America’s 20-Year Investment Drought

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

This year has been the year of the Chart of the Year. Seriously. Charts on blogs, especially economic charts, have become such a big deal that I counted at least half a dozen year-end roundups of the “Best Charts of 2011.” Despite my love of charts, though, I haven’t chosen a chart of the year myself. There’s just no single chart that explains everything.

But if there were, this one from Michael Mandel comes pretty close:

Ben Bernanke’s “savings glut” got a lot of attention a few years ago as a macro-level explanation for the housing/credit bubble of the aughts: huge pools of money flowed into America, and that money flowed into housing, producing a bubble. But the flip side of that is an investment drought. After all, that tsunami of cash didn’t have to flow into housing, but it did. The problem was that people with money increasingly didn’t feel like they had very many productive, real-world alternatives for their investment dollars. Here’s Mandel:

This chart, which runs through the third quarter of 2011, displays several disturbing patterns:

  • Despite rebounding from its recession valley, net business investment as a share of net national product is still far below historical levels.
  • Household and institutional net investment as a share of net national product is at a 40-year low.
  • And perhaps most disturbing, government net investment is only 1% of net national product, a 40-year low.

Let me repeat that: Government net investment as a share of net national product is at a 40-year low. I had to check this last one a couple of times to make sure it was really true. This is a true failure of national economic policy. Government is punking out, just at the time when a public investment surge is needed to make up for the private investment drought. As a country, we should be investing more, not less.

There are lots of things happening in the economy besides this, and if you want to, you can even convince yourself that there’s not much going on in this chart except a steep drop in construction that’s making the overall investment picture look worse than it is. There’s a little bit to that, I think, but only a little bit. Household investment was obviously heavily impacted by the housing bust, but business investment and government investment have been on a secular decline for more than two decades now.

Is this because we’re entering an era that’s fundamentally less capital intensive than it used to be? After all, Facebook has built up a multi-billion dollar business with only a few thousand employees and a level of investment in plants and equipment that Andrew Carnegie would have laughed at. That may be part of it, but it’s hardly comforting regardless. One way or another, American capital needs to be marshaled for use in the real world, but increasingly the real world simply doesn’t look like a great investment opportunity. Recovery is going to be mighty tough as long as that remains the case.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate