Now That John Williams Is President of the New York Fed, He Really Should Convene a Blue Ribbon Commission on What the Inflation Target Should Be

From June 2017: Fed Up Rethink 2% Inflation Target Blue-Ribbon Commission Conference Call: I hear four arguments for not changing the 2%/year inflation target, even though pursuing that target found us in a situation where monetary policy was greatly hobbled in its ability to manage the economy for a solid decade. And, as best as I can evaluate them, all four of these arguments seem to me to be wrong. They are:

  1. The Federal Reserve, even at the zero lower bound, has powerful tools sufficient to carry out its stabilization policy tasks….

  2. The problem is not the 2%/year target but rather pressure on the Federal Reserve… from substantial numbers of economists and politicians practicing bad economics and motivated partisan reasoning….

  3. A higher inflation rate would bring shifting expectations of inflation back into the mix, distract people and firms from their proper task of calculating real costs and benefits to worry about monetary policy, and make monetary policy management more complicated….

  4. The Federal Reserve needs to maintain its credibility, and if it were to even once change the target inflation rate, its commitment to any target inflation rate would have no credibility….

Who Should Be the Next President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco?

Memo to Self: Now that John Williams is heading to become President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Vice Chair of the Federal Open Market Committee, who should take his place as President of the Federal Reserve bank of San Francisco?

  • Mary Daly?
  • Christie Romer?
  • Glenn Rudebusch?
  • Thinking outside the box, Takeo Hoshi?
  • Thinking way outside the box, Enrico Moretti?
  • Thinking way way outside the box, Raj Chetty?

Ideal candidates should I think, be in their early 50s, and should be prepared to lead an analytical and operations orientation of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank toward one or more of:

  • Financial system safety-and-soundness regulation
  • Financial system consumer finance regulation
  • Asia and its place in the global financial system
  • Tech and its place in the global financial system
  • Regional economic development issues.

How Large Is the Shadow Cast by Recessions?

Macroeconomics: How Large Is the Shadow Cast by Recessions?

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0-rKMXUoFYubeD2FVgezAd8kg

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Why Low Inflation Is No Surprise: Fresh at Project Syndicate

Project Syndicate: Why Low Inflation Is No Surprise by J. Bradford DeLong: BERKELEY – The fact that inflation has remained stubbornly low across the global North has come as a surprise to many economic observers. In September, the always sharp and thoughtful Nouriel Roubini of New York University attributed this trend to positive shocks to aggregate supply…. In my view, interpreting today’s low inflation as a symptom of temporary supply-side shocks will most likely prove to be a mistake. This diagnosis seems to misread the historical evidence from the period between the early 1970s and the late 1990s… Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

Monetary Policy Outlook: The United States (Fall 2017)

What Will (Probably) Happen?

  • What the Federal Reserve thinks:
    • that the U.S. economy is near full employment…
    • that U.S. potential-output growth rate is 2%/year…
    • that it should be “normalizing” interest rates…
  • A positive shock to growth (or inflation) will see the Fed raise faster and further:
    • Do not expect real growth much above 2%/year under this Fed…
    • Do expect the Federal Funds rate to rise at about (3/4%/year)/year—or faster—as long as the economy can stand it without recession…
    • A negative shock to inflation will see slowed but not stopped “normalization”…
  • A negative shock to growth will see:
    • The Federal Reserve quickly return the Federal Funds rate to zero…
    • And then dither, with many tools but none of them powerful to affect the economy…

Employment-to-Population, 25-54

  • I think the Fed could be more aggressive at promoting growth…
  • Prime-age employment-to-population numbers in the U.S. still show considerable labor market slack…
  • But the unemployment rate shows over-full employment…
  • Wage growth shows no labor supply-side pricing power for workers…
  • Yet the Federal Reserve trusts the unemployment rate much more than other indicators…
    • This creates a puzzle because…

