued this summer.
Starting Points Matter
A key driver of these forecasts comes down to prices: Lower prices point to higher implied returns. “Starting prices matter,” says Philip Straehl, global head of research and investment management at Morningstar Investment Management. “U.S. valuations have improved dramatically in the last 12 months. There’s been significant repricing in the U.S. equity markets.”
That’s even more true internationally, where stocks have had the added burden of coping with the strong U.S. dollar and weakened local currencies on top of inflation and rising rates. Strategists say developed and emerging markets represent the best opportunities for the highest returns.
Morningstar Investment Management forecasts stocks in developed international countries will return 9.4% annualized over the next decade. For emerging markets, the expectations are even rosier at 11.8%. Vanguard’s outlook for stocks in developed international countries is for annualized total returns of 7.2%-9.2%, and 7%-9% in emerging-markets equities. Research Affiliates is forecasting 13.1% returns annualized for emerging markets over the next 10 years and 12.6% annualized for developed international markets.
“Our recommendation would be to look outside the U.S.,” says John Thorndike, co-head of asset allocation at Boston-based investment manager GMO, which bases its outlook on a seven-year investing time frame. “If you are going to take equity risk, take the bulk of it in non-U.S. value stocks. We think you should take the risk. These stocks are attractive.”
A woman shops for chicken at a supermarket in Santa Monica, California, on September 13.Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images
The last year of inflation has disproportionately hurt low-incomeand nonwhite families — those with the least flexibility in their monthly budgets to absorb higher prices. Now those same groups could be hurt by economic policymakers’ plan to tackle inflation through interest rate hikes, and in potentially longer-lasting ways.
Last month, leaders at the Federal Reserve predicted that, given their plans to continue raising rates, unemployment would rise from 3.7 percent (or 6 million people) to 4.4 percent by the end of 2023. In plain terms, this means an additional 1.2 million people would lose their jobs over the 15-month period. “I wish there was a painless way to do that,” Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell had said. “There isn’t.”
Other financial analysts projected even higher unemployment to result. Bank of America predicted unemployment would reach 5.6 percent by the end of 2023, translating to 3.2 million more people out of their jobs. Researchers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in September that unemployment may need to reach as high as 7.5 percent to curb inflation, which would mean roughly 6 million people losing work.
The Federal Reserve raises interest rates to slow down consumption across the economy: As the cost of borrowing rises, the hope is that people buy fewer things, and prices stop spiraling higher. The latest data shows inflation still up roughly 8 percent compared to a year ago, and recent reporting in the New York Times suggests Fed leaders may even raise rates more aggressively into 2023 than they had previously envisioned.
The question is whether the Federal Reserve will be able to hit the brakes when they decide they’ve done enough — or whether it will be too late, and the economy will be hurtling downhill toward a recession that the Fed created but can’t control.
“One thing that’s a very open debate and a very important subtext to all the fights is the question of whether the Fed can actually increase unemployment just a little,” said Mike Konczal, the director of Macroeconomic Analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “And with every million who lose their jobs, it’s that much harder to reintegrate them [into the labor force] later on.”
Stabilizing the economy, Konczal said, is like mending a garment. “You can pull at the threads, but if it tears you can’t just push it all back,” he said. “That’s certainly what keeps me very nervous, that the Fed is so worried it underreacted last year [to inflation] that now it might overreact.”
Some economic experts and journalists are asking if the current pain of inflation outweighs the suffering of a potential recession, and if there are less blunt tools the federal government could be leveraging instead.
“To have a smaller paycheck due to inflation, is that really worse than having no paycheck at all?” Today, Explained host Noel King asked Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari last week. “There’s not an easy answer,” Kashkari acknowledged, ultimately arguing that unemployment affects fewer people than inflation, and it’s easier for the government to target assistance to those who might be hurt.
But higher unemployment and recessions don’t just affect those who lose their jobs, and the assumption that the government would be willing or even able to provide targeted assistance to those pushed out of the labor market beyond the maximum six months of traditional (and relatively meager) unemployment benefits seems highly uncertain, given how Democrats’ more generous pandemic stimulus policies have been blamed for contributing to inflation in the first place.
