Although rising moderately this year, US fixed capital investment has fallen far short of the level that history suggests should have occurred given the recent dramatic surge in corporate profitability. Combined with a collapse of long-term illiquid investments by households, they have frustrated economic recovery. These shortfalls, the result of widespread private-sector anxiety over America’s future, have defused much, if not most, of the impact of the administration’s fiscal stimulus. Moreover, the activism embodied in such programmes has itself stoked the degree of anxiety.
The instinctive reaction of businessmen and householders to uncertainty is to disengage from those activities that require confident predictions of how the future will unfold. For non-financial corporations (half of gross domestic product), the disengagement is best measured by the share of liquid cash flow allocated to illiquid long-term fixed asset investment. In the first half of 2010, that share fell to 79 per cent, its lowest reading in the 58 years for which data are available.
The corresponding surge in the proportion of liquid assets following the Lehman bankruptcy was the most rapid in postwar history, amounting to a rise of nearly $400bn. By mid-2010 total liquid assets had risen to $1,800bn, the highest share of total assets in nearly a half century. Without this unprecedented cash flow diversion, the rate of increase in capital expenditures of non-financial corporations would have been double the modest increase that emerged during the first half of this year.