MacroScope

What would Main Street America look like without immigrants?

Picture vastly fewer restaurants (37% of the industry’s ownership is foreign-born), hotels and accommodation (43% foreign-born ownership), dry cleaning and laundry facilities (54% foreign-born), and nail salons (37%). It would be that much harder to go out for a treat (bakeries, 32% immigrant-owned), fill up the tank (gas stations, 53%), or grab a bottle of wine on the way to a dinner party (beer, wine and liquor stores, 42%).

As President Barack Obama announces a big shift in immigration policy that will offer greater leniency to individuals under 30 who came into the United States as undocumented children, a new report from the New York-based Fiscal Policy Institute highlights just how broad a role immigrants play in the world’s largest economy.

In his speech this week, President Barack Obama hinted at the new policy:

If we truly want to make this country a destination for talent and ingenuity from all over the world, we won’t deport hardworking, responsible young immigrants who have grown up here or received advanced degrees here. We’ll let them earn the chance to become American citizens so they can grow our economy and start new businesses right here instead of someplace else.

Most people have a notion of how immigrants contribute to their community’s economy. Take an inventory of any main street or downtown area, and you’re likely to find more than a few small businesses – doctors’ offices, nail salons, grocery stores – whose owners hail from overseas. The Fiscal Policy Institute report is the first survey to take a macro look at the state of small business ownership among immigrants across the country. It found that immigrants are not just employees, but increasingly, employers.

The immigrant share of small business owners, at 18 percent, is higher than the immigrant share of the overall population (13 percent) and the immigrant share of the labor force (16 percent).

Are politicians playing chicken with central bankers? More to the point, if the U.S. Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank step up, yet again, to protect their economies from the global slowdown, will it take U.S., German, Spanish, Italian, Greek and other governments off the hook?

Such questions are swirling as Europe’s financial crisis boils and starts to bubble over into Asia and the Americas. Expectations are growing that the Fed will take more monetary policy action when it meets June 19-20. The messy possibility that Greece could exit the euro zone was not enough to prompt the ECB to cut interest rates last week – and that was before a deal over the weekend to bail out Spanish banks was dismissed by markets as just another kick of the can. Underlining the standoff between monetary and fiscal policymakers, ECB President Mario Draghi told European Parliament this on May 31:

Can the ECB fill the vacuum of lack of action by national governments on fiscal growth? The answer is no.

Despite all the flashing yellow signs in the global economy, banking sector forecasters are sticking – if a bit uneasily – to their modestly optimistic outlook. Still, a group of economists from the American Bankers Association, a banking lobby that presented its latest economic projections to Federal Reserve officials this week, highlighted plenty of risks. Chief among them were financial contagion from Europe and sharp fiscal adjustments in the United States.

They see U.S. gross domestic product expanding at a pretty subdued 2.2 percent this year, and then slowing to 2 percent in 2013. The forecast assumes that Europe will come to some sort of resolution that puts a floor under its troubled debt markets. Even so, the ABA committee saw a 55 percent chance that one or more countries would exit the euro, with Greece topping the list.

At a press conference on Friday presenting the group ‘s findings, George Mokrzan, chair of the committee and economist at Huntington Bancorporation in Columbus, Ohio, said one worrisome factor for the U.S. economy  was the lack of income growth for most American workers. He said this could crimp consumer spending, which accounts for the vast bulk of U.S. economic activity.

Chris Reese contributed to this post.

A barrage of rotten economic news around the world has suddenly and vigorously reawakened the prospect of additional monetary easing by the Federal Reserve – most notably a report on Friday showing job growth slowed sharply in recent months.

William Larkin, portfolio manager at Cabot Money Management in Salem, Mass., said:

The chance of another recession is on the table, no question about it. It might force the Fed to develop another growth strategy like a QE3.

By Sarmista Sen and Sumanta Dey

Economists predicting jobs growth in the United States, or rather the lack of it, scored an unfortunate hat-trick on Friday – vastly overestimating the rise in payrolls for three consecutive months.