Experts say the country still lacks the infrastructure to deliver more targeted aid, and with Democrats barely even mounting a defense of their pandemic assistance, whether there’s political oxygen — let alone technological capacity — to help those in a recession remains unclear.
On top of all this, if rate hikes do push millions more people out of work, those who would likely bear the biggest brunt of that job loss and take the longest to recover are the same groups suffering most now from inflation: low-income workers, workers with less education, and people of color.
Missing a “soft landing” means millions more people could lose their jobs
The workers who are most vulnerable to near-term layoffs work in construction and mortgage lending, and sell products like TVs and cars. These are so-called “interest-sensitive” industries, particularly responsive to changes in interest rates and borrowing costs. The next hit would be those working in firms that are particularly exposed to financial speculation — like traders and tech companies built around equity valuation.
The Federal Reserve’s goal is to achieve a so-called “soft landing” — meaning they want to lower inflation without throwing the economy into a recession.
Earlier this year Powell, the Fed chair, explained their goal was to make it harder for people to switch jobs, since job-switching and the fierce competition to hire workers were driving up wages. In this scenario, maybe a business eyeing higher interest rates would post fewer new jobs or decide not to fill vacant roles.
Maybe an employee would see the hiring landscape as less friendly and decide to stay put. “The idea is there’s a whole lot of activity happening that we don’t see by just looking at the unemployment rate,” said Konczal, of the Roosevelt Institute. “So in this scenario, where it becomes harder to switch to new jobs, the economy still cools without unemployment going up.”
Konczal says there’s some evidence that Powell’s “soft landing” argument has been bearing out over the past two months — the number of new job openings has slowed, as have the number of workers voluntarily switching to take another job. Wage data expected at the end of October should provide a clearer picture of where things stand.
But many experts are pessimistic that inflation can really come down without driving up unemployment, and say that if the Federal Reserve wants to see a genuine drop in prices it will have to force layoffs in less “interest-sensitive” industries, even if that increases the risk of a recession. Fewer people simply work in interest-sensitive fields like manufacturing than they did decades ago.
“That’s where face-to-face services like hospitality start to take the hit,” said Josh Bivens, the research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Recessions can have big multiplier effects. Layoffs typically start in construction and then radiate onward, and things can get pretty bad if you have a big spiral.”
It’s harder for less educated, low-income, and nonwhite people to find work after layoffs
While some policymakers are trying to figure out if they could reduce inflation while keeping unemployment around 4 or 5 percent, other economists are sounding the alarm on what even this optimistic aggregate figure obscures — the unemployment rate for Black people is generally double that of white people, and for Hispanic people it’s typically 1.5 times the rate.
In one recent study, researchers found that lowering interest rates disproportionately helped the employment prospects for Black workers, women, and those without a high school diploma. It makes sense — if employers are facing increased competition for labor, they may be less likely to discriminate in the hiring process. Relatedly, over the past year, workers with criminal recordsand workers with disabilities were more in demand than they have been, as employers struggled to fill vacancies.
“It’s just a truism that when bad things happen in an economy, it’s the marginalized people, the people with less power, who are hurt fastest and most,” said Wendy Edelberg, the director of the Hamilton Project, an economics division within the Brookings Institution. “That should be fiscal policymakers’ laser focus, at all times but particularly in a downturn.”
The government is less likely to offer aid to workers who lose their jobs
The investments kept millions out of poverty and evictions below historic averages, and are credited generally with helping the economy rebound much faster than following past downturns, and more quickly than other nations that had less robust stimulus policies.
But now Republicans have latched onto that federal aid as one of the top reasons inflation is at its highest point in four decades. They blame the Biden administration for putting too much money in people’s pockets, allowing them to spend too much and drive up prices. Some argue the American Rescue Plan was simply too big, or not targeted enough to those who really needed help. Economists disagree over how much the pandemic policies are to blame but Democrats, notably, are not touting their investments on the campaign trail, as voters cite inflation as a top election concern.
Republicans are expected to win control of the House, and Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy has for months attacked Democrats’ Covid policies for driving inflation. This raises the question: If the economy does spiral and workers lose their jobs or their workable hours, what kind of assistance might they expect to receive in that scenario?