Inflation Remains Subdued

  • Back in the 1950s Alan Greenspan declared that 2%/year measured inflation was “effective price stability”…
  • The Bernanke-Yellen Federal Reserve decided to use the core PCE chain index…
  • Persistent undershoot:
    • Since January 2009, cumulating to 4%-points in the price level…
    • Recent price news not suggesting any inflationary spiral developing soon…
  • Suggesting that the tightening cycle announced in mid-2013 and begun in 2016 was premature…
    • The market agrees with me…

The Long Nominal Rate, Inflation Breakeven, and Long Real Rate

  • When Larry Summers was Deputy Treasury Secretary, he convinced Bob Rubin to issue TIPS…
    • We now have 15 years of watching the long nominal rate, long real rate, and the difference between them:
      • The expectations based inflation breakeven…
    • These give us a better window…

Secular Stagnation

  • Fall in (notional) TIPS from 4% at end of 1990s to 2% in mid-2000s…
  • Fall in TIPS from 2.0–2.5% pre-crisis to 0.0-0.5% today…
  • Without any signs of a runaway boom of any sort…
    • But increased appetite for debt…
    • Any risks being generated?

Implications for the Fed-Controlled Short Rate and the Long Rate

  • The Federal Reserve controls the interest rate on Treasury bills…
    • Subject to the condition that it cannot drive it below zero (without making substantial institutional changes in the banking system)…
  • The long rate goes where it wants…
    • And it has not wanted to go up for a long time indeed…
    • Expect a lot of time at the zero lower bound over the next decade…

Might We Get a Different Fed?

  • I said “under this Fed”…
  • But might we get a different Fed?
    • Very unlikely…
    • Trump not interested…
    • The non-unitary executive:
      • Will appoint Republican monetary-policy worthies
      • Most of whom think like the Fed already…
      • And the Fed is very good at assimilating new governors and bank presidents…

Summing Up

  • I said that under this Fed:
    • If no recession:
      • A ceiling of 2%/year on growth…
      • A ceiling of 2.5%/year on inflation…
      • Short-term interest rate increases of (3/4%/year)/year or more…
        • Already priced into long rates…
    • If recession:
      • Cut Fed Funds rate back to zero…
      • Dither…

Implications for Trading Partners

  • U.S. not a locomotive for demand…
  • U.S. not a (major) source of likely upward demand or upward interest rate shocks…
  • Trading partners have to decide how to react to the tightening cycle:
    • But it will be slow (probably)…
    • Hence (probably) innocuous…
  • Trading partners do have to worry about a recession in the United States:
    • Given the absence of powerful monetary policy tools to the Fed’s hand…
    • Given the lack of political will for non-monetary stimulus…

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https://www.icloud.com/keynote/07lTGr0dPnEoKQd_LFNsqkAYw

I Am Heartened by the Improvement in the Prime-Age Employment Rate. Now Let Us Let It Continue Rather than Stopping It…

Here in the United States, there were always three arrows to “hysteresis”—to the argument that the failure to adopt policies that properly fought the downturn of 2008-2009 in an aggressive manner to restore full employment rapidly did not just temporary but permanent damage to the economy’s productive potential. A long period of very slack demand:

  1. slowed experimentation with business models, organizations, and technologies and so reduced total factor productivity growth by a poorly known but perhaps very substantial amount.

  2. diminished investment and reduced our productive capital stock relative to a rapid-recovery counterfactual baseline by a well understood and large amount.

  3. caused workers to exit from the labor force with little hope of getting them back—too much time out of the workforce had destroyed their social networks they needed in order to effectively search for jobs.

(1) and (2) dealt mighty and powerful permanent blows to American economic growth. Barring some currently-unanticipated large positive shock, we are never getting back to our pre-2007 growth trend:

Real Gross Domestic Product FRED St Louis Fed

But there has, over the past couple of years, been good news about (3).

The prime-age employment-to-population ratio is no longer lower than it has been since the 1980s, before the full coming of the feminist economic revolution to the workplace.

Fears that we would never get any significant fraction of the 5%-points of the prime-age population that lost their jobs in 2008-2009 back into work—fears that were very live and very scary over 2010-2013—appear to have been wrong. The prime-age employment-to-population ratio has been climbing at a rate of 0.6%-points per year since the end of 2013. Labor-side hysteresis has thus turned out to be a much smaller deal than worst-case analyses feared back even as little as three and a half years ago.

Do note, moreover, that this increase in the prime-age employment-to-population ratio has been accomplished with no signs of any inflationary pressure whatsoever. The fact that it has been accomplished leads to harsh judgments on the Federal Reserve and the administration of 2010-2014, which were unwilling to pursue the much more stimulative policies within their control—more and faster quantitative easing,

Simon Wren-Lewis: Could austerity’s impact be persistent?

: “How Conservative macroeconomic policy may be making us persistently poorer… https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2017/06/could-austeritys-impact-be-persistent.html

…I was happy to sign a letter from mainly academic economists published in the Observer yesterday, supporting the overall direction of Labour’s macroeconomic policy. I would also have been happy to sign something from the Liberal Democrats, who… have the added advantage of being against Brexit, but no such letter exists…. We desperately need more public investment and more current spending to boost demand, which in turn will allow interest rates to come away from their lower bound…. Nominal interest at their lower bound represent a policy failure…. In the textbook macroeconomic models, this policy mistake can have a large but temporary cost in terms of lost output and lower living standards…. In these basic models a short term lack of demand does not have an impact on supply…. Gustav Horn and colleagues… find that the impact of recent fiscal shocks have been persistent rather than temporary, at least so far…. I do not have to argue that such permanent effects are certain to have occurred. The numbers are so large that all I need is to attach a non-negligible probability to this possibility. Once you do that it means we should avoid austerity at all costs. In 2010 austerity was justified by imagined bond market panics, but no one is suggesting that today. The only way to describe current Conservative policy is pre-Keynesian nonsense, and incredibly harmful nonsense at that. That was why I signed the letter…

My Sections: As Delivered: Fed Up Rethink 2% Inflation Target Blue-Ribbon Commission Conference Call

Opening Statement (as Delivered): I digress from my job here to say that I agree with everything that Jason and Josh have said. They do not speak just for themselves. They speak for me as well.

And let me also digress by trumping both Jason and Josh.

They both said “if you thought a 2% inflation target was appropriate a decade ago”. A decade ago I did not think a 2% inflation target was appropriate.

It was twenty-five years ago this summer that Larry Summers and I went to the Federal Reserve’s conference at Jackson Hole to say, among other things, that we thought it would be extremely risky and inappropriate to drop the Fed’s informal inflation target from its then-five percent to two percent. The 1990 savings and loan crisis was a small macroeconomic shock. Yet the Federal Reserve cut short-term interest rates by 600 basis points to respond to it. If there were ever a big shock, we said, the Fed would want all that much room to maneuver and more. It would not have that room to maneuver with a two percent inflation target.

So I’ve been beating this drum for twenty-five years off and on, and feeling very Cassandra-like for the past decade.

Now on to my job here. It is to get all medieval, in the sense of Thomas Aquinas, on you. It is to deal with the objections to our position, and then to provide what we believe are sufficient answers to those objections.

I hear four arguments for not changing the 2%/year inflation target, even though pursuing that target found us in a situation where monetary policy was greatly hobbled in its ability to manage the economy for a solid decade. And, as best as I can evaluate them, all four of these arguments seem to me to be wrong. They are:

The Federal Reserve, even at the zero lower bound, has powerful tools sufficient to carry out its stabilization policy tasks (Cf.: Mankiw and Weinzierl (2011) https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/exploration_of_optimal.pdf), so moving away from 2%/year as a target is not necessary. This leaves begging the questions of why, then, employment has been so low over the past decade and why production is still so low relative to our circa-2007 expectations.

The problem is not the 2%/year target but rather pressure on the Federal Reserve: pressure from substantial numbers of economists and politicians practicing bad economics and motivated partisan reasoning. (As an example, somebody sent me a video clip this week of the very smart Marvin Goodfriend half a decade ago, arguing that faster recovery required the Fed to hit the economy on the head with a brick to make people more confident in its willingness to fight inflation http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/06/on-the-negative-information-revealed-by-marvin-goodfriends-i-dont-teach-is-lm.html.) This ignores the Fed’s long institutional history of being willing to ignore outside pressure as it performs its standard monetary policy task of judging what appropriate interest rates are. Pressure only mattered when we got into “non-standard” monetary policies, which we needed to do only because the low inflation target had caused us to hit the zero lower bound.

At 2%/year, inflation is non-salient: nobody worries about it. A higher inflation rate would bring shifting expectations of inflation back into the mix, distract people and firms from their proper task of calculating real costs and benefits to worry about monetary policy, and make monetary policy management more complicated. But right now people and firms are “distracted” by the high likelihood of depressions that last longer than five years. That is a much bigger distraction than worrying about whether inflation will be 4%/year of 5%/year. And right now the zero lower bound makes monetary policy management much more complicated than it was back in the 1990s when the impact of Fed policy on inflation expectations was in the mix.

The Federal Reserve needs to maintain its credibility, and if it were to even once change the target inflation rate, its commitment to any target inflation rate would have no credibility. But the credibility you want to have is credibility that you will follow appropriate policies to successfully stabilize the economy—not credibility that you will mindlessly pursue a destructive policy because you think it somehow wrong to acknowledge that the considerations that led you to adopt it in the first place were wrong or have changed. As my friend Daniel Davies puts it in his One-Minute MBA Course: “Is a credible reputation as an idiot a kind of credibility really worth having?” http://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/29/reputations-are-made-of/

Over to you, Joe…

* * * *

Answers to Questions: There is no unemployment rate target right now.

The Federal Reserve thinks about what the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment might be. But they claim not to have any strong view. They claim to be guided by the data, in terms of assessing how much pressure the economy can take. By contrast, the Federal Reserve had an informal inflation target of four to five percent per year in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And it then shifted down first, in the mid-1990s, to an informal target of two percent per year for the core PCE index under Alan Greenspan. It then formalized that under Bernanke in the late 2000. If they did have an unemployment rate target to talk about, we would be talking about that as well. But they don’t.


The question is a very good one. When I come write the economic history of the 2010s, I think that both Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen are likely to be judged quite harshly. Once the recession of 2008-2009 had reached its end, the Federal Reserve had one overwhelming first priority: to create a strong enough economy that it could sustain short-term safe nominal interest rates of 400 to 500 basis points, and still grow at potential, in order that the Federal Reserve would have room to deal with the next recessionary shock when it came by conventional interest rate policy. The Federal Reserve did not prioritize that objective. Now here we are, late in a recovery, with short-term safe interest rates at 80 basis points or so, and with substantial fear that the economy is not robust enough to support any substantial rise over the time before the next severe recessionary shock hits. Indeed, an attempt to push short-term rates higher in the near future might well be such a recessionary shock.

The Federal Reserve has wedged itself into a position where it has almost no conventional monetary policy ammunition to deploy.


Let me say that the housing bubble did not blow up the economy. Let me say that the deflation of the housing bubble did not blow up the economy. As of the start of 2008, the housing bubble had collapsed, and all of the excess workers who had
been employed in construction had moved out and overwhelmingly found jobs in other sectors without even a small recession or more than a trivial rise in the unemployment rate.

But there was left in the bowels of the financial system the fact that the big money center banks had been playing regulatory arbitrage—claiming that the mortgage-backed securities they were holding were true AAA assets when they were nothing of the sort. It was this concentration of overvalued and mischaracterized assets in the highly leveraged money center banks that got us into big trouble, not the collapse of the housing bubble.

You can see this if you recall that the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000-1 took down about five times as much in the way of investors’ wealth as the collapse of the housing bubble took down the wealth of subprime lenders. And yet the 2000-1 bubble collapse did not cause a big recession. Why not? Because the people who took the hit were the rich equity investors in Silicon Valley, rather than the highly overleveraged money center banks that had decided to get a little bit too clever with how they characterized the assets they were holding.


Note that there are people like Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard who are right now much more on now on Team Expansionary Fiscal Policy than on Team Raise the Inflation Target, in substantial part because of a desire to keep inflation non-salient and because our understanding of how bubbles are generated and what role ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing play in generating them is very poor.


Let me underscore Jason’s point: Marvin Goodfriend is a potential future nominee to the Federal Reserve Board. Marvin Goodfriend has a remarkable aversion to and suspicion of quantitative easing. But has been very comfortable with the Federal Reserve’s interest rate management role.


When I have pitched this idea of a blue-ribbon examination of the proper inflation target in the past, what I have believed was my cleverest thought was to make Ben Bernanke and Larry Summers co-chairs, and make them in charge of figuring out where the rough consensus of—once again getting Thomas Aquinas on you—the greater and wiser part of the informed community of thinkers about this is.


I have to run to two pointless bureaucratic meetings. If you have any more questions, please email me at delong@econ.berkeley.edu, and if I can hide my phone keyboard and use my thumbs I will answer during the meetings, and if not I will answer as soon as I can afterwards.


And one thing I did not say: We have had four pieces of bad news in the past decade, all of which strongly argue against preserving the two percent per year core PCE inflation target. They are:

  1. bad news about the value of the Wicksellian neutral interest rate.
  2. bad news about the public sphere’s understanding of what the non-interest rate macroeconomic policy tools are and how to deploy them.
  3. bad news about partisanship—the solid opposition of the Republican Party to the policies of South Carolina Republican Ben Bernanke because it was thought they might redound to the benefit of Obama.
  4. bad news about the strength of non-standard stimulative monetary policies.

More References:

Rethink 2%

3 Month Treasury Bill Secondary Market Rate FRED St Louis Fed

Rethink 2% http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Rethink%202%25%20letter.pdf:

Federal Reserve Board of Governors
Constitution Ave NW & 20th Street Northwest
Washington, D.C. 20551

Dear Chair Yellen and the Board of Governors:

The end of this year will mark ten years since the beginning of the Great Recession. This recession and the slow recovery that followed was extraordinarily damaging to the livelihoods and financial security of tens of millions of American households. Accordingly, it should provoke a serious reappraisal of the key parameters governing macroeconomic policy.

One of these key parameters is the rate of inflation targeted by the Federal Reserve. In years past, a 2 percent inflation target seemed to give ample leverage with which the Fed could lower real interest rates. But given the evidence that the equilibrium interest rate had fallen substantially even prior to the financial crisis, and that the Fed’s short-term policy rate remained at zero for seven years without sparking any large acceleration of aggregate demand growth, a reassessment of this target seems warranted. Such a reassessment is particularly appropriate when the lack of evidence that moderately higher inflation would harm Americans’ standard of living is juxtaposed with the tremendous evidence that a tighter labor market would improve Americans’ standards of living.

Some Federal Reserve policymakers have acknowledged these shifting realities and indicated their willingness to reconsider the appropriate target level. For example, San Francisco Federal Reserve President John Williams noted the need for central banks to “adapt policy to changing economic circumstances,” in suggesting a higher inflation target, and Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren cited the different context in which the inflation target was set in emphasizing the need for debate about the right target.[1] [2]

In May, Vice Chair Stanley Fischer highlighted the Canadian system of reconsidering the inflation target every five years, saying, “I can envisage–say, in the case of inflation targeting–a procedure in which you change the target or you change the other variables that are involved on some regular basis and through some regular participation.”[3]

The comments made by Fischer, Rosengren, and Williams all underscore the ample evidence that the long-term neutral rate of interest may have fallen. Even if a 2 percent inflation target set an appropriate balance a decade ago, it is increasingly clear that the underlying changes in the economy would mean that, whatever the correct rate was
then, it would be higher today. To ensure the future effectiveness of monetary policy in stabilizing the economy after negative shocks–specifically, to avoid the zero lower bound on the funds rate–this fall in the neutral rate may well need to be met with an increase in the long-run inflation target set by the Fed.