The U.S. economy added 69,000 jobs last month, less than half the Reuters median for a gain of 150,000 jobs and missing even the lowest forecast of 75,000 from nearly 80 economists .

Forecasters last achieved that feat between April and November 2008, when the actual NFP number consistently missed the lowest forecast in the survey, for eight consecutive months.

Moving from one house or apartment to another is mainly onerous, but one of its few pleasures is coming across papers you have not seen for years: the adventure stories your grown son wrote when he was eight years old or the book report he wrote on William Shakespeare’s Richard III when he was 10.

Another potential source of amusement is finding an older newspaper or magazine article or column, preserved on purpose or inadvertently. One reads these pieces with the benefit of time: You, dear reader, have seen the future at which the columnist, either hapless or prescient, could only make a guess, educated or otherwise.

So herewith are excerpts from two side-by-side columns published in the Summer 2005 edition of TIAA-CREF’s “advance,” two years before the financial crisis sent the global economy into its worst downturn since the Great Depression.

More than five years into an unprecedented slump, the U.S. housing sector continues to languish. Pending home sales fell in April to a four-month low, while house prices continue to bounce along near recent lows. The National Association of Realtors said on Wednesday its index, based on contracts signed last month, fell 5.5 percent to 95.5, its lowest level since December, after a downwardly revised 3.8 percent increase in March. The weakness suggested other more closely watched indicators may also flag in coming weeks and months.

Writes Daniel Silver, economist at JP Morgan:

The level of pending home sales reported for April (95.5) was the weakest reported so far this year, and the latest data point to some weakening in existing home sales ahead because pending home sales – measured when contracts are signed – typically lead existing home sales – measured when transactions are completed – by about one or two months.

The picture that emerged from the home price data was equally discouraging. Prices climbed just 0.1 percent in March, and were down 2.6 percent compared to a year earlier. Yale professor Robert Shiller, one of the two names behind the Case/Shiller index, told Reuters Insider:

Another reason the Federal Reserve may have additional room for monetary easing: Inflation expectations fell sharply in May, according to the latest Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment. Inflation expectations five years out dropped to 2.7 percent in May, the lowest since January. Fed officials often say expectations are a key leading indicator of actual price increases.

Daniel Silver, economist at JP Morgan:

This level of longer-term inflation expectations is towards the bottom of the range that has been reported in recent years – 2.7% has been hit on several occasions (most recently between October 2011 and January 2012) and 2.6% was only reached back in December 2008 and March 2009, early on in the crisis period. Most other inflation measures that the Fed watches (including core PCE inflation and the 5yr-5yr breakeven inflation rate) have signaled that inflation expectations are still anchored and underlying inflation pressure is modest.

The downshift comes in the wake of inflation figures for April that also pointed to a tame price environment. This is why Eric Green at TD Securities argues “U.S. inflation favors the doves.”:

Incumbency, it is often said, confers many advantages.

Sitting U.S. presidents certainly have reaped its benefits – in the past 80 years, only three have been unseated.

Most economists believe the same benefits apply to reserve currencies. Yes, the U.S. dollar may one day be supplanted as the leading international currency, the thinking goes, but that day is many decades away.

Then again, maybe not.

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks more closely at the dollar’s own rise to the top in the 20th century suggests, among other things, that “the advantages of incumbency are not all they are cracked up to be.”

Asian Americans have the highest rate of long-term joblessness of any ethnicity in the United States, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington.

Last year marked the second year in a row that Asian Americans had the largest share of unemployed workers who were unemployed long term (i.e., for six months or more). In 2011, 50.1 percent of the Asian American unemployed were unemployed long term, up from 48.7 percent in 2010. In both of these years, the Asian American share slightly exceeded the African American share.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other central bank officials have argued long-term unemployment is an enormous challenge, but have been reluctant to apply additional monetary stimulus to the problem. In March, Bernanke said: