More musings on the fall of the house of Uncle Milton…

This, from Paul Krugman, strikes me as… inadequate:

Paul Krugman: Why Monetarism Failed: “Right-wingers insisted–Friedman taught them to insist–that government intervention was always bad, always made things worse…

…Monetarism added the clause, ‘except for monetary expansion to fight recessions.’ Sooner or later gold bugs and Austrians, with their pure message, were going to write that escape clause out of the acceptable doctrine. So we have the most likely non-Trump GOP nominee calling for a gold standard, and the chairman of Ways and Means demanding that the Fed abandon its concerns about unemployment and focus only on controlling the never-materializing threat of inflation.

What about the reformicons, who pushed for neo-monetarism? We can sum up their fate in two words: Marco Rubio. There is no home for the kind of return to realism they were seeking…. The monetarist idea no longer serves any useful purpose, intellectually or politically. Hicksian macro–IS-LM or something like it–remains an extremely useful tool of both analysis and policy formulation; that tool is not helped by trying to state it in terms of monetary velocity and all that. And if you want macro policy that isn’t dictated by Ayn Rand logic, you have to turn to a Democrat; on the other side, there’s nobody rational to talk to.

Sad!

This is an issue I have worried at like a dog at a worn-out glove for a decade now. So let me worry at it again:

There were gold bugs and Austrians in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s too. But Arthur Burns, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan and company kicked them up and down the street with gay abandon. And the Ordoliberal Germans would, when you cornered them, would admit that somebody else had to take on the job of stabilizing aggregate demand for the North Atlantic economy as a whole for their doctrines to work.

But in 2009 the Lucases and the Prescotts and the Cochranes and the Famas and the Boldrins and the Levines and the Steils and the Taylors and all the others and even the Zingaleses (but we can excuse Luigi on the grounds that if you are (a) Italian and (b) view Berlusconi as the modal politician a certain reluctance to engage in fiscal policy is understandable)–crawled out from their caves and stood in the light of day. And the few remaining students of Milton Friedman got as little respect as the Stewards of Gondor gave to the leaders of the Dunedain.

Yes, there is an intellectual tension between believing in laissez faire as a rule and believing in activist monetary management to set the market interest rate equal to the Wicksellian neutral interest rate. But why is that tension unsustainable? Once you have swallowed a government that assigns property rights, sustains contracts, and enforces weights and measures, why is this extra step a bridge too far?

The disappearance of monetarism

I just hoisted a piece I wrote 15 years ago1—a follow-up to my “Triumph of Monetarism” that I published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. I think of it as my equivalent of Olivier Blanchard’s “The state of macro is good” piece…

However, it is, I now recognize, clearly inadequate. It is quite good on how today’s New Keynesians are really Monetarists and how today’s Monetarists are really Keynesians. But it misses completely:

  • How use of the DSGE framework was morphing from (a) a rhetorical step to emphasize that assuming that agents in models behaved “rationally” did not entail any laissez-faire inclusions to (b) an unhelpful methodological straitjacket.
  • How there were about to be no Monetarists—how the right wing of macroeconomics, the Republican Party in the United States, the Tory Party in England, and all of Germany were about to, when confronted with the choice between following Milton Friedman’s well-grounded and empirically based arguments on the one hand and a mindless lemming-like devotion to austerity on the other hand, reject both empirical evidence and coherent thought and plump enthusiastically for the second.

I am still not sure how that happened…

Must-read: Barry Eichengreen: “The Case for a Grand Bargain”

Must-Read: Barry Eichengreen: The Case for a Grand Bargain: “What would it take for all this to happen?…

…First, there would have to be a reassertion of non-ideological economic common sense in U.S. and German policy making circles. One doesn’t have to be a Keynesian to believe that record low interest rates in both countries create a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for infrastructure spending or to acknowledge that there are aspects of public infrastructure in both countries desperately in need of repair.

Second, central banks in countries lacking fiscal space would have to do more. This means not just talking down the exchange rate as a way of enhancing competitiveness but taking steps to encourage domestic spending, for example ramping up domestic [financial] security purchases still further, and ignoring domestic opposition.

Third, emerging markets and Southern European countries would have to make a credible commitment to structural reform. The need is there, quite independent of international coordination. But without this commitment, international coordination is off the table.

Skeptics will say that I am a dreamer for imagining this grand bargain. But the alternative to this dream is an ongoing economic nightmare.