More immediately, new, post-crisis economic conditions suggest that a reiteration of the meaning of the Fed’s current target is in order. In its 2016 statement of long-run goals and strategy, the Federal Open Market Committee wrote: “The Committee would be concerned if inflation were running persistently above or below this objective.” Some FOMC participants, however, appear to instead consider 2 percent a hard ceiling that should never be breached, and justify their decision-making on that basis. It is important that the Federal Reserve makes clear–and operates policy based on–its stated goal that it aims to avoid inflation being either below or above its target.

Economies change over time. Recent decades have seen growing evidence that developed economies have harder times generating faster growth in aggregate demand than in decades past. Policymakers must be willing to rigorously assess the costs and benefits of previously-accepted policy parameters in response to economic changes.

One of these key parameters that should be rigorously reassessed is the very low inflation targets that have guided monetary policy in recent decades. We believe that the Fed should appoint a diverse and representative blue ribbon commission with expertise, integrity, and transparency to evaluate and expeditiously recommend a path forward on these questions. We believe such a process will strengthen the Fed as an institution and its conduct of monetary policy, and help ensure wise policymaking for the years and decades to come.

Yours,

Dean Baker
Laurence Ball
Jared Bernstein
Heather Boushey
Josh Bivens
David Blanchflower
J. Bradford DeLong
Tim Duy
Jason Furman
Joseph Gagnon
Marc Jarsulic
Narayana Kocherlakota
Mike Konczal
Michael Madowitz
Lawrence Mishel
Manuel Pastor
Gene Sperling
William Spriggs
Mark Thoma
Joseph Stiglitz
Valerie Wilson
Justin Wolfers


[1] John Williams, “Monetary Policy in a Low R-Star World,” August 15, 2016

[2] Sam Fleming, “Inflation Goal May Be Too Low, says Fed’s Rosengren,” Financial Times, April 21, 2015

[3] Greg Robb, “Fed’s Williams Backs Changing Central Bank’s Strategy to Price-Level Targeting,” Market Watch, May 5, 2017

Why the Fed Should Rethink Its 2%/Year No-Lookback Inflation Target

Conference call today at 9:00 PDT/noon EDT on why the Federal Reserve would be very smart to abandon its 2%/year no-lookback inflation target for a less destructive policy framework. The call is to be moderated Shawn Sebastian. Then Josh Bivens will summarize his short whitepaper: “Is 2% Too Low? Rethinking the Fed’s Arbitrary Inflation Target to Avoid Another Great Recession” http://www.epi.org/publication/is-2-percent-too-low/. Jason Furman will talk about the evidence for the fall in the equilibrium Wicksellian neutral rate of interest and the implications of that for optimal monetary policy. I come next. Joe Stiglitz wraps up. And then questions from reporters.

My task is to set out what the arguments on the other side are—and why we do not find them convincing:

I hear four arguments for not changing the 2%/year inflation target, even though pursuing that target found us in a situation where monetary policy was greatly hobbled in its ability to manage the economy for a solid decade. And, as best as I can evaluate them, all four of these arguments seem to me to be wrong. They are:

  1. The Federal Reserve, even at the zero lower bound, has powerful tools sufficient to carry out its stabilization policy tasks (Cf.: Mankiw and Weinzierl (2011) https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/exploration_of_optimal.pdf), so moving away from 2%/year as a target is not necessary. The response is: This leaves begging the questions of why, then, employment has been so low over the past decade, and why production is still so low relative to our circa-2007 expectations.

