Must-Read: Tim Duy: Curious

Must-Read: Tim Duy: Curious: “I find the Fed’s current obsession with raising interest rates curious to say the least…

…To me… it appears that by raising rates now the Fed is risking falling short on its employment mandate at a time when the price mandate is also challenged. And falling short on the employment mandate now suggests an economy with sufficient slack to prevent reaching that price mandate. And that is without considering neither the balance of risks to the outlook nor the possibility that escaping the zero bound requires approaching the inflation target from above rather than below. Consequently, it seems that the case for a rate hike in June should be quite weak….

What is driving so many FOMC participants to the rate hike camp?… First, they believe that tapering and ending QE was not tightening…. Second, the Fed may be too enamored with… the idea of normalization…. They have already decided that the equilibrium fed funds rate is north of 3 percent, and hence assume that the current rate is highly accommodative. They thus see a large distance that needs to be covered, and feel an urge to start sooner than later…

Must-Read: Tim Duy: This Is Not a Drill. This Is the Real Thing

Must-Read: Again. I do not understand Janet Yellen and Stan Fischer’s thinking at all. A 25 basis-point rate hike is a small contractionary thing. But it is a thing. The credibility gained by sticking to a bad policy long past the point where its badness ought to have been recognized is not the credibility worth gaining. The rest of the world is shaky–and the last thing it needs is to have risk-bearing capacity pulled out of it by a U.S. rate hike. And whatever interest-rate hikes might be made this summer could be made up with ease next spring, after the situation becomes clear.

Yet they continue:

Tim Duy: This Is Not a Drill. This Is the Real Thing: “The June FOMC meeting is live…

…That message came through loud and clear in the minutes, and was subsequently confirmed by New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley…. Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren… gave a strong nod to June…. The Fed broadly agrees that the economic recovery… is sufficient to drive further improvement in labor markets…. Still, the risks are [seen by the Fed as] either balanced or to the downside….

The Fed’s plan had been to let the economy run hot enough for long enough to eliminate underemployment. One sizable camp within the Fed thinks this largely been accomplished…. The Fed is also split on the inflation outlook but most believe inflation is set to trend toward target…. June is on the table…. There is a rate hike likely in the near-ish future…. I think we narrowly avoid a rate hike, but at the cost of moving forward the next hike to the July meeting.

Must-read: Ryan Avent: “The Fed Ruins Summer: America’s Central Bank Picks a Poor Time to Get Hawkish”

Must-Read: And agreement on my read of the Federal Reserve from the very sharp Ryan Avent. Nice to know that I am not crazy, or not that crazy…

Ryan Avent: The Fed Ruins Summer: America’s Central Bank Picks a Poor Time to Get Hawkish: “THE… Federal Reserve… ha[s] been desperate to hike rates, often…

…keen to begin hiking in September, but were put off when market volatility threatened to undermine the American recovery. In December they managed to get the first increase on the books, and committee members were feeling cocky as 2016 began; Stanley Fischer, the vice-chairman, proclaimed that it would be a four-hike year… and here we are in mid-May with just the one, December rise behind us. But the Fed… is ready to give higher rates another chance…. Every Fed official to wander within range of a microphone warned that more rate hikes might be coming sooner than many people anticipate. And yesterday the Fed published minutes from its April meeting which were revealing:

Most participants judged that if incoming data were consistent with economic growth picking up…then it likely would be appropriate for the Committee to increase the target range for the federal funds rate in June….

[But] worries about runaway inflation are based on a view of the relationship between inflation and unemployment that looks shakier by the day…. Global labour and product markets are glutted… a global glut of investable savings too…. The Fed does not have cause to try to push inflation down. Its preferred measure of inflation continues to run below the Fed’s 2% target, as it has for the last four years. Somehow the Fed seems not to worry about what effect that might have on its credibility. All that undershooting has depressed market-based measures of inflation expectations…. If the Fed’s goal is to hit the 2% target in expectation, or on average, or most of the time, or every once in a while, or ever again, it might consider holding off on another rate rise until the magical 2% figure is reached. You know, just to make sure it can be done.

But the single biggest, overwhelming, really important reason not to rush this is the asymmetry of risks facing the central bank. Actually, the Fed’s economic staff explains this well; from the minutes:

The risks to the forecast for real GDP were seen as tilted to the downside, reflecting the staff’s assessment that neither monetary nor fiscal policy was well positioned to help the economy withstand substantial adverse shocks. In addition, while there had been recent improvements in global financial and economic conditions, downside risks to the forecast from developments abroad, though smaller, remained. Consistent with the downside risk to aggregate demand, the staff viewed the risks to its outlook for the unemployment rate as skewed to the upside.

The Fed has unlimited room to raise interest rates…. It has almost no room to reduce rates…. Hiking now is a leap off a cliff in a fog; one could always wait and jump later once conditions are clearer, but having jumped blindly one cannot reverse course if the expected ledge isn’t where one thought it would be…

I Continue to Fail to Understand Why the Federal Reserve’s Read of Optimal Monetary Policy Is so Different from Mine…

Does you think this looks like an economy where inflation is on an upward trend and interest rates are too low for macroeconomic balance?

Personal Consumption Expenditures Chain type Price Index FRED St Louis Fed Graph Personal Consumption Expenditures Excluding Food and Energy Chain Type Price Index FRED St Louis Fed

Mohamed El-Erian says, accurately, that the Federal Reserve is much more likely than not to increase interest rates in June or July: Mohamed El-Erian: Federal Reserve Is Torn: “”Moves in financial conditions as a whole are making [the Fed]…

…more confident about going forward [with interest-rate hikes,] and they were worried that the markets were underestimating the possibility of a rate hike this year and they wanted to do something about it…. In the end, what’s clear is a hike will definitely happen this year…. If the Fed unambiguously signals that it will move, you will see a stronger dollar and that… will have consequences on other markets…

Olivier Blanchard (2016), [Blanchard, Cerutti, and Summers (2015)2, Kiley (2015), IMF (2013), and Ball and Mazumder (2011) all tell us this about the Phillips Curve:

  • The best estimates of the Phillips Curve as it stood in the 1970s is that, back in the day, an unemployment rate 1%-point less than the NAIRU maintained for 1.5 years would raise the inflation rate by 1%-point, and that a 1%-point increase in inflation would raise future expected inflation by 0.8%-points.
  • The best estimates of the Phillips as it stands today is that, here and now, an unemployment rate 1%-point less than the NAIRU maintained for 5 years would raise the inflation rate by 1%-point, and that a 1%-point increase in inflation would raise future expected inflation by 0.15%-points.
Www bradford delong com 2016 01 must read olivier blanchard says that he and paul krugman differ not at all on the analytics but rather substantially html

In only 6 of the last 36 months has the PCE core inflation rate exceeded 2.0%/year. I keep calling for someone to present me with any sort of optimal-control exercise that leads to the conclusion that it is appropriate for the Federal Reserve to be raising interest rights right now.

Civilian Employment Population Ratio FRED St Louis Fed

I keep hearing nothing but crickets

My worries are compounded by the fact that the Federal Reserve appears to be working with an outmoded and probably wrong model of how monetary policy affects the rest of the world under floating exchange rates. The standard open-economy flexible-exchange rate models I was taught at the start of the 1980s said that contractionary monetary policy at home had an expansionary impact abroad: the dominant effect was to raise the value of the home currency and thus boost foreign countries’ levels of aggregate demand through the exports channel. But [Blanchard, Ostry, Ghosh, and Chamon (2015)][6] argue, convincingly, that that is more likely than not to be wrong: when the Fed or any other sovereign reserve currency-issuer with exorbitant privilege raises dollar interest rates, that drains risk-bearing capacity out of the rest of the world economy, and the resulting increase in interest-rate spreads puts more downward pressure on investment than there is upward pressure on exports.