“It’s one of the reasons I’m so worried about the Fed potentially overshooting, that we just won’t do that much to help people since we’re told that helping people too generously is what got us into this mess,” said Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. “I think that’s wrong, but I’m still totally worried about this dynamic.” Bivens also warned that if Republicans control Congress, it might be in their interest to prolong economic hardship ahead of the next presidential election.
“If the Fed slips the economy into recession, what kinds of tools and political capital will be available? That’s a real concern that we aren’t talking about and aren’t being honest with ourselves,” said Mark Paul, an economist at Rutgers who has argued raising rates is the wrong response to the inflation crisis. “In the pandemic, policymakers reacted in a far better way than they have in our lifetime, where, rather than the economy taking 10 years to get to pre-Covid levels, it essentially took 1.5 years. The narrative now is that the government overshot, but the question is what were the other options and what would those have led to?”
Edelberg of the Hamilton Project said if there is a downturn, she hopes we can get “targeted relief” to those most in crisis, so that it only has modest effects on inflation. “We should do that with eyes wide open — knowing it will boost aggregate demand a little bit and that will be okay because a policy should have more than one objective,” she said.
Edelberg acknowledged the country isn’t exactly positioned to distribute targeted relief — the nation’s unemployment insurance system remains in need of serious upgrades. “We should be improving the system so we can find the people who need to get the money, so we don’t need to do things like send checks to everyone,” she said. “We do not have that infrastructure now because we haven’t really valued it.”
Slow wage growth affects even those who keep their jobs
It took 10 years after the Great Recession for wages to finally start rising, long after unemployment had gone back down. Part of this was fueled by stateand local minimum wage increases, but part of it, experts believe, was due to a finally tightening economy.
Workers have enjoyed increased power over the past two years amid the even tighter post-pandemic labor market. Wages have gone up, especially for workers at the lower end of the income spectrum, and especially among those who switched their jobs. In 2021, wages grew by 4.5 percent on average, the fastest rate in almost four decades.
Now that we’re finally seeing broad-based gains in the economy, progressive economists warn that aggressive Fed policy could make those raises disappear. One major risk of a recession is slowed wage growth, which can impact everyone, not just those who lose their jobs. Even modest economic downturns can significantly reduce the chance of employers handing out raises.
The Federal Reserve has been explicit that its goal is to reach 2 percent inflation — meaning prices would continue to rise in that scenario, just hopefully more slowly and predictably. But if wages are not also rising, then families will still feel worse off and struggle to afford basic necessities.
“This wage growth angle is, by far, the most important reason why just looking at the rise of unemployment in a recession is a radical understatement of how many workers are adversely affected by recessions,” Bivens wrote in July.
One big fear for inflation watchers is the risk of a so-called “wage spiral” — a scenario where wage increases cause price increases, which in turn cause more wage increases. The concern isn’t baseless; wage spirals have happened before, most notably in the US in the 1970s, but it’s certainly not an inevitability. The labor movement was also much stronger four decades ago — over a third were unionized compared to 6 percent of private sector workers today — giving workers the kind of bargaining power they simply lack now.
Fears of a wage spiral have been dissipating somewhat. Wage growth is still higher than pre-Covid levels but has been slowing down this year. Earlier this month, researchers with the IMF concluded that wage spiral risks “appear contained” for now.
What else could be done?
Some economists and writers have warned that raising interest rates further is unlikely to curb some of the root causes of inflation — such as the war in Ukraine and factory shutdowns — and that inflation would come down next year regardless as supply chains get back on track.Others say more attention should be on things like investigating corporations for raising their prices far beyond the cost increases for raw materials.
The House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy held a hearing on these concerns in late September, and three Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill in May that would seek to ban price gouging during market disruptions. Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, pointed to what he called “an extraordinary increase in profit shares in a relatively short period” — rising from 23.9 percent in 2019 to 26 percent in the second quarter of this year.
Some centrist and conservative analysts have framed higher unemployment and a possible recession as simply a necessary if regrettable stage in the life cycle of an economy, almost like a biological reset. “The Fed’s rate hikes will hurt,” said the right-leaning Washington Post editorial board. “That’s unavoidable.”