Must-read: Ken Rogoff: “The Fear Factor in Global Markets”

Must-Read: This, by the very-sharp Ken Rogoff, seems to me to be simply wrong. If “the supply side, not lack of demand, is the real constraint in advanced economies” then we would live in a world in which inflation would be on a relatively-rapid upswing right now. Instead, we live in a world in which Global North central banks are persistently and continually failing to meet their rather-modest targets for inflation. If a fear of supply disruptions or supply lack were ruling markets, then people in markets would be heavily betting on an upsurge of inflation and we would see that. But we don’t. What am I missing here?

Ken Rogoff: The Fear Factor in Global Markets: “There are some parallels between today’s unease and market sentiment in the decade after World War II…

…In both cases, there was outsize demand for safe assets. (Of course, financial repression also played a big role after the war, with governments stuffing debt down private investors’ throats at below-market interest rates.)… People today need no reminding about how far and how fast equity markets can fall…. The idea is that investors become so worried about a recession, and that stocks drop so far, that bearish sentiment feeds back into the real economy through much lower spending, bringing on the feared downturn. They might be right, even if the markets overrate their own influence on the real economy. On the other hand, the fact that the US has managed to move forward despite global headwinds suggests that domestic demand is robust. But this doesn’t seem to impress markets….

The most convincing explanation… is… that markets are afraid that when external risks do emerge, politicians and policymakers will be ineffective in confronting them. Of all the weaknesses revealed by the financial crisis, policy paralysis has been the most profound. Some say that governments did not do enough to stoke demand. Although that is true, it is not the whole story. The biggest problem burdening the world today is most countries’ abject failure to implement structural reforms. With productivity growth at least temporarily stuck in low gear, and global population in long-term decline, the supply side, not lack of demand, is the real constraint in advanced economies…

Must-read: David Wessel: “Are We Ready for the Next Recession?”

Must-Read: David Wessel: Are We Ready for the Next Recession?: “Financial markets seem to be anxious that a U.S. recession is on the horizon…

…even though economic forecasters disagree. When the next recession arrives, will fiscal and monetary policy be able to respond? If so, how? The Federal Reserve is holding short-term interest rates near zero and faces resistance, internally and externally, to reviving large-scale purchases of assets. The federal debt is larger, as a share of the economy, than at any time since the end of World War II and is projected to climb further. On March 21, the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy will consider which fiscal and monetary policy tools will be available in the event of a recession—and which won’t—and how effective additional fiscal and monetary stimulus is likely to be, along with new ideas to make fiscal policy more effective…. David Wessel… Wendy Edelberg… Ben Spielberg… Phillip Swagel… Richard Clarida… Jon Faust… Louise Sheiner… Jared Bernstein

Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: Conservatives Turn on the White Working Class

Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: Conservatives Turn on the White Working Class: “One of the great conceits of conservative punditry over the past 15 years…

…has been the notion that American politics is dominated by affluent liberal snobs who disdain white working-class America and its communities…. Charles Murray… Clive Crook… merely assert its existence via broad generalities. But now… some conservative pundits are unleashing sentiments about white working-class communities that are a good deal more vicious than snobbish disdain.

National Review’s Kevin Williamson…

the truth about these dysfunctional downscale communities is that they deserve to die: Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap….The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles…. They need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

David French… backs up Williamson using less colorful language… makes an even more explosive charge–that conservatives should regard economically struggling white people in rural communities in the same way they regard… [the] inner-cit[ies]….

It was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives…. Always–always–there was a sense of entitlement. And that’s where disability or other government programs kicked in….

These are essays making the case that suffering white working-class communities don’t deserve help of any kind. That’s a correct application of the strict principles of free market ideology, but it’s also a signpost of how American political discourse has changed since the end of the Cold War. If you said in 1966, or even 1986…. It was taken for granted that the governing class had an obligation–a practical one, if not a moral one–to actually make the system work for average people. Over the past 20 years, that idea has been increasingly abandoned on the American right…

Must-read: Jonathan Portes and Simon Wren-Lewis: “Issues in the Design of Fiscal Policy Rules”

Must-Read: Jonathan Portes and Simon Wren-Lewis: Issues in the Design of Fiscal Policy Rules: “The potential conflict in designing rules between the need to mimic optimal policy…

…where debt is a shock absorber and is adjusted only very slowly, and the need to prevent deficit bias…. It may therefore make sense to make different recommendations depending on… the nature of governments…. [In] governments… not… subject to deficit bias… simple debt feedback rules come close to reproducing the optimal fiscal policy… [if] the exchange rate is floating and there is little risk of hitting the ZLB…. [G]overnment[s] behav[ing] in a non-benevolent manner… need… operational targets… fixed for the end of the natural term of the government… [to] provide strong incentives… for cyclically adjusted primary deficits…. These targets should be set in cooperation with a fiscal council, which would monitor progress… [and,] in exigent circumstances… suggest that the target be revised….