  2. The problem is not the 2%/year target but rather pressure on the Federal Reserve: pressure from substantial numbers of economists and politicians practicing bad economics and motivated partisan reasoning. (As an example, somebody sent me a video clip this week of the very smart Marvin Goodfriend half a decade ago, arguing that faster recovery required the Fed to hit the economy on the head with a brick to make people more confident in its willingness to fight inflation http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/06/on-the-negative-information-revealed-by-marvin-goodfriends-i-dont-teach-is-lm.html.) The response is: This ignores the Fed’s long institutional history of being willing to ignore outside pressure as it performs its standard monetary policy task of judging what appropriate interest rates are. Pressure only mattered when we got into “non-standard” monetary policies, which we needed to do only because the low inflation target had caused us to hit the zero lower bound.

  3. At 2%/year, inflation is non-salient: nobody worries about it. A higher inflation rate would bring shifting expectations of inflation back into the mix, distract people and firms from their proper task of calculating real costs and benefits to worry about monetary policy, and make monetary policy management more complicated. The response is: But right now people and firms are “distracted” by the high likelihood of depressions that last longer than five years. That is a much bigger distraction than worrying about whether inflation will be 4%/year of 5%/year. And right now the zero lower bound makes monetary policy management much more complicated than it was back in the 1990s when the impact of Fed policy on inflation expectations was in the mix.

  4. The Federal Reserve needs to maintain its credibility, and if it were to even once change the target inflation rate, its commitment to any target inflation rate would have no credibility. The response is: But the credibility you want to have is credibility that you will follow appropriate policies to successfully stabilize the economy—not credibility that you will mindlessly pursue a destructive policy because you think it somehow wrong to acknowledge that the considerations that led you to adopt it in the first place were wrong or have changed. As my friend Daniel Davies puts it in his One-Minute MBA Course: “Is a credible reputation as an idiot a kind of credible reputation one really wants to have?” http://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/29/reputations-are-made-of/

Over to you, Joe…

On the Negative Information Revealed by Marvin Goodfriend’s “I Don’t Teach IS-LM”

The smart and snarky Sam Bell wants to taunt me into rising to his bait by twittering https://twitter.com/sam_a_bell/status/872116967070732288 a quote from likely Fed nominee Marvin Goodfriend: “I don’t teach IS-LM”. He succeeds. Here is the quote:

TOM KEENE: But, Marvin, with, you know, basic IS-LM and theory and all that stuff you teach in Economics 101, aren’t we going to see a dampening of GDP if we see a restrictive Fed?

MARVIN GOODFRIEND: By the way, I don’t teach IS-LM. But what I would say is this…

And here is the tape:

March 23, 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emvSYwUnWyI&ab_channel=Bloomberg


Let me start by analyzing “I don’t teach IS-LM”. And let me preface this by saying that Marvin Goodfried is a very sharp and honest economist. But I believe that whenever anybody says “I don’t teach IS-LM” they are one of:

  1. Making completely implausible and wrong claims about how the economy works.
  2. Being lazy and/or stupid.
  3. Declaring a tribal affiliation to a particular Carnegie-Mellon tradition of macroeconomic analysis that the late Rudi Dornbusch described to me and others as “Jim Tobin with original errors”, and that I think has shed a lot more heat than light on real issues.

Let us start with (1), and let us start with Irving Fisher’s monetarism: the quantity of money demanded in the economy is given by the equation:

Md = PY/V

where M is the quantity of money demanded, P is the price level, Y is the level of production, and V is the velocity of money—the value of transactions that having $1 in the bank or in cash as money can support, in the sense of manufacturing the needed trust so that the transactions will go through.

If you believe that that velocity of money is fixed by the institutions of the banking system and the technology supporting transactions, then you do not have to teach IS-LM. You have reached a full stop, and have the monetarist conclusion that the total nominal spending in the economy—prices times quantities produced—is equal to a constant times the economy’s money stock, with the constant of proportionality chaining slowly over time as the institutions of the banking system and the technology supporting transactions slowly changes.

That is meaning (1) of “I don’t teach IS-LM”: I do not need to teach it because it is not important in determining how much spending there is the economy. That is implausible and wrong. Here is the graph of velocity since 1960—the thing that is supposed to be on a smooth and steady time trend if “I don’t teach IS-LM” is a sensible thing to say:

Velocity of M2 Money Stock FRED St Louis Fed

Even before the 1990s any model assuming an unproblematic relationship between the money stock and total spending was badly awry, although not as badly awry as it has been since.

