What Kind of New Economic Thinking Is Needed Now?: A Twitter Dialogue, with References

A Twitter Dialogue: IS-LM and the Neoclassical Synthesis in the Short-Run and the Medium-Run: Andy Harless asks a question, and I try to explain what I think Paul Krugman is thinking…


And let me put the relevant Paul Krugman pieces down here below the fold… or, rather, below the second fold:

Paul Krugman (October 30, 2015): An Unteachable Moment: “It is, as Antonio Fatas notes, almost seven years since the Fed cut rates to zero…

…The era of lowflation-plus-liquidity-trap now rivals in length the 70s era of stagflation, and has been associated with much worse real economic performance. So where, asks Fatas, is the rethinking of economic theory and policy? I asked the same question a couple of years ago…. Some of us anticipated much though not all of what has gone wrong. [But as] Fatas says…

even those who agreed with this reading of the Japanese economy would have never thought that we would see the same thing happening in other advanced economies. Most thought that this was just a unique example of incompetence among Japanese policy makers….

I did write a 1999 book titled The Return of Depression Economics, basically warning that Japan might be a harbinger…. [But even] I never expected policy to be so bad that Japan ends up looking like a role model…. We should have expected… as major a rethink as… in the 70s… [but] we’ve seen almost no rethinking. Economists who wrote that ‘inflation is looming’ in 2009 continued to warn about looming inflation five years later. And that’s the professional economists. As Josh Barro notes, conservatives who imagine themselves intellectuals have increasingly turned to Austrian economics, which explicitly denies that empirical data need to be taken into account….

Back to Fatas: how long will it take before the long stagnation has the kind of intellectual impact that stagflation did… before people stop holding up the 1970s as the ultimate cautionary tale, even… in the midst of a continuing disaster that makes the 70s look mild? I don’t know…. It’s clear that we have to understand this phenomenon in terms of politics and sociology, not logic.

Paul Krugman (October 20, 2015): Rethinking Japan: “The IMF held a small roundtable discussion on Japan yesterday…

…and in preparation for the event I thought it was a good idea to update my discussion of Japan…. I find it useful to approach this subject by asking how I would change what I said in my 1998 paper on the liquidity trap… one of my best papers; and it has held up pretty well…. But… there are two crucial differences between then and now. First, the immediate economic problem is no longer one of boosting a depressed economy, but instead one of weaning the economy off fiscal support. Second, the problem confronting monetary policy is harder than it seemed, because demand weakness looks like an essentially permanent condition.

Back in 1998 Japan was in the midst of its lost decade… good reason to believe that it was operating far below potential output. This is… no longer the case…. Output per working-age adult has grown faster than in the United States since around 2000, and at this point the 25-year growth rates look similar (and Japan has done better than Europe)…. Japan [may be] closer to potential output than we are.

So if Japan isn’t deeply depressed at this point, why is low inflation/deflation a problem?The answer… is largely fiscal. Japan’s relatively healthy output and employment levels depend on continuing fiscal support… large budget deficits, which in a slow-growth economy means an ever-rising debt/GDP ratio. So far this hasn’t caused any problems…. But even those of us who believe that the risks of deficits have been wildly exaggerated would like to see the debt ratio stabilized and brought down at some point. And here’s the thing: under current conditions, with policy rates stuck at zero, Japan has no ability to offset the effects of fiscal retrenchment with monetary expansion.

The big reason to raise inflation, then, is to make it possible to cut real interest rates… allowing monetary policy to take over from fiscal policy…. The fact that real interest rates are in effect being kept too high by insufficient inflation at the zero lower bound also means that debt dynamics for any given budget deficit are worse than they should be…. Raising inflation would both make it possible to do fiscal adjustment and reduce the size of the adjustment needed.