It looks to me as though the Fed is thinking that its desire to appease those in the banking sector and elsewhere who think, for some reason, that more “normal” and higher interest rates now are desirable is not in conflict with its duty as global monetary hegemon in a world afflicted with slack demand. But it looks more likely than not that they are in fact in conflict.

[6]: Blanchard, Jonathan D. Ostry, Atish R. Ghosh, and Marcos Chamon

Must-read: Tim Duy: Fed Watch: Fed Speak, Claims

Must-Read: I confess I could understand FOMC participants wanting to raise interest rates right now if projected growth over 2016 was 3.5% or higher. But we have a first quarter of 0.8% and a second quarter of 2.3%: we may well not even get to 2.0% this year.

I confess I understand FOMC participants worrying about “imbalances” created by extremely-low interest rates, but:

  1. If they are worried about extremely-low real interest rates, they need to be all-in pressuring the Congress for more expansionary fiscal policy.

  2. If they are worried about extremely-low nominal interest rates, they need to be all-in pressuring their colleagues for a higher inflation target.

It’s the absence of either of those two from the Fed hawks–and the Fed moderates–that has me greatly concerned:

Tim Duy: Fed Watch: Fed Speak, Claims: “The Fed is not likely to raise rates in June…

…But not everyone at the Fed is on board with the plan. Serial dissenter Kansas City Federal Reserve President Esther George repeated her warnings that interest rates are too low…. Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren… reiterated his warning that financial markets just don’t get it….

I would suggest that the failure of policymakers to better manage the economy at turning points is not because it is impossible, but because they have overtightened in the latter stage of the cycle, forgetting to pay attention to the lags in policy they think are so important during the early stages of the cycle….

Bottom Line: Ultimately, I suspect the FOMC will not find sufficient reason in the data before June to convince the Fed that growth is sufficiently strong to justify a hike. Hence I anticipate that they will pass on that opportunity to raise rates. Look for an opportunity in September…. I doubt, however, that most on the Fed are pleased that market participants have already priced out a June hike on the basis of the April employment report…. They do not see the outcome as already preordained.

Must-read: Tim Duy: “June Fades Away”

Must-Read: As I have said, what I am hearing sounds more and more like a Federal Reserve that is not engaged in a technocratic optimal-control exercise, but is instead employing motivated reasoning to find an excuse to raise rates on the grounds that an economy with unemployment at the NAIRU has normalized, and a normalized economy should have normal interest rates.

As I have said, I think this is a substantial mistake–not least because the Fed needs a higher inflation rate to give it more sea room for when the next macroeconomic storm arrives:

Tim Duy: June Fades Away: “At the beginning of last week, monetary policymakers were trying to keep the dream of June alive…

…Later in the week, however, financial market participants took one look at the employment report and concluded the Fed was all bark and no bite. Markets see virtually no possibility of a Fed rate hike in June. That–a desire to keep June in play coupled with insufficient data to actually make June happen–all happened faster than I anticipated. But don’t think the Fed will go down without a fight. New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley played down the April employment numbers…. Note that unemployment is settling into a level slightly above the Fed’s estimate of the natural rate of unemployment:

NewImage

For Yellen, this should be something of a red flag. The plan was to let the economy run hot enough that unemployment sank somewhat below the natural rate, thereby more aggressively reducing underemployment…. [But] the labor participation rate rose… reveal[ing] that there is substantial excess capacity in the labor market, and consequently the Fed should not be in a rush to raise rates. Indeed, because they have underestimated the slack in the economy, they need to let the economy run hot for even longer….

