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Gustonomics’ Liz Wilke “Bullish on a Soft Landing.”
By Blake Oliver
It’s been a wild ride that past 12 months with the regional banking crisis, the Fed raising rates to the highest level in two decades, not to mention AI disrupting accounting and other professions, and the constant threat of recession.
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If you’re wondering how to advise your clients with so many conflicting signals on the horizon, you’re not alone. To help make sense of it all, I spoke with Liz Wilke, Chief Economist at Gusto, on an episode of The Accounting Podcast.
“Honestly, I’m pretty bullish on a soft landing for the economy,” shared Wilke. “If we have a recession, it will most likely be a mild one in the minus 1 percent to zero percent growth range. And I don’t think it’s coming till 2024 if it’s coming at all,” added Wilke, host of the Gustonomics Podcast.
At the beginning of the year, Wilke said most of her economist friends were convinced a recession was inevitable, but she wasn’t as pessimistic. “Labor market numbers are at best drifting sideways, and consumers are spending so much money that they’re really like the wind beneath the wings.” Further, she believes the “jacked up interest rates” are doing precisely what Fed Chair Jerome Powell is counting on to keep inflation under control without derailing the economy.
From where I sit, that’s reassuring. Still, I’m sure many of your business owner clients are concerned about the regional banking crisis and seeing their access to credit potentially choked off. Wilke said it could have been worse than imagined since the amount of money wrapped up in the three failed regional banks was equivalent to the total assets held by all the failed banks during the 2008-09 financial crisis. But she said the FDIC and the Fed did their job with all the banking controls and governance standards established by the Dodd-Frank Act. “We are learning a lot of lessons from the 2008-09 financial crisis, so we just didn’t see the fallout that we saw in 2008.”
Instead of chaos as we saw 15 years ago, the Fed said, “Don’t worry. We know how to solve this,” related Wilke. “Everybody’s going to get their money back. And that really helped to calm the fear and prevented a contagion from starting.” The Fed quietly transferred failed banks into receivership and found a buyer for them so we could all return to normal. “I don’t think the Fed got enough credit for dealing with the situation as smoothly as it did,” noted Wilke.
While this may be reassuring to your clients, like many non-economists, I still have to wonder if the underlying cause of the regional banking crisis — the Fed’s aggressive rate-tightening policy – could still drag down more banks. Wilke conceded that risk is still present since many small and regional banks put assets on their balance sheet when interest rates were at rock bottom, particularly commercial real estate. “That’s the elephant in the room,” said Wilke. “It really depends on how much the Fed wants to step in every single time a bank gets into trouble and induces more mergers and acquisitions.”
So, as bigger banks get bigger and buy up the struggling, smaller banks, will that get the balance sheets in order?
Wilke said one of two things is likely to happen.
Either small and community banks will fail and go into receivership due to their real estate loans, or they’ll have to undergo the same stringent stress testing that only the largest banks must do today. Many will find that stress testing makes it too hard to serve their customers, and they’ll choose to be acquired by a larger bank.
As a small business owner myself, I agree with Wilke that SMBs are not going to have the same close relationship with big banks like Wells Fargo that they have with their local banks. Community banks understand the local market for your business, work closely with you on lending, and keep a close eye on how you’re doing, said Wilke, especially if you’re in a small town or rural area. That’s not going to happen with a global bank. No one knows for sure how that’s going to play out, but it likely won’t be good for small businesses and their customers if the current trend continues.
So, from my perspective, it shows the profound ripple effect of interest rates and how we manage them. Wilke told me she’s not convinced that our old models and our traditional economic thinking are still valid. “We’re in uncharted territory,” noted Wilke. “The magnitude of the change resulting from the pandemic, all the retirements, the huge surges of entrepreneurship, all of the changing industry needs and the digitalization that happened during Covid, is still playing out.”
Wilke said that normally, jacking up interest rates so aggressively would cause the economy to slow down and cost many more people their jobs. But that hasn’t happened. “If I were the Fed, I would actually be kind of happy about the resilient labor market we’re seeing because it means I need to turn the screws more on inflation and interest rates,” said Wilke. “It’s likely we’ll have high-interest rates for a while. We might get a couple more bumps, but now that we’re seeing inflation, cool, my best guess is that they’ll probably think, let’s keep it here for a while.”
My hunch is that this is one area in which you can advise your clients – helping them plan for a sustained period of elevated interest rates and borrowing costs.
So, let’s go back to the banks. For two decades, they enjoyed cheap, almost free, money. They took cheap money from the Fed, loaned it out to businesses and real estate, and it was easy to make a profit. But now, when money costs them 5.5 percent (the federal funds rate as I write this), their margins are much thinner.
Wilke said that can be problematic for most smaller and regional banks that have significant amounts of commercial real estate debt on their balance sheets that were financed at super-low interest rates and now must be refinanced at today’s elevated rates. Unlike a conventional 30-year mortgage, commercial real estate loans are only financed between five and ten years, with a balloon payment due at the end. Seven years is typical. With more painful balloon payments coming due, you have fewer profitable real estate projects, and we expect banks to take substantial losses. They hold many of these loans on their books at historical values, so they haven’t been marked to market. That could be a landmine. We don’t know how much these values could shrink.
According to Wilke, office rates are down 20 percent to 30 percent in some areas since the pandemic began, especially in big cities where highly remote office workers live in the suburbs and only come into the office one or two days a week. And we’re seeing “jingle mail” again for the first time since the global financial crisis. Except this time, it is office owners, not homeowners, throwing up their hands, stopping payments, and mailing the keys back to the bank.
Banks don’t want to own commercial real estate outright, but Wilke said one thing in their favor is that most were savvy enough to have a diversified portfolio of loans. Warehouses, retail, and even hotels are doing well, so that helps offset the losses from office space.
Wilke said we might see bridge programs or other protections put in place for commercial real estate in which the interest rate on your specific loan can never go up by more than a certain amount – similar to the protections on variable-rate home mortgages that were put in place in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Finally, Wilke believes the talent shortage facing many businesses, including accounting firms, is more than just a temporary hangover from the pandemic. Skilled workers are going to be scarce for the foreseeable future. We will have to figure out how to train, retain and develop people. It’s quite possible we’ll face a “forever talent shortage” and maybe “forever interest rates,” said Wilke. And if potential hires can’t qualify for a mortgage or are unwilling to sell their homes, they will stay put. That means remote work policies will remain essential for attracting top talent.
These transitory shifts are challenging, especially when everything seems counterintuitive to what we learned in school. But you can lend significant value by helping clients lean into these changes instead of pining away for the good old days.