But what would it take to raise inflation? Back in 1998… I envisaged an economy in which the current level of the Wicksellian natural rate of interest was negative, but that rate would return to a normal, positive level…. It was easy to show that this proposition applied only if the money increase was perceived as permanent, so that the liquidity trap became an expectations problem. The approach also suggested that monetary policy would be effective if… the central bank could ‘credibly promise to be irresponsible’…. But what is this future period of Wicksellian normality of which we speak?…

Japan looks like a country in which a negative Wicksellian rate is a more or less permanent condition. If that’s the reality, even a credible promise to be irresponsible might do nothing: if nobody believes that inflation will rise, it won’t. The only way to be at all sure of raising inflation is to accompany a changed monetary regime with a burst of fiscal stimulus…. While the goal of raising inflation is, in large part, to make space for fiscal consolidation, the first part of that strategy needs to involve fiscal expansion. This… is unconventional enough that one despairs of turning the argument into policy (a despair reinforced by yesterday’s meeting…)

How high should Japan set its inflation target?… High enough so that when it does engage in fiscal consolidation it can cut real interest rates far enough to maintain full utilization…. It’s really, really hard to believe that 2 percent inflation would be high enough…. Japan may face a version of the timidity trap. Suppose it convinces the public that it will really achieve 2 percent inflation… engages in fiscal consolidation, the economy slumps, and inflation falls well below 2 percent… the whole project unravels–and the damage to credibility makes it much harder to try again. What Japan needs (and the rest of us may well be following the same path) is really aggressive policy, using fiscal and monetary policy to boost inflation, and setting the target high enough that it’s sustainable. It needs to hit escape velocity. And while Abenomics has been a favorable surprise, it’s far from clear that it’s aggressive enough to get there.

Paul Krugman (March 21, 2014): Timid Analysis: IAn issue I’ve worried about for a long time…

…which I think I’ve been able to formulate a bit better. Here goes: If you look at the extensive theoretical literature on the zero lower bound since my 1998 paper, you find that just about all of it treats liquidity-trap conditions as the result of a temporary shock… [that] leads to a period of very low demand, so low that even zero interest rates aren’t enough to restore full employment. Eventually, however, the shock will end. So the way out is to convince the public that there has been a regime change, that the central bank will maintain expansionary monetary policy even after the economy recovers, so as to generate high demand and some inflation.

But if we’re talking about Japan, when exactly do we imagine that this period of high demand… is going to happen?… What does it take to credibly promise inflation? Well, it has to involve a strong element of self-fulfilling prophecy: people have to believe in higher inflation, which produces an economic boom, which yields the promised inflation. But a necessary (not sufficient) condition for this to work is that the promised inflation be high enough that it will indeed produce an economic boom if people believe the promise will be kept. If it isn’t, then the actual rate of inflation will fall short of the promise even if people believe in the promise–which means that they will stop believing after a while, and the whole effort will fail….

Suppose that the economy really needs a 4 percent inflation target, but the central bank says, ‘That seems kind of radical, so let’s be more cautious and only do 2 percent.’ This sounds prudent–but may actually guarantee failure.

Paul Krugman (March 20, 2014): The Timidity Trap: “In Europe… they’re crowing about Spain’s recovery…

…growth of 1 percent, versus 0.5 percent, in a deeply depressed economy with 55 percent youth unemployment. The fact that this can be considered good news just goes to show how accustomed we’ve grown to terrible economic conditions…. People seem increasingly to be accepting this miserable situation as the new normal…. How did this happen?… I’d argue that an important source of failure was what I’ve taken to calling the timidity trap–the consistent tendency of policy makers who have the right ideas in principle to go for half-measures in practice, and the way this timidity ends up backfiring, politically and even economically….

There are some important differences between the U.S. and European pain caucuses, but both now have truly impressive track records of being always wrong, never in doubt…. In America… a faction both on Wall Street and in Congress… has spent five years and more issuing lurid warnings about runaway inflation and soaring interest rates. You might think that the failure of any of these dire predictions to come true would inspire some second thoughts, but, after all these years, the same people are still being invited to testify, and are still saying the same things…. In Europe, four years have passed since the Continent turned to harsh austerity programs. The architects of these programs told us not to worry about adverse impacts on jobs and growth–the economic effects would be positive, because austerity would inspire confidence. Needless to say, the confidence fairy never appeared….

So what has been the response of the good guys?… The Obama administration’s heart–or, at any rate, its economic model–is in the right place. The Federal Reserve has pushed back against the springtime-for-Weimar, inflation-is-coming crowd. The International Monetary Fund has put out research debunking claims that austerity is painless. But these good guys never seem willing to go all-in…. The classic example is the Obama stimulus… obviously underpowered given the economy’s dire straits. That’s not 20/20 hindsight….

