As budget constraints grow, MACs may become even more popular with agencies. Strategic sourcing efforts encourage their use because they allow agencies to consolidate purchases while maintaining competition. The alphabet soup of MAC vehicles–ITES-2S, SeaPort-E, Alliant, Encore, SEWP, TIPSS, ICT-21 and many others — offer a wide variety of approaches for federal agencies to consider using for their purchases. Companies must navigate the growing set of MACs to find the best way to reach government customers.

Join Bloomberg Government, the Public Contracting Institute and the Professional Services Council for an expert panel discussing key trends and developments in MAC vehicles, the strategic sourcing initiative going forward, and how they will affect industry and government alike.

Confirmed panelists include:
Tom Sharpe, Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner, General Services Administration
Alan Chvotkin, Executive Vice President & Counsel, PSC
Trey Hodgkins, Senior Vice President, TechAmerica
Brian Friel, Senior Analyst, Bloomberg Industries

Moderated by:
David Drabkin, Corporate Director of Acquisition Policy, Northrop Grumman Corporation

Date: May 23, 2013
Time: 8:30 – 10:30 a.m. (9:00 a.m. program start)
Location: Bloomberg Government , 1101 K Street, NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC

To Register For This Event Please Click Here.

Bloomberg Government’s Capital Impact, hosted by Allen Scott, focuses on the business implications of government spending in core industries of defense IT and technology, energy, finance, health care and transportation, as well as the appropriations process in Congress. The show is a joint production with Federal News Radio 1500 AM in Washington, DC.

“The Republican strategy of pretending that they’re going to take hostage the debt limit to get their priorities is a bad one and harmful to our country, and we’re not going to buy it.”

Hoyer tells Cook a longterm budget deal remains “possible” but the path forward remains “difficult.”

Hoyer is more optimistic about immigration reform. He puts the chances of a comprehensive bill clearing the Senate and House at 70%.

“I think the Senate’s going to pass the bill. I think there’s bipartisan support for that bill. And when it comes here, I’m hopeful that we will put it on the floor, and I think it can pass.”

“The Republican strategy of pretending that they’re going to take hostage the debt limit to get their priorities is a bad one and harmful to our country, and we’re not going to buy it.”

Hoyer tells Cook a longterm budget deal remains “possible” but the path forward remains “difficult.” He is also is more optimistic about immigration reform. He puts the chances of a comprehensive bill clearing the Senate and House at 70%.

Sunday’s “Capital Gains” unveils Bloomberg Government’s list of the 200 biggest federal contractors. Cook interviews the top executive at United Launch Alliance, one of the companies making the biggest move up in the rankings. CEO Mike Gass discusses the budget reality facing the space business and the challenge posed by Elan Musk’s SpaceX. Bloomberg Government analyst Evan Croen and Bloomberg Industries analyst Brian Friel explain what the rankings tell us about federal contracting trends.

Bloomberg Government’s Capital Impact, hosted by Allen Scott, focuses on the business implications of government spending in core industries of defense IT and technology, energy, finance, health care and transportation, as well as the appropriations process in Congress. The show is a joint production with Federal News Radio 1500 AM in Washington, DC.

The top 200 companies won almost two-thirds of the government’s $516 billion in fiscal 2012 contracts, the lowest since 2007. Take a look at our interactive snapshot of the BGOV200 below.

The briefing featured experts from Bloomberg Government and on behalf of NDIA including:

Ret. General Arnold Punaro, The Punaro Group

Robert Litan, Director of Research, Bloomberg Government

Loren Duggan, Director of Legislative Analysis, Bloomberg Government

Cameron Leuthy, Senior Budget Analyst, Bloomberg Government

Robert Levinson, Senior Defense Analyst, Bloomberg Government

For those who missed the event:

• A replay of this webinar is available. (Free, requires registration)
• The slides from this webinar are now available.

To access these studies and more, or for a free demo of the BGOV service, contact the Bloomberg Government team.

Presented & Sponsored by Bloomberg Government, in association with NDIA.

Lost in the kerfuffle over the infamous spreadsheet error in the statistical work of economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (RR) showing that growth slows once a nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio tops 90 percent is another of their findings with just much relevance to the current economic circumstances of the U.S. and other developed countries.

The researchers’ other major finding — so far largely uncontested — is that advanced economies grow about one percentage less during the decade following a major financial crisis, like the one experienced in 2007-08, than after a normal downturn.