But “the idea that severe recessions are necessary is absolutely not true,” said Konczal. “That’s the whole point of having a Federal Reserve and macroeconomics. And the idea that recessions are somehow regenerative and healing to the economy is also wrong.”
Whether one needs higher-than-expected unemployment or lower-than-existing GDP to bring down inflation is not really clear. “People are not sure if that’s true,” said Konczal. “It’s a small sample size, and we have only so many economies that you can test.”
Others have argued that fiscal policy — as opposed to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy — demands more attention to combat inflation. (Fiscal policy refers to a government’s decision to tax and spend, whereas monetary policy is about a central bank’s control over the flow of money and credit.) Fiscal policy can be more targeted, but it can also be difficult to pass through the legislative process, and take far longer to have an economic effect.
For example, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) has called for a “production agenda” that would involve new investments in child care, housing, and community college to bring down prices and train Americans to work. These strategies, if successful, would take years however to trickle out. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) similarly argued this past summer that Congress investing in child care would help bring more parents into the workforce, which could counteract inflation, though pouring more money into child care amid a worker shortage, conversely, could also worsen it.
In August, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) introduced a bill that would place price controls on utilities, food, and housing, bolster the scope of the White House supply chain disruption task force, and authorize better data collection on corporate profiteering. (Price controls are controversial, and led to soaring prices after they were lifted in the 1970s.)
Paul, the Rutgers economist, helped advise Bowman on his bill and told Vox that he believes the Federal Reserve is not taking seriously its dual congressional mandate for both price stability and maximum employment. “Right now the Fed seems to be focused on price stability at all costs,” Paul said. “Full employment be damned.”
Small retailers shop for dry fruits in a wholesale market, in New Delhi, Oct. 10, 2022. A record drop in the rupee -- on top of higher raw material and shipping costs - has made the nuts much costlier for Indian consumers. Manish Swarup—AP
The cost of living in Cairo has soared so much that security guard Mustafa Gamal had to send his wife and year-old daughter to live with his parents in a village 70 miles south of the Egyptian capital to save money. Gamal, 28, stayed behind, working two jobs, sharing an apartment with other young people and eliminating meat from his diet. “The prices of everything have been doubled,” he said. “There was no alternative.”
Around the world, people are sharing Gamal’s pain and frustration. An auto parts dealer in Nairobi, a seller of baby clothes in Istanbul and a wine importer in Manchester, England, have the same complaint: A surging U.S. dollar makes their local currencies weaker, contributing to skyrocketing prices for everyday goods and services. This is compounding financial distress at a time when families are already facing food and energy crunches tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“A strong dollar makes a bad situation worse in the rest of the world,’’ says Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University. Many economists worry that the sharp rise of the dollar is increasing the likelihood of a global recession sometime next year.
The dollar is up 18% this year and last month hit a 20-year high, according to the benchmark ICE U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the dollar against a basket of key currencies.
The reasons for the dollar’s rise are no mystery. To combat soaring U.S. inflation, the Federal Reserve has raised its benchmark short-term interest rate five times this year and is signaling more hikes are likely. That has led to higher rates on a wide range of U.S. government and corporate bonds, luring investors and driving up the U.S. currency.
Most other currencies are much weaker by comparison, especially in poor countries. The Indian rupee has dropped nearly 10% this year against the dollar, the Egyptian pound 20%, the Turkish lira an astounding 28%.
Celal Kaleli, 60, sells infant clothing and diaper bags in Istanbul. Because he needs more lira to buy imported zippers and liners priced in dollars, he has to raise prices for the Turkish customers who struggle to pay him in the much-diminished local currency.
“We’re waiting for the new year,” he said. “We’ll look into our finances, and we’ll downsize accordingly. There’s nothing else we can do.”
Ordinarily, countries could get some benefit from falling currencies because it makes their products cheaper and more competitive overseas. But at the moment, any gain from higher exports is muted because economic growth is sputtering almost everywhere.
A rising dollar is causing pain overseas in a number of ways:
— It makes other countries’ imports more expensive, adding to existing inflationary pressures.
— It squeezes companies, consumers and governments that borrowed in dollars. That’s because more local currency is needed to convert into dollars when making loan payments.