These rules should not apply if interest rates have hit the ZLB. In that case, fiscal policy should focus on demand stabilization… the suspension of the rule while the ZLB constraint applies, and not its modification. This ‘knockout’ should be an explicit part of the rule…

Ordoliberalismus and Ordovolkismus

At the zero lower bound on safe nominal short-term interest rates, an expansionary fiscal policy impetus of d percent of current GDP will:

  1. raise current output by (μ)d,
  2. raise future output by (φμ)d, and
  3. raise the debt to GDP ratio by a proportional amount ΔD = (1 – μτ – μφ)d,

where [mu] is the Keynesian multiplier, τ is the tax rate, and φ is the hysteresis coefficient.

It will then require a commitment of (r-g)ΔD percent of future output the service the additional debt, where r is the real interest rate on government debt and g is the growth rate of the economy. The debt service can be raised through explicit and fiscal deadweight loss-inducing taxation, through inflation–a tax on outside money balances accompanied by disruption of the unit of account–or through financial repression–a tax on the banking system but also imposes financial distortions.

That is the simple arithmetic of expansionary fiscal policy in a liquidity trap.

The question of whether and how much expansionary fiscal policy a government facing a liquidity trap should engage and then becomes a technocratic one of calculating uncertain benefits and uncertain costs. Why uncertain? Because our knowledge of the parameters of the economy is uncertain. And we are particularly uncertain not just of the outcome of the key debt- amortization parameter r-g but of its ex-ante distribution as well. There is this an element of radical, almost Knightian, uncertainty here in the benefit-cost calculation. But it remains a benefit-cost calculation. And rare these days is the competent economist Who has thought through the benefit-cost calculation and failed to conclude that the governments of the United States, Germany, and Britain have large enough multipliers, strong enough hysteresis coefficients for infrastructure investment programs, and sufficient fiscal space–favorable likely distributions of r-g–to make substantially more expansionary fiscal policies than they are currently following almost no-brainers.

It is against the backdrop of this situation that we find aversion to fiscal expansion being driven not by pragmatic technocratic benefit-cost calculations but by raw ideology. And so we find Barry Eichengreen being… shrill:

Barry Eichengreen: Confronting the Fiscal Bogeyman: “The world economy is visibly sinking, and the policymakers who are supposed to be its stewards are tying themselves in knots…

…Or so suggest the results of the G-20 summit held in Shanghai…. All that emerged… was an anodyne statement… structural reforms… avoiding beggar-thy-neighbor policies. Once again, monetary policy was left… the only game in town…. Someone needs to do something to keep the world economy afloat, and central banks are the only agents capable of acting. The problem is that monetary policy is approaching exhaustion….

The solution is straightforward. It is to fix the problem of deficient demand… by boosting public spending. Governments should borrow to invest in research, education, and infrastructure…. Such investments cost little given low interest rates… [and] enhance the returns on private investment [as well]…. Thus it is disturbing to see… particularly… the US and Germany [refusing] to even contemplate such action, despite available fiscal space….

Barry blames Germany’s derangement on the ideology of Ordliberalism:

In Germany, ideological aversion to budget deficits… is rooted in the post-World War II doctrine of ‘ordoliberalism,’ which counseled that government should enforce contracts and ensure adequate competition but otherwise avoid interfering in the economy…. The ordoliberal emphasis on personal responsibility fostered an unreasoning hostility to the idea that actions that are individually responsible do not automatically produce desirable aggregate outcomes…. It rendered Germans allergic to macroeconomics….

Barry blames the U.S. derangement on a somewhat analogous ideological formation—call it Ordovolkism:

[In] the US… citizens have been suspicious of federal government power, including the power to run deficits, which is fundamentally a federal prerogative.… That suspicion was strongest in the American South… rooted in the fear that the federal government might abolish slavery…. During the civil rights movement, it was again the Southern political elite that opposed the muscular use of federal power…. The South [became] a solid Republican bloc and leave its leaders antagonistic to all exercise of federal power except for the enforcement of contracts and competition—a hostility that notably included countercyclical macroeconomic policy. Welcome to ordoliberalism, Dixie-style. Wolfgang Schäuble, meet Ted Cruz.

And Barry concludes by asking:

Ideological and political prejudices deeply rooted in history will have to be overcome to end the current stagnation. If an extended period of depressed growth following a crisis isn’t the right moment to challenge them, then when is?