The Fed has, in its own way, done the same thing. From the start, monetary officials ruled out the kinds of monetary policies most likely to work–in particular, anything that might signal a willingness to tolerate somewhat higher inflation, at least temporarily. As a result, the policies they have followed have fallen short of hopes, and ended up leaving the impression that nothing much can be done.

And the same may be true even in Japan… finally adopting the kind of aggressive monetary stimulus Western economists have been urging for 15 years and more. Yet there’s still a diffidence… a tendency to set things like inflation targets lower than the situation really demands… [that] increases the risk that Japan will fail to achieve ‘liftoff’–that the boost it gets from the new policies won’t be enough to really break free from deflation.

You might ask why the good guys have been so timid, the bad guys so self-confident. I suspect that the answer has a lot to do with class interests. But that will have to be a subject for another column.

Secular Stagnation–That’s My Title, of the Longer Version at Least

J. Bradford DeLong: The Tragedy of Ben Bernanke: Project Syndicate:

Ben Bernanke has published his memoir, The Courage to Act.

I am finding it hard to read. And I am finding it hard to read as anything other than a tragedy. It is the story of a man who may have been the best-prepared person in the world for the job he was given, but who soon found himself outmatched by its challenges, quickly falling behind the curve and never quite managing to catch up.

It is to Bernanke’s great credit that the shock of 2007-2008 did not trigger another Great Depression. But the aftermath was unexpectedly disappointing… READ MOAR AT PROJECT SYNDICATE

Must-Read: Charles Bean: Causes and Consequences of Persistently Low Interest Rates

Must-Read: So: On the one hand, risk tolerance is disappointingly and inappropriately low–but should return to normal some day. On the other hand, investors are “reaching for yield” and taking inappropriate risks by crowding into bubbly assets. I cannot be the only person who wants a real model of how this is supposed to work, and real evidence that it is a factor at work, plus a real argument that higher interest rates would exert enough of a curb to pass some reasonable benefit-cost test. The very sharp Gabriel Chodorow-Reich looked for this and did not find it…

Charles Bean: Causes and Consequences of Persistently Low Interest Rates: “Demographic developments… the partial integration of China…

…and the associated capital outflows…. a lower propensity to invest… as a result of heightened risk aversion…. Rates should eventually return to more normal levels…. But… the time scale… is highly uncertain and will be influenced by longer-term fiscal and structural policy choices…. A world of persistently low interest rates may be more prone to generating a leveraged ‘reach for yield’ by investors and speculative asset-price boom-busts. While prudential policies should be the first line of defence against such financial stability risks, their efficacy is by no means assured. In that case, monetary policy may need to come into play as a last line of defence…

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Rethinking Japan

Must-Read: Paul Krugman is musing about and rethinking his 1998 analysis of Japan and its macroeconomic problems:

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Paul Krugman: Rethinking Japan: “[How] would change what I said in my 1998 paper…

…on the liquidity trap[?]… Japan and the world look different…. First, the immediate economic problem is… weaning the economy off fiscal support. Second… demand weakness looks… permanent…. Back in 1998 Japan… [was] operating far below potential…. This is, however, no longer the case…. Output per working-age adult has grown faster than in the United States since around 2000…. [But] Japan’s relatively healthy output and employment levels depend on continuing fiscal support… ever-rising debt/GDP…. So far this hasn’t caused any problems…. But even those of us who believe that the risks of deficits have been wildly exaggerated would like to see the debt ratio stabilized and brought down at some point…..

With policy rates stuck at zero, Japan has no ability to offset the effects of fiscal retrenchment with monetary expansion. The big reason to raise inflation… is to… allow… monetary policy to take over from fiscal policy…. But what would it take to raise inflation?… Back in 1998… [I assumed] the Wicksellian natural rate of interest… would return to a normal, positive level at some future date… [thus] the liquidity trap became an expectations problem…. But what is this future… normality[?]… [If] a negative Wicksellian rate is… permanent… [even] a credible promise to be irresponsible might do nothing: if nobody believes that inflation will rise, it won’t….

The only way to be at all sure… is… a changed monetary regime with a burst of fiscal stimulus…. While the goal… is… to make space for fiscal consolidation, the first part of that strategy needs to involve fiscal expansion… really aggressive policy, using fiscal and monetary policy to boost inflation… setting the target high enough… escape velocity. And while Abenomics has been a favorable surprise, it’s far from clear that it’s aggressive enough to get there.

