The Market And Energy Page, T+37 -- February 27, 2018

Wow, this is so cool. I said this would happen -- I can't remember if I posted it or merely mentioned it in an e-mail to a reader, but I suspected this would happen. The WSJ is reporting that dividends are climbing amid competition from bonds.

More than a fifth of the S&P 500 have boosted their payouts this year, but higher bond yields threaten to diminish the allure of high-dividend stocks.

More than a fifth of the companies in the S&P 500 have boosted their dividends to shareholders so far this year, while none have slashed their payouts, a first since 2011, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. The increases are getting bigger too, with companies on average raising their payouts by 14%, the biggest jump since 2014.

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Barack Obama And Slow Growth

Is Barack Obama to blame for slow growth? That's the question The WSJ is asking. President Donald Trump’s economists may be right about the direction of President Barack Obama's policies but wrong about the magnitude, according to this article.

A quick reading suggests that the writer is either an apologist for Obama or at least trying to "justify" Obama's actions. The author seems to be saying exactly what we've all been saying for years, to explain how Obama crippled the US economy. Obama's motives seem unclear to many. For those folks, all I can say is, they need to replace their "Chuck Schumer" filters on their reading glasses.

The article begins:

One of the great economic puzzles of the last decade is why growth since the last recession has been so weak. Last week, President Donald Trump’s economic team pointed the finger at President Barack Obama.

There’s a tradeoff between growth and fairness, and Mr. Obama erred too far in favor of the latter, argued Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers its first Economic Report of the President.

Mr. Obama’s “efforts to strike a new optimum on the frontier of social protection and economic growth may have sacrificed too much of the latter in pursuit of the former,” the report declares. The typical household earned less in 2016 than in 2001 and “Obama’s tax and transfer policies worsened the wound,” Kevin Hassett, the council’s chairman, told reporters.

Mr. Hassett probably has the direction right: Mr. Obama raised marginal tax rates, inundated business with rules and lawsuits and expanded “means-tested” benefits (i.e., that phase out as incomes rise). Textbook economics predicts all these things ought to discourage work and investment. But his report does not prove these policies explain the magnitude of the growth shortfall, and is silent on the harm some of Mr. Trump’s own policies could do, in particular restricting legal immigration.

Economic growth since the trough of the recession in 2009 has been the weakest of any expansion since 1949. But an aging population means the economy can’t grow as fast as it used to. Moreover, financial crises usually beget weak expansions and the U.S. actually did better than all but one of the seven largest advanced economies.

Mr. Obama’s macroeconomic policies—those aimed at the economy as a whole—were relatively mainstream and made the recovery faster than otherwise: fiscal stimulus, bailouts of tottering financial companies and car manufacturers, and support for the Federal Reserve’s aggressive monetary easing.