— It forces central banks in other countries to raise interest rates to try and prop up their currencies and keep money from fleeing their borders. But those higher rates also weaken economic growth and drive up unemployment.
Put simply: “The dollar’s appreciation is bad news for the global economy,’’ says Capital Economics’ Ariane Curtis. “It is another reason why we expect the global economy to fall into recession next year.’’
In a gritty neighborhood of Nairobi known for fixing cars and selling auto parts, businesses are struggling and customers unhappy. With the Kenyan shilling down 6% this year, the cost of fuel and imported spare parts is soaring so much that some people are choosing to ditch their cars and take public transportation.
“This has been the worst,” said Michael Gachie, purchasing manager with Shamas Auto Parts. “Customers are complaining a lot.’’
Gyrating currencies have caused economic pain around the world many times before. During the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, for instance, Indonesian companies borrowed heavily in dollars during boom times — then were wiped out when the Indonesian rupiah crashed against the dollar. A few years earlier, a plunging peso delivered similar pain to Mexican businesses and consumers.
The soaring dollar in 2022 is uniquely painful, however. It is adding to global inflationary pressures at a time when prices were already soaring. Disruptions to energy and agriculture markets caused by the Ukraine war magnified supply constraints stemming from the COVID-19 recession and recovery.
In Manila, Raymond Manaog, 29, who drives the colorful Philippine mini-bus known as a jeepney, complains that inflation — and especially the rising price of diesel — is forcing him to work more to get by.
“What we have to do to earn enough for our daily expenses,” he said. “If before we traveled our routes five times, now we do it six times.”
In the Indian capital New Delhi, Ravindra Mehta has thrived for decades as a broker for American almond and pistachio exporters. But a record drop in the rupee — on top of higher raw material and shipping costs — has made the nuts much costlier for Indian consumers.
In August, India imported 400 containers of almonds, down from 1,250 containers a year earlier, Mehta said.“If the consumer is not buying, it affects the entire supply chain, including people like me,’’ he said.
Kingsland Drinks, one of the United Kingdom’s biggest wine bottlers, was already getting squeezed by higher costs for shipping containers, bottles, caps and energy. Now, the rocketing dollar is driving up the price of the wine it buys from vineyards in the United States — and even from Chile and Argentina, which like many countries rely on the dollar for global trade.
Kingsland has offset some of its currency costs by taking out contracts to buy dollars at a fixed price. But at some point, “those hedges run out and you have to reflect the reality of a weaker sterling against the U.S. dollar,” said Ed Baker, the company’s managing director.
Translation: Soon customers will just have to pay more for their wine.
The surge in the value of the US dollar against other major currencies under the impact of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hike is raising concerns about its effect both on the financial system and the global economy.
According to an index compiled by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the dollar has risen 13 percent this year against a basket of currencies. But the movement is even more marked in relation to other major currencies.
So far this year the dollar has risen 17 percent against the pound, sending the British currency to its lowest point since 1985.
The Japanese yen has fallen to its lowest against the dollar in 24 years, amid expectations that its precipitous slide will go further, prompting hints from the government that official intervention may be necessary. The euro is now trading at below parity against the US currency for the first time since its launch in 1999.
Warnings about the continued dollar surge are being sounded in the financial press. Over the weekend the Financial Times (FT) published an editorial comment under the headline “Currency shifts add to global woes.”
It said that in the midst of an energy crisis and the highest inflation in four decades the “global economy is also being rattled by big realignments in exchange rates.” Under conditions of war in the Ukraine, the European energy crisis and concerns over how some emerging markets will manage high oil and food prices, there was a move to seek security in US assets, which are regarded as “the least unsafe option.”
The surging US dollar, which is fueling price hikes in the rest of the world via imported goods, is one of the factors driving interest rate hikes by central banks, particularly in Europe.
For so-called emerging market economies in addition to rising food and energy prices, the rise in the dollar increases the burden of dollar-denominated debt and threatens to spark capital outflows. According to the International Monetary Fund, around 20 emerging markets have debt now trading at “distressed” levels. This proportion can be expected to rise.
The WSJ noted that because the dollar is at the centre of world financial markets its rise can have unforeseen consequences. Investors and policy makers, it said, were being forced to “consider history’s unkind lessons…….to be continued
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