Bottom Line: The Fed breathed a sigh of relief after financial markets stabilized. That opened up the possibility that June would still be on the table, leaving them the option for three rate hikes this year. I don’t think that policymakers will abandon June as easily as financial market participants. My sense is that they will remain coy, implying odds closer to 50-50. But the data are not in their favor…

Must-read: Kate Davidson and Anupreeta Das: “Fed’s New Bank Critic Neel Kashkari Keeps Heat On”

Must-Read: It’s strange and new for me to find myself to the right of the past president of the FRBMinnie (Narayana Kocherlakota) on monetary policy and to the right of the current president (Neel Kashkari) on regulatory policy:

Kate Davidson and Anupreeta Das: Fed’s New Bank Critic Keeps Heat On: “Neel Kashkari, the new president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis…

…is positioning himself as an unlikely regulatory threat to the nation’s biggest banks. Six weeks after an attention-grabbing speech in Washington in which he called on government to consider breaking up big banks like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc., he kicks off a series of public meetings Monday in Minneapolis to bolster his case that rules designed to prevent taxpayer rescues of the financial system don’t go far enough…

Must-read: Duncan Black: “Time to Increase Interest Rates!”

Must-Read: And Duncan Black comes up with a very good phrase to describe what we think the Federal Reserve is doing based on what we think is its misspecified and erroneous view of the inflation process: “taking away the punchbowl before the DJ even shows up to the party”:

Duncan Black: Time To Increase Interest Rates!: “As I’ve said, I don’t think small upticks in interest rates by the Fed…

…will really destroy the economy. They just signal that the Fed will never let wages (for most of us) rise ever again. They’re taking away the punchbowl before the DJ even shows up to the party. Killing inflation is easy and you don’t have to pre-kill it. The best argument for Fed actions is that they need to increase rates so that they’ll be able to decrease them again if the economy sours. There’s a bit of an obvious problem with this reasoning. Exciting days at the dog track probably do get their attention. Wonder why that is.

Must-read: Tim Duy: “Yellen Pivots Toward Saving Her Legacy”

Must-Read: Ever since the Taper Tantrum, it has seemed to me that the center of gravity of the FOMC has not had a… realistic picture of the true forward fan of possible scenarios.

Now Tim Duy sees signs that the center of the FOMC’s distribution is moving closer to mine. Of course, I still do not see the FOMC taking proper account of the asymmetries, but at least their forecast of central tendencies no longer seems as far awry to me as it had between the Taper Tantrum and, well, last month:

Tim Duy: Yellen Pivots Toward Saving Her Legacy: “Janet Yellen… [would] her legacy… amount to being just another central banker…

…who failed miserably in their efforts to raise interest rates back into positive territory[?] The Federal Reserve was set to follow in the footsteps of the Bank of Japan and the Riksbank, seemingly oblivious to their errors. In September… a confident Yellen declared the Fed would be different…. ANN SAPHIR…. “Are you worried… that you may never escape from this zero lower bound situation?” CHAIR YELLEN…. “I would be very surprised if that’s the case. That is not the way I see the outlook or the way the Committee sees the outlook…. That’s an extreme downside risk that in no way is near the center of my outlook.”…

Bottom Line: Rising risks to the outlook placed Yellen’s legacy in danger. If the first rate hike wasn’t a mistake, certainly follow up hikes would be. And there is no room to run; if you want to ‘normalize’ policy, Yellen needs to ensure that rates rise well above zero before the next recession hits. The incoming data suggests that means the economy needs to run hotter for longer if the Fed wants to leave the zero bound behind. Yellen is getting that message. But perhaps more than anything, the risk of deteriorating inflation expectations – the basis for the Fed’s credibility on its inflation target – signaled to Yellen that rates hike need to be put on hold. Continue to watch those survey-based measures; they could be key for the timing of the next rate hike.