Carmen Reinhart speaks at the Philadelphia Fed Policy Forum.
Photo Credit: Bradley Bower / Bloomberg

To be sure, there have been a few academics who have argued that the U.S. experience this time around is unique and cannot be compared with financial crises of earlier eras in different countries. Nonetheless, the performance of the U.S. economy since the financial crisis certainly seems consistent with this other RR finding.

Instead of the normal V-shaped recovery following other post-war recessions, this recovery has been marked by sluggish growth despite record-setting amounts of fiscal and monetary stimulus (with the latter, in the form of quantitative easing) still going. Europe is in an even worse mess, including Germany, the strongest economy of a weak lot.

This other RR finding has a lot more immediate relevance to the average family than what happens down the road to deficits and debt-to-GDP ratios (which remain critical in their own right). Weak recoveries mean bleak job prospects for all but the most highly skilled workers, which leave out a lot of recent college graduates and many older workers displaced by the relentless drive for corporate efficiency amidst weak consumer demand.

Consumers have been understandably hesitant to spend like the old days – though they have been showing some signs of life in the past few months with depressed housing prices finally beginning to bounce back a bit – since they got whacked during the last crisis and employers remains skittish about creating jobs at the pace all of us would like. Because consumers have been hesitant, so have businesses about spending their hoards of cash, earned from strong profits due more to corporate downsizing than rapid revenue growth.

Meanwhile, policy makers feel helpless, the two U.S. political parties are at war with each other, and academics continue to argue about what’s gone wrong with their models. What’s becoming clearer with each passing day is that there is no magic elixir for restoring the “animal spirits” that John Maynard Keynes long ago pointed to as the driving private sector force behind economic growth.

Kenneth Rogoff speaks during the World Economic Forum in 2009.
Photo Credit: Adam Berry / Bloomberg

We learned that even massive doses of fiscal stimulus, like those applied in 2009-10, work slowly, especially if loaded down with not-so-shovel ready spending projects. Tax cuts that are tilted in favor of those in the lower and middle parts of the income distribution – where people are living more or less hand to mouth and spending what they take home – are likely to have the biggest bang for the buck. In retrospect, the U.S. economy would have grown more rapidly had the nearly $800 billion in fiscal stimulus enacted in 2009 consisted solely of a cut in social security taxes spread over several years. But even that plan probably wouldn’t have kept unemployment from topping 8 percent, which White House economists predicted wouldn’t happen, but did, after the tax cut-plus-spending stimulus package passed Congress.

Since then, stimulus has become a new four letter word, and austerity is in – not so much because of RR’s contested finding that debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent are bad for growth – but because of a combination of a backlash to the stimulus coupled with a broad bipartisan consensus that the U.S. has to begin addressing its escalating health-care burden and other costs associated with its aging population, which together are driving long-term deficits, before they become a crippling economic drag .

Amidst all this, the only other government tool for keeping the economy growing at even the anemic rate of about 2 percent it has recorded since 2009 is massive monetary easing, which remains highly controversial. So far, those who worry that the flood of money will lead to out-of-control inflation have been contradicted by the low and falling rate of inflation, clearly due to the weak labor market and corresponding absence of upward wage pressures. Until the labor market really heals – and it has a long way to go despite the drop in the unemployment rate to 7.5 percent because so many workers have stopped looking for work while others remain severely under-employed – inflation isn’t something that policy makers should be overly worried about.

So the painful lesson from all this is that recoveries after financial crises indeed are sluggish and there is only so much the government can do about them. Things would be better if our federal government were not so dysfunctional. Perhaps then, private sector animal spirits would roaming freer, creating more new firms hiring more workers, and encouraging consumers and investors to spend. The truth is we really don’t know; we can only make a reasonable guess that this would be true.

In short, the less-argued Reinhart-Rogoff lesson rings true; growth is slow post-financial crises. That counsels less austerity in the short run than we have been subjected to, while urging that Congress and the president agree to a long-term deficit reduction plan – which remains necessary even if the other RR finding had never existed or been disputed – that eases up on the current sequester while doing something real about the long-term deficits that the Congressional Budget Office for years has been warning threaten our economic prosperity and security. At this point, the chances of that happening, unfortunately, seem low.

So look to the Fed to continue propping up an economy that would be in even worse shape without its leadership, no matter what the Fed’s numerous and vocal critics say.

Robert Litan is the Director of Research at Bloomberg Government. Follow him on Twitter @BobLitan.

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Follow Bloomberg Government on Twitter @BGOV