In many ways, things are even worse than Paul says. Paul Krugman’s original argument assuming that the economy would eventually head towards a long-run equilibrium in which flexible wages and prices what make Say’s Law hold true, in which there would be a positive natural nominal rate of interest, and thus in which the price level would be proportional to the money stock. That now looks up for grabs. It is the fact that that is up for grabs that currently disturbs Paul. Without a full-employment Say’s Law equilibrium out there in the transversality condition to which the present day is anchored by intertemporal financial-market and intertemporal consumer-utility arbitrage, all the neat little mathematical tricks that Paul and Olivier Blanchard built up at the end of the 1970s to solve for *the* current equilibrium break in their hands. And we enter Roger Farmer-world–a scary and frightening place.

But there is even more. Paul Krugman’s original argument also assumed back-propagation into the present via financial-market intertemporal arbitrage and consumer-satisfaction intertemporal utility arbitrage of the effects of that future well-behaved full-employment equilibrium. The equilibrium has to be there. And the intertemporal arbitrage mechanisms have to work. Both have to do their thing.

But, as Paul wrote in another context:

Paul Krugman**: Multipliers and Reality: “Rigorous intertemporal thinking…

…even if empirically ungrounded, can be useful to focus one’s thoughts. But as a way to think about the reality of spending decisions, no…. Consider… what the public knows about the biggest new government program of recent years[, ObamaCare]…. If people are that uninformed about something that big, imagining that they do anything like the calculations assumed in DSGE models is ludicrous. Surely they rely on rules of thumb that don’t make use of the kind of information that plays such a large role in our models…

Suppose the full employment equilibrium is really out there. People still have to anticipate that it is out there, and then take account of the fact that it is out there and the way that a rational-expectations utility-maximizing agent would.

Now sometimes we get lucky.

Sometimes the fact that one can transact on financial markets on a large scale means that even if only a few are willing to bet on fundamentals, the fact that they can make huge fortunes betting on fundamentals on a large scale drives current asset prices to fundamental values, and those asset prices then drive the current behavior even those who do not know anything about the future equilibrium that is driving the present via this process of expectational back-propagation inductive-unraveling.

But when we are talking about inducing people to spend more now because they fear their money will be worth less then in the future when the debt will have been monetized–well, if that were an important and active channel, we would not now have our current sub-2%/year inflation in Japan and the United States, would we?

Time to drop a link to my New Economic Thinking, Hicks-Hansen-Wicksell Macro, and Blocking the Back Propagation Induction-Unraveling from the Long Run Omega Point: The Honest Broker for the Week of May 31, 2015.

In fact, let me just repeat the whole thing below the fold…


Over at Equitable Growth: In the long run… when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.

At that time–or, rather, in that logical state to which the economy will converge if values of future shocks are set to zero–expected inflation will be constant at about the 2% per year that the Federal Reserve has announced as its target. At that time the short-term safe nominal rate of interest will be equal to that 2% per year of expected inflation, plus the real profits on marginal investments, minus a rate-of-return discount because short-term government bonds are safe and liquid. At that time the money multiplier will be a reasonable and a reasonably stable value. At that time the velocity of money will be a reasonable and a reasonably stable value. Why? Because of the powerful incentive to economize on cash holdings provided by the the sacrifice of several percent per year incurred by keeping cash in your wallet rather than in bonds. And at that time the price level will be proportional to the monetary base. READ MOAR

That was and is the logic behind so many economists’ beliefs. Their beliefs before 2008 that economies could not get stuck in liquidity traps (because central banks could always create inflation by boosting the monetary base); beliefs in 2008 and 2009 that economies’ stays in liquidity traps would be very short (because central banks were then boosting the monetary base); and beliefs since then that (because central banks had boosted the monetary base) those who believe will not taste death before, but will live to see exit from the liquidity trap and an outburst of inflation as the Federal Reserve tries and fails at the impossible task of shrinking its balance sheet to normal without inflation–all of these beliefs hinged and hinge on a firm and faithful expectation that this long run is at hand, or is near, or will soon draw near (translations from the original koine texts differ). Because the long run will come, increases now in the monetary base of sufficient magnitude that are believed to be permanent will–maybe not now, but soon, and for the rest of our lives, in this long run–produce equal proportional increases in the price level, and thus substantial jumps in the inflation rate as the price level transits from its current to its long-run level.