Now let’s move on to (2)—lazy and/or stupid. The graph above tells you that if you want to forecast—or even retrospectively explain—the relationship between the money stock and the level of spending, you need a model of what the determinants of the fluctuations of velocity we see are. If we draw a graph with the level of spending on the horizontal axis and some sufficient statistics for the determinants of velocity on the vertical axis, the path traced out by our equation:

Md = PY/V

is conventionally called “the LM curve”. But you then need to know where on the LM curve the economy will be—you need another curve. And that other curve is conventionally called “the IS curve”.

To claim that you do not teach IS-LM is to implicitly claim that you do not need to figure out where on the LM curve the economy will be. That is something it is only possible to say if you are being lazy, or stupid.

The third meaning of “I don’t teach IS-LM” is that it is a CMU-school tribal indentification marker, and has no purpose beyond that—no intellectual purpose.

So, yes, the fact that Marvin Goodfriend would go on Tom Keene’s surveillance and say “I don’t teach IS-LM” makes me think a good deal less of him. I do, however, interpret that claim as a declaration of tribal allegiance to CMU-school macro. I do not interpret it as a claim that you don’t need a model of the determinants of fluctuations in velocity. I do not interpret it as a claim that there are no fluctuations in velocity large enough to worry about.

What worries me more, however, is what comes next:

GOODFRIEND: There is no way that this recovery can proceed with any degree of confidence unless the Fed makes sure that inflation does not move up. So I think the risks are exactly reversed from the way the Fed chairman discusses this. He has to make the public understand that any whiff of doubt about the Fed’s ability and willingness to stabilize inflation is going to put a crimp into the public’s willingness to take positions and commitments over the next two or three years that would produce genuine growth. And so I would just take it, and turn it on its head, and not put the question as you did to me, but reverse it.

The risks of allowing any latitude in inflation expectations to build dup, or any doubt about the Fed’s willingness to do what it takes to keep inflation down, is to me the most likely risk in preventing this recovery from getting any traction…

Do notice that Marvin Goodfriend is, here, thinking in terms of an IS-LM model. When he says “any whiff of doubt about the Fed’s ability and willingness to stabilize inflation is going to put a crimp into the public’s willingness to take positions and commitments… is to me the most likely risk in preventing this recovery from getting any traction…”, he is saying: “any whiff of doubt about the Fed’s ability and willingness to keep inflation low will cause a large leftward shift in the IS curve that will prevent this recovery from getting any traction…” He does not do more than gesture at an expectational mechanism for this leftward shift in the IS curve that he wants the Federal Reserve to take action to head off. But it is what he fears.

And, of course, Goodfriend was wrong: a continuation of Bernanke’s extraordinary easing policies was not going raise “any whiff of doubt about the Fed’s ability and willingness to stabilize inflation”.

Here we have a market-based measure of inflation expectations—the ten-year breakeven inflation rate since 2010: that inflation rate over the forthcoming ten years that would, at each date, have made investments in conventional Ten-Year U.S. Treasury bonds and investments in Ten-Year Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) equally profitable. The vertical blue line marks March 23, 2012: the date of Marvin Goodfriend’s interview. The point that Marvin was hammering home again and again on March 23, 2012 was that the Federal Reserve needed to rapidly start shrinking its balance sheet and raising interest rates lest inflation expectations break out to the upside.

The Federal Reserve ignored Marvin Goodfriend.

And Marvin Goodfriend was wrong. The shift to a tighter, more restrictive policy he demanded then was not necessary to prevent an upside breakout of inflation expectations.

In fact, the Federal Reserve’s persistent problem since has been that expectations of—and actual outcomes for—inflation have been well below rather than above the Federal Reserve’s targets.

I would very much like to hear Marvin Goodfriend explain why he misjudged the situation in the spring of 2012, and how he has updated his view of the economy and of optimal monetary policy since.