白宫NEC主任Hassett：美国实际GDP增速5.14%，看好AI生产力

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Let's uh go over now to the Economic Club of New York where our colleague David Weston is speaking with Kevin Hasset of the White House. Let's listen. the National Academic Council uh that it was created by President Bill Clinton and my good friend I'm sure friends a lot of people in the room Bob Rubin was the first uh person to have that job and um without naming names um I think that President Clinton thought that that once you send the cabinet people out to run their cabinet agencies that some of them might have like agendas of their own that disagree with what President Clinton's agenda was.

I'm not naming names, but I I think I can hear names being thought.

Um, and so he brought Bob Rubin in to make sure that the president's objectives are being pursued by the cabinet agencies and to pick up the vote every day and say, "What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?" And and so it's an interesting thing. One one little trivia um is that sometimes people call me chairman of the National Economic Council, but I'm not the chairman. I'm the director. Do you know who the chairman is?

Uh, yes I do. Um, uh, I looked up, um, Scott,

it's pres It's President Trump.

It is.

It is.

He didn't replace the chair.

No, he I the director runs the National Economic Council or the president, but when the National Economic Council meets, the chairman of those meetings is president.

Oh, I see. I see.

And and so so I'm not I was chairman of the council of economic advisors.

But who's the chairman of the economic advisors now? Cuz I look at

Yeah. Yeah. Chris Valen out he's a fantastic guy. Um and and so I think that uh right now

we've had the sort of supply side pushes that we expected.

Uh that uh growth is uh the GDP now is in the fives right now and that's consistent with a lot of data that we're seeing.

Real or nominal?

Uh real real. Uh in fact

what?

Yeah. What what's the real number right now?

Okay.

It's good to have a guy like that.

Yeah.

What's your average over the two years?

Um, you know, I think that uh the we're looking ahead, the way I think about what we're about to experience because of the capital spending boom that we've been seeing, uh, the productivity boom that's related to AI. I know we're going to want to talk more about that. and the increase in uh work hours uh which is really visible. So so it used to be that people would want to look at average hourly wages when they're thinking about how the labor market's doing.

But what we've started doing is looking at average weekly wages because all these things that you know the tax stimuli that are making people work harder show up in longer work weeks. uh and so all those things are big supply side impetuses and the way to do sort of growth accounting from it looking forward is that I think that right now our estimate for productivity growth is it's like about 2 and a half and I think our estimate for what we're getting out of capital deepening is it's like 7 or8 uh labor supply maybe about the same uh and so that means that the sort of base case no disruptions to the outside from the outside world and we'll talk about those two that you should be cruising around four instead of three.

Um and the biggest contributor to that is the productivity boob which you I believe my my friend friend uh Dan Eranle and Steve at the Fed once did a paper on productivity. I don't know if you've ever readen their research on this and they said that when there's a productivity boom uh that it's never apparent uh to the public until after the benchmark revision when the productivity boom is almost over.

Uh and the reason is that when there's a productivity boom then a lot of times there are like all these new things and we don't really know how to measure them at the beginning and then we learn how to measure them over time and stuff like that. But think about this that we're having a productivity boom be and we're measuring it before the benchmark revision. We're seeing it in real time. So how good's the benchmark revision going to be?

And so I'd say that we're really really bullish on the momentum that we have uh going forward and uh you know I'm not going to break news on what the president's uh uh plans are for the for this or that that's that's not public. Uh but the if you go back and look at everything that we've done um even to like so we reduced uh federal employment by 300 something thousand workers. Uh that's a budget saving if we keep it there of about $500 billion over 10 years. uh those workers if they go into the private sector and get private sector jobs make on average about $30,000 more than they did at government work in part because uh they don't they don't get the benefits and so so on.

So so there there's about another hundred billion dollar tax benefit from that. So so if you look at all the things we've been doing then you can imagine the things that we're going to continue the things that we're going to expand. uh and um I think that the AI policy uh as an example is something that we uh made it basically so that they it's voluntary. So if you don't want a data center in your town, nobody's going to make you have a data center in your town.

Uh and if a firm wants to build a data center, then they got to make their own power, right? and and and and so so we've got all these things in this big everchanging world that are building an enormous amount of of momentum and we're going to continue them

if um increased productivity from AI is important. So the plan going for the economy are you at all worried about downside risk as you said if you want a data center fine if you don't you don't have to increasing numbers of communities and even states and of course Texas is the one I already mentioned but it's not just Texas New York are putting moratoria are you worried that that may slow down the productivity gains from AI

well what we're seeing right now uh let's contrast it uh with uh the internet uh and and I'll tell you a a sort of interesting story about the internet because I was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve in Washington with Alan Greenspan when the internet was just starting and I was in charge of the business sector, researching and forecasting the business sector. And one of the things that the um government agency started to do was they did something called hyonic adjustment of the computer uh deflator.

So that uh because you went from like a 8286 to a Pentium and it cost about the same but the Pentium was like 10 times better and then they would show that up as a decline in the uh price of computing because you for the same dollar you get way more computing. Uh and so at one point uh Allan, you know, came into my office or sent a note and then I went to his office and he said, you know, something doesn't make sense because, uh, telecommunications equipment is basically all computers now.

So, think about Cisco and everything else. Uh, but the deflator for telecommunications equipment is like it's going up 3 or 4% a year. Figure out what's going on. And so I called over to the Bureau of Economic Analysis as to what's going on. And um they said, "Well, we we have a mash model way that we calculate price changes and we don't take things out of the bundle where we measure the price changes until the thing is no longer made in the US."

And so they were still making uh like the telecom's uh equipment that you could see on Laughim uh and shipping it to developing countries who had these old analog things. And since the government, the US uh firms were still making it, it was still in the bundle that was counted in the deflator. And uh so I did a memo for uh for Greenspan that's presumably foyable now after all these years where I said if we just uh were to take the uh communications deflator and treat it as if it's the computer deflator t