Moreover, there is more to the argument: The long run is not here. The long run may not be coming soon. But the long run will come. And so there will will a time when the long run is near. At that time, those who are short long-term bonds will be about to make fortunes as interest rates normalize and long bond prices revert to normal valuation ratios. At that time, those who are leveraged and short nominal debt will be about to make fortunes as the real value of their debt is heavily eroded by the forthcoming jump in the price level .

And there is still another step in the argument: When the long run is near but not yet here–call it the late medium run–investors and speculators will smell the coffee. This late medium run will see investors and speculators frantically dumping their long bonds so as not to be caught out as interest rates spike and bond prices collapse. It will see investors and speculators frantically borrowing in nominal terms to buy real assets and currently-produced goods and services so as not to be caught out when the price level jumps. Thus even before the long run is here–even in the late medium run–their will already be very powerful supply-and-demand forces at work. Those forces will be pushing interest-rates up, pushing real spending levels, and pushing price levels and inflation rates up.

The next step in the argument continues the induction unraveling: When it is not yet the late medium run but only the medium run proper, rational investors and speculators must still factor the future coming of the long run into their decisions. The long run may not be near. But it may be that soon markets will conclude the long run is near. Thus in the medium run none will want their portfolios to be so imbalanced that when the late medium run does come and with it the time to end your exposure to long-term bonds and to nominal assets and leverage up, you are on the wrong foot and so last person trying to get through the door in the stampede. There may be some short run logic that keeps real spending low, prices low, inflation quiescent, and interest rates at zero. But that logic’s effects will be severely attenuated when the medium run comes, for then investors and speculators will be planning not yet for the long run or even the at-handness of the long run, but for the approach of the approach of the long run.

And so we get to the final step of the induction-unraveling: Whatever may be going on in the short run must thus be transitory in duration, moderate in their effects, and limited in the distance it can can push the economy away from its proper long run equilibrium. And it certainly cannot keep it there. Not for long.

This is the real critique of Paul Krugman’s “depression economics”. Paul can draw his Hicksian IS-LM diagrams of an economy stuck in a liquidity trap:

The Inflationista Puzzle NYTimes com

He can draw his Wicksellian I=S diagrams of how the zero lower bound forces the market interest rate above the natural interest rate at which planned investment balances savings that would be expected were the economy at full employment:

Lifestream vpdoc 2015 06 02 Tu Krugman Feldstein

Paul can show, graphically, that conventional monetary policy is then completely ineffective–swapping two assets that are perfect substitutes for each other. Paul can show, graphically, that expansionary fiscal policy is then immensely powerful and has no downside: it does not generate higher interest rates; it does not crowd out productive private investment; and, because interest rates are zero, it entails no financing burden and thus no required increase in future tax wedges. But all this is constrained and limited by the inescapable and powerful logic of the induction-unraveling propagating itself back through the game tree from the Omega Point that is the long run equilibrium. In the IS-LM diagram, the fact that the long run is out there means that even the contemplation of permanent expansion of the monetary base is rapidly moving the IS curve up and to the right, and thus leading the economy to quickly exist the liquidity trap. In the Wicksellian I=S diagram, the fact that the long run is out there means that even the contemplation of permanent expansion of the monetary base is rapidly moving the I=S curve up so that the zero lower bound will soon no longer constrain the economy away from its full-employment equilibrium.

The “depression economics” equilibrium Paul plots on his graph is a matter for today–a month or two, or a quarter or two, or at most a year or two.

But it will soon be seven years since the U.S. Treasury Bill rate was more than whispering distance away from zero. And it is now more than two decades since Japan’s short-term bonds sold at less than par.

