STICHWORTE: • • • • • • • • • • •von

Demografie doch nicht so relevant?

Bekanntlich halte ich die demografische Entwicklung für einen der bedeutendsten Einflussfaktoren auf Wirtschaft und Kapitalmärkte. Und für den wohl immer am meisten unterschätzten. Die FT kommt zu einer deutlich kritischeren Feststellung. Die Argumentation:

  • Zunächst eine generelle Feststellung, der man nur zustimmen kann: “It would be an understatement to say that economic forecasts are a constant disappointment to investors. The trouble arises because the forecasters’ models are fundamentally flawed. Many are over-reliant on extrapolations of the recent past, (and…) rarely pick up big economic shifts, such as the 1970s oil shock or the rapid rise of China. Such shifts are inherently unpredictable.” – bto: wobei vieles, was als unvorhersehbar angesehen wird – Beispiel Finanzkrise – es sehr wohl ist.
  • “Yet there are some fundamental regime changes that ought to be predictable and which forecasters may now be overlooking. The most obvious, which will be hugely important for capital markets, relates to demography and the impending shrinkage of the global workforce.” – bto: was in der Tat zusammen mit den Folgen der Migration erhebliche Umbrüche bedingt.
  • “The experience of the past 35 years has been one of labour oversupply arising from the postwar baby boom in the advanced economies and the incorporation of the emerging markets into the global economy. This has put downward pressure on wages. At the same time, excessive global saving, notably in Asia and northern Europe, has helped cause low or negative real interest rates.” – bto: was doch durchaus einleuchtet.
  • “Today the baby boomers are retiring, and there is nothing remotely comparable in the pipeline to the addition of China to the global trading system. And China itself is ageing rapidly at a relatively early stage in its development. So a negative labour shock is looming, which coincides with declining fertility. That is a recipe for a shift from disinflation back to inflation.” – bto: Auch das klingt doch erst mal nachvollziehbar.
  • “In a paper for the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank for central banks, Mikael Juselius and Elöd Takáts found a very strong link between trend inflation and the age structure of the population in 22 advanced economies between 1955 and 2014. The larger the proportion of young and old in the total population, the higher the inflation.” – bto: Ich habe das Paper übrigens im Sommer 2015 hier erstmals besprochen: → Demografie – Inflation oder Deflation als Folge alternder Gesellschaften?

Und hier der Link zur Studie: → Can demography affect inflation and monetary policy?

  • “In the US, the baby boomers increased inflation by an estimated six percentage points between 1955 and 1975 and lowered it by five percentage points between 1975 and 1990, when they entered working life. Across the 22 countries in the sample, the age-structure effect explained about five percentage points of the reduction in the average rate of inflation from the late 1970s to the early 2000s.” – bto: Diese Ergebnisse haben bei mir damals zu der Überlegung geführt, dass es tatsächlich zu einer inflationären Tendenz kommen könnte. Ich kann mir diese auch noch in lokalen Dienstleistungsmärkten vorstellen (Handwerker, Gesundheit). Andererseits dürften viele Ältere weiterarbeiten (müssen) und deshalb kann es ausbleiben.
  • “(…) inflation will be about three percentage points higher on average in 40 years from 2016, due to ageing. That, of course, leaves out the delicate question of timing. If the shift comes sooner rather than later, today’s bond market would see a nasty bust.” – bto: was angesichts der hohen Verschuldung eben undenkbar ist.
  • “It is also worth asking what could go wrong with such a forecast. If baby boomers work longer (…) Robotics could provide competition for humans in the labour market, reducing the bargaining power of labour.” – bto: Und genau das wird kommen, die Verhandlungsmacht der Menschen nimmt ab, und zugleich werden immer mehr Ältere auf Einkommen angewiesen sein.
  • “(…) the record of forecasting on the basis of demography has not been impressive. Many in the 1980s forecast less-buoya nt housing markets in the US and UK on the basis of a declining proportion of young people in the population. They were spectacularly wrong. The conventional wisdom in Japan in the 1980s was that ageing would be inflationary, which is not how it has worked so far.” – bto: Das stimmt, allerdings wird jetzt aus Japan abgeleitet, dass es deflationär sein muss. Denke, dieser Schluss ist auch zu früh.
  • “(…) the best case for suggesting a return to inflation is not demographics but debt. It is hard to see how the rise in developed-world public sector debt to astonishingly high levels since the financial crisis can be managed without informal default through inflation.” – bto: Und das bekommen wir nur hin, wenn wir richtig in die Vollen gehen. Mit Helikopter-Geld und Ähnlichem.

→ FT (Anmeldung erforderlich): „The constant disappointment of economic forecasts“, 22. April 2017