Must-read: Narayana Kocherlakota: “Information in Inflation Breakevens about Fed Credibility”

Must-Read: Whenever I look at a graph like this, I think: “Doesn’t this graph tell me that the last two years were the wrong time to give up sniffing glue the zero interest-rate policy”? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Graph 3 Month Treasury Bill Secondary Market Rate FRED St Louis Fed

And Narayana Kocherlakota agrees, and makes the case:

Narayana Kocherlakota: Information in Inflation Breakevens about Fed Credibility: “The Federal Open Market Committee has been gradually tightening monetary policy since mid-2013…

…Concurrent with the Fed’s actions, five year-five year forward  inflation breakevens have declined by almost a full percentage point since mid-2014.  I’ve been concerned about this decline for some time (as an FOMC member, I dissented from Committee actions in October and December 2014 exactly because of this concern).  In this post, I explain why I see a decline in inflation breakevens as being a very worrisome signal about the FOMC’s credibility (which I define to be investor/public confidence in the Fed’s ability and/or willingness to achieve its mandated objectives over an extended period of time).

First, terminology.   The ten-year breakeven refers to the difference in yields between a standard (nominal) 10-year Treasury and an inflation-protected 10-year Treasury (called TIPS).  Intuitively, this difference in yields is shaped by investors’ beliefs about inflation over the next ten years.  The five-year breakeven is the same thing, except that it’s over five years, rather than 10.  

Then, the five-year five-year forward breakeven is defined to be the difference between the 10-year breakeven and the five-year breakeven.   Intuitively, this difference in yields is shaped by beliefs about inflation over a five year horizon that starts five years from now.   In particular, there is no reason for beliefs about inflation over, say, the next couple years to affect the five-year five-year forward breakeven. 

Conceptually, the five-year five-year forward breakeven can be thought of as the sum of two components:
 
1. investors’ best forecast about what inflation will average 5 to 10 years from now

  1. the inflation risk premium over a horizon five to ten years from now – that is, the extra yield over that horizon that investors demand for bearing the inflation risk embedded in standard Treasuries.
     
    (There’s also a liquidity-premium component, but movements in this component have not been all that important in the past two years.) 

There is often a lot of discussion about how to divide a given change in breakevens in these two components.  My own assessment is that both components have declined.  But my main point will be a decline in either component is a troubling signal about FOMC credibility.  

It is well-understood why a decline in the first component should be seen as problematic for FOMC credibility.  The FOMC has pledged to deliver 2% inflation over the long run.  If investors see this pledge as credible, their best forecast of inflation over five to ten year horizon should also be 2%.   A decline in the first component of breakevens signals a decline in this form of credibility.  

Let me turn then to the inflation-risk premium (which is generally thought to move around a lot more than inflation forecasts). A decline in the inflation risk premium means that investors are demanding less compensation (in terms of yield) for bearing inflation risk. In other words, they increasingly see standard Treasuries as being a better hedge against macroeconomic risks than TIPs.  

But Treasuries are only a better hedge than TIPs against macroeconomic risk if inflation turns out to be low when economic activity turns out to be low.  This observation is why a decline in the inflation risk premium has information about FOMC credibility.  The decline reflects investors’ assigning increasing probability to a scenario in which inflation is low over an extended period at the same time that employment is low – that is, increasing probability to a scenario in which both employment and prices are too low relative to the FOMC’s goals. 

Should we see such a change in investor beliefs since mid-2014 as being ‘crazy’ or ‘irrational’? The FOMC is continuing to tighten monetary policy in the face of marked disinflationary pressures, including those from commodity price declines.  Through these actions, the Committee is communicating an aversion to the use of its primary monetary policy tools: extraordinarily low interest rates and large assetholdings. Isn’t it natural, given this communication, that investors would increasingly put weight on the possibility of an extended period in which prices and employment are too low relative to the FOMC’s goals?

To sum up: we’ve seen a marked decline in the five year-five year forward inflation breakevens since mid-2014.  This decline is likely attributable to a simultaneous fall in investors’ forecasts of future inflation and to a fall in the inflation risk premium.   My main point is that both of these changes suggest that there has been a decline in the FOMC’s credibility.   

To be clear: as I well know, in the world of policymaking, no signal comes without noise.  But the risks for monetary policymakers associated with a slippage in the inflation anchor are considerable.   Given these risks, I do believe that it would be wise for the Committee to be responsive to the ongoing decline in inflation breakevens by reversing course on its current tightening path.