Paul has a critique of the extremely sharp Marty Feldstein’s latest over at Project Syndicate (parenthetically, I must say it is rather cruel for Project Syndicate to highlight Feldstein’s August 2012 “Is Inflation Returning” in site-searches for “Feldstein”):

Paul Krugman: The Inflationista Puzzle: “Martin Feldstein has a new column on what he calls the ‘inflation puzzle’…

…the failure of inflation to soar despite the Fed’s large asset purchases, which led to a very large rise in the monetary base. As Tony Yates points out, however, there’s nothing puzzling at all about what happened; it’s exactly what you should expect when interest rates are near zero…. This isn’t an ex-post rationale, it’s what many of us were saying from the beginning. Traditional IS-LM analysis said [it]… so did the translation of that analysis into a stripped-down New Keynesian framework that I did back in 1998, starting the modern liquidity-trap literature. We even had solid recent empirical evidence: Japan’s attempt at quantitative easing in the naughties, which looked like this:

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I’m still not sure why relatively moderate conservatives like Feldstein didn’t find all this convincing back in 2009. I get, I think, why politics might predispose them to see inflation risks everywhere, but this was as crystal-clear a proposition as I’ve ever seen.

Still, even if you managed to convince yourself that the liquidity-trap analysis was wrong six years ago, by now you should surely have realized that Bernanke, Woodford, Eggertsson, and, yes, me got it right…. Maybe it’s because those tricksy Fed officials started paying all of 25 basis points on reserves[?] ([But] Japan never paid such interest[.]).

Anyway, inflation is just around the corner, the same way it has been all these years.

Unlike Paul, I get why moderate conservatives like Feldstein didn’t find “all this convincing” back in 2009. I get it because I only reluctantly and hesitantly found it convincing. Feldstein got the Hicksian IS-LM and the Wicksellian S=I diagrams: he just did not believe that they were anything but the shortest of short run equilibria. He could feel in his bones and smell in the air the up-and-to-the-right movement of the IS curve and the upward movement of the S=I curve as investors, speculators, and businesses took look at the size of the monetary base and incorporated into their thinking about the near future the backward induction-unraveling from the long run Omega Point. My difference with Marty in 2009 is that he thought then that the liquidity trap was a 3 month-1 year phenomenon–that that was the duration of the short run–while I was much more pessimistic about the equilibrium-restoring forces of the market: I thought it was a 3 year-5 year phenomenon.

And it was not just me. Consider Ben Bernanke. I have no memory any more of who was writing [Free Exchange] back in 2009. But whoever it was was very sharp, and wrote:

????: Person of the next five to ten years: “There are those who blame [Bernanke] for missing all the warning signs…

…those who blame him for managing the crisis in the most Wall Street-friendly way… those who blame him for laying the groundwork for a future asset bubble or inflation crisis…. I think his defining decision… has been to conclude that 10% unemployment is acceptable–that having averted a Depression-style 25% unemployment scenario, his countercyclical work is complete… that the risk of sustained high unemployment is outweighed by the risk of… efforts to boost the economy… by asking for more fiscal stimulus… targeting nominal GDP or… committing… to some [higher] level of inflation….

Bernanke believes most of the increase in unemployment… to be cyclical… does not think that pushing… unemployment… down to… 7% would overextend the economy…. He simply seems to think that leaving his primary job half done is acceptable. That’s a pretty momentous choice, affecting millions of people directly and billions indirectly. It will shape American politics and economics for the next decade, at least…. He deserves… person of the year…. But reappointment? That’s another story entirely.

What this leaves out is that Bernanke was willing to take his foot off the gas in late 2009 with an unemployment rate of 10% because, like Marty, he could smell the back-propagation of the induction-unraveling of the short run equilibrium. He us expected that, with his foot off the gas, unemployment would be 8.5% by the end of 2010, 7% by the end of 2011, 6% by the end of 2013–and thus that further expansionary policies in 2010-2011 would run some risk of overheating the economy in 2013-2014 that was not worth the potential game. He didn’t see the liquidity trap short run as as brief as Marty did. But he also didn’t see the short run as as long as I did–and I have greatly underestimated its duration.

(Someday I want Christina Romer to write up her memoir of late 2009-late 2010, as she wandered the halls of the White House, the Federal Reserve, the IMF, and the OECD, trying to convince a bunch of economists certain that the short run was a year or two that all the historical evidence we had–the Great Depression and Japan’s Lost Decades, plus what we dimly think we know about 1873-9, and so forth–suggested, rather, that it the short run would, this time, be a five to ten-year phenomenon. Yet even with backing by Rinehart and Rogoff on the short run equilibrium duration (albeit not the proper fiscal policy) front, she made little impression and had next to no influence.)

Ahem. I have gotten off track…

My point:

Back in late 2009 I thought that the liquidity-trap short run was likely to be a three-to-five-year phenomenon. It has now been six. And the Federal Reserve’s proposed interest-rate liftoff now scheduled for the end of 2015 appears to me profoundly unwise as a matter of technocratic optimal control, prudent policy, and recognition of the situation. The duration of the short run thus looks to me to be, this time, not three to five years but more like ten. Or more. The backward-propagation of the induction-unraveling of the short run under pressure of the healing rays of the long run Omega Point is not just not as strong as Marty Feldstein thought, is not just not as strong as I thought, it is nearly non-existent.

Thus I find myself getting somewhat annoyed at Paul Krugman when he writes that:

Paul Krugman: Choose Your Heterodoxy: “A lot of what I use is 1930s economic theory…

…via Hicks. And I should be deeply ashamed…. [But] plenty of physicists who still use Newtonian dynamics, which means that they’re seeing the world through the lens of 17th-century theory. Fools!… Farmer is trying to explain an empirical regularity he thinks he sees, but nobody else does–a complete absence of any tendency of the unemployment rate to come down when it’s historically high. I’m with John Cochrane here: you must be kidding…

Or that:

Paul Krugman: Nonlinearity, Multiple Equilibria, and the Problem of Too Much Fun: “Was the crisis something that requires novel multiple-equilibrium models to understand?…

…That’s far from obvious. The run-up to crisis looks to me more like Shiller-type irrational exuberance. The events of 2008 do have a multiple-equilibrium feel to them, but not in a novel way… pull Diamond-Dybvig…. And since the crisis struck, as I’ve argued many times, simple Hicksian macro–little equilibrium models with some real-world adjustments–has been stunningly successful…

Or:

Paul Krugman: Learned Helplessness: “We knew all about liquidity traps, and had at least thought about balance-sheet crises…

…a decade ago…. The Return of Depression Economics in 1999. The world we’re now in isn’t that different from the world I suspected, back then, we’d find ourselves in. Oh, and about Roger Farmer and Santa Fe and complexity and all that: I was one of the people who got all excited about the possibility of getting somewhere with very detailed agent-based models–but that was 20 years ago. And after all this time, it’s all still manifestos and promises of great things one of these days…

The problem is that the macroeconomics that Paul Krugman learned at Jim Tobin’s knee wasn’t just 1930s-style Hicks-Hansen Keynesianism. It was the 1970s adaptive-expectations Phillips Curve neoclassical synthesis–nearly the same stuff that I first learned at Marty Feldstein and Olivier Blanchard’s knees in the spring of 1980. That is the framework that Marty is using know, and that generates his puzzlement. That framework had a short run of 1-2 years, a medium-run transition-dynamics phase of 2-5 years, and a long run of 5 years or more baked into it. You cannot–or at least I cannot–just throw away the medium run transition dynamics* and the declaration that the long run Omega Point is five years out, and say that mainstream economics does well. You need to explain why the back-propagation induction-unraveling worked at its proper time scale in the 1970s and the 1980s, but is nowhere to be found now.

And so I am much less confident that I have solid theoretical ground under my feet than Paul Krugman does.

A Reader’s Guide to the Secular Stagnation Debate: The Honest Broker for the Week of October 12, 2015

The very sharp and energetic Peter Passell, who runs the Milken Institute Review these days, commissioned me to write a reader’s guide to the secular stagnation debate. I set it up as a four-corner cage match–Bernanke, Rogoff, Krugman, and Summers–and I am proud of it. (But I have to offer apologies to those–Koo, Blanchard, Feldstein come most immediately to mind, but there are others–who have their own serious positions that are not completely and satisfactorily understood as linear combinations of the four I chose to be my basis vectors.) It is out:

J. Bradford DeLong (2015): The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation, Milken Institute Review 2015:IV (October) pp. 34-51:

Bernanke… says we have entered an age of a “global savings glut.”… Rogoff… points to the emergence of global “debt supercycles.”… Krugman warns of the return of “Depression economics.” And… Summers calls for broad structural shifts in government policy to deal with “secular stagnation.” All… are expecting a future that will be very different than the second half of the 20th century, or even the so-far, not-so-good third millennium. But they… [differ on] optimism or pessimism… [and on whether] cautious repairs or an abrupt break with policy as usual [are needed. This] is, I believe, the most important policy-relevant debate in economics since John Maynard Keynes’s debate with himself… which transformed him from a monetarist to the apostle of active fiscal policy.

I think Summers is largely right, but then, I would, since I have been losing arguments with him since I was 20. What’s needed here, though, is not a referee’s decision, but a guide to the fight…


Briefly:

  • Bernanke sees anomalies in portfolio decisions by emerging-market central banks and plutocrats that have generated a global savings glut in the relatively short-run.
  • Rogoff sees overleverage as having created a medium-run period of stagnation that requires active debt-liquidation policies to shorten it.
  • Krugman sees the end of the era of moderate inflation as bringing about a return to “Keynesian” economic structures that require activist fiscal policy.
  • Summers sees deeper problems that call for more in the way of government’s acting as investment-spender, risk-bearer, safe asset-supplier, and bubble-preventer of last resort, and thus extend its proper role beyond that of Keynesian demand-management policies toward what Keynes called a “comprehensive socialization of investment”.

All are serious and live possibilities…

Must-Read: Torsten Slok: DB: Expect More Hawkish Fedspeak

Must-Read: Remember, relative to Fed beliefs less than four years ago, we have already seen 75 basis points of tightening relative to the benchmark of the estimated natural rate:

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The more likely it is that we are in a régime of secular stagnation, the more important it is to take the 2%/year inflation target as an average rather than a ceiling, and the less-wise is the Federal Reserve’s expressed commitment to start raining interest rates come hell or high water. The markets appear to think–quite reasonably–that the Federal Reserve is gradually moving month-by-month toward a more reality-based Larry Summers-like view of the macroeconomic situation, and that when December comes around the current FOMC consensus for raising interest rates then will have sublimed away.

And if the market is wrong, the most likely reason for it to be wrong is if the Federal Reserve decides to be contrary and to stop its ongoing rethinking process, just to show that it can and that it is boss…

Torsten Slok: DB: Expect More Hawkish Fedspeak: “Before Yellen’s speech last week, the probability of a rate hike by the end of 2015 was 42%…

…Today it is 41%. The market continues to believe that the Fed will not hike rates later this year despite 13 out of 17 FOMC members expecting a hike in 2015. Why does the market not believe the Fed? One reason is likely that the Fed for several years now has been too optimistic… has had to revise down their forecasts of not only near-term growth but also longer-term growth prospects…. This one-way revision in forecasts over many years has probably had an impact on how market participants interpret Fed communication…. We continue to expect a rate hike in December and we continue to expect Fedspeak in the coming weeks will repeat their expectation of liftoff coming in 2015..

Morning Must-Watch: Lawrence Summers:

Owen Zidar Weekend Links: “Larry Summers gave a talk at INET (starts at 45 min and goes to 1:38 or so)…

…with some especially interesting hypotheses about the changing structure of investment (from GE’s high capital investment model to Google’s abundance of cash) and reflections on the agriculture transition (around 1:21) and the associated difficulties with large shifts in the industrial composition of employment… http://new.livestream.com/INETeconomics/HumanAfterAll/videos/47888551

Morning Must-Read: Barry Eichengreen: It’s Not a Savings Glut, It’s a Tolerance for Holding Risky Investment Shortfall

Barry Eichengreen: It’s Not a Savings Glut, It’s a Tolerance for Holding Risky Investment Shortfall: “The data show little evidence of a savings glut….

It is plausible that the wealthy consume smaller shares of their income…. But to affect global interest rates, these trends have to translate into increased global savings…. A second explanation for low interest rates is a dearth of attractive investment projects. But this does not appear to be the diagnosis of stock markets…. Capital expenditure has been insufficient to prevent rates from trending down for more than three decades…. If the disorder has multiple causes, then there should be multiple treatments… tax incentives for firms to hire the long-term unemployed; more public spending on infrastructure, education, and research to compensate for the shortfall in private capital spending; and still higher capital requirements for banks and strengthened regulation of nonbank financial institutions…. Finally, central banks should set a higher inflation target…