Barry intends this last as a rhetorical question: It is the great Hillel’s “If not now, when?”, to which the proper answer is: “Then now!”

But it is quite possible that the best answer is, instead: “Never!”

While Austerian fear and suspicion of countercyclical monetary policy is rooted in the same Ordoliberal and Ordovolkist ideological fever swamps as objections to countercyclical fiscal policy, it is much weaker. It is much weaker because fundamentalist cries for an automatic monetary system—whether based on a gold standard, a k%/year percent growth rule, or John Taylor’s interest-rate rule—have crashed and burned so spectacularly so many times that they lack even the barest surface plausibility. History has definitively refuted Henry Simons’s call for rules rather than authority in monetary policy. The near-consensus agreed-upon task of institution design for monetary policy is not to construct rules but, instead, to construct authorities with technocratic competence and sensible objectives and values.

Thus one way around the Ordoliberal and Ordovolkist ideological blockages is to redefine a sufficient quantum of countercyclical fiscal policy as monetary policy. I call this “social credit”. Others call it “helicopter money”. Move the central bank’s seigniorage revenue stream outside of the government’s consolidated budget. Assign the disposition of this revenue stream to the central bank. It is not first-best. It may be good enough to do the job.

Another way of attempting to finesse the problem is to construct a fiscal council of some sort. Such an institution, assigned responsibility for the government’s investment budget, may attract the technocratic competence and status of the central banks, and so outflank Ordoliberal and Ordovolkist ideological blockages. Are haps.

But if neither of these expedients—neither social credit or helicopter money on the one hand nor fiscal councils on the other—will serve, then Barry Eichengreen is completely right: it is long past time for a frontal intellectual assault on the dangerous and destructive ideologies of Ordoliberalism and Ordovolkism.

And that assault would be, itself, part of a broader intellectual struggle. The major point of Steve Cohen’s and my Concrete Economics is precisely that ideology is a very bad guide the economic policy. This is simply another—albeit an unusually important—instance.

Must-read: Simon Wren-Lewis: “A (Much) Better Fiscal Rule”

Must-Read: Simon Wren-Lewis: A (Much) Better Fiscal Rule: “Today the Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell…

…will give a speech where he puts forward an alternative fiscal rule… a rolling target for the government’s current balance: within 5 years taxes must cover current spending. It leaves the government free to borrow to invest…. There is a commitment to reduce debt relative to trend GDP over the course of a parliament. No doubt we will hear the usual cries from the opponents of sensible fiscal rules: Labour plan to borrow billions more than George Osborne and they plan to go on borrowing forever. The simple response to that should be that it is right to borrow to invest in the country’s future, just as firms borrow to invest in capital and individuals borrow to invest in a house. Indeed, with so many good projects for the government to choose from, and with interest rates at virtually zero, it is absolute madness not to investment substantially in the coming years….

Recessions come and go, you might respond, but higher debt will always be with us. That ignores two key points. First, prolonged and deep recessions cause lasting damage. UK GDP per head is currently over 15% below pre-recession trends. Does none of that have anything to do with the slowest UK recovery from a recession in centuries? Second using fiscal policy to end recessions quickly does not mean higher debt forever. The key point is that debt can be reduced once the recession is over and interest rates are safely above their lower bound. Doing that will be no cost to the economy as a whole, as monetary policy can offset the impact on demand. Obsessing about debt during a recession, by contrast, costs jobs and reduces incomes, as every economics student knows and as the OBR have shown….

Some Labour MPs and commentators. They say, quite rightly, that one of the main reasons the 2015 election was lost was because Labour were not trusted on fiscal policy. But the basic truth is that you do not enhance your fiscal credibility by signing up to a stupid fiscal rule. Apart from getting attacked for doing so by people like me, your collective heart is not really in it and it shows. You get trapped into proposing to shrink the state as Osborne is doing, or hitting the poor as Osborne is doing, or raising taxes which makes you unpopular. And if by chance it ever looks like you might be getting that trust back, Osborne or his successor will move the goalposts again.

The far more convincing way to get trust back is to adopt a fiscal rule that makes sense to both economists and the public (‘only borrowing to invest’), and actively talking about it….

The Conservatives know they are vulnerable on public investment. Osborne tries to give the impression that he is doing a lot of it, but the figures do not lie. In the last five years of the Labour government the average share of net public investment in GDP was over 2.5%. During the coalition years it fell to 2.2%, and for the five years from 2015 it is planned to average just 1.6%. That is not building for the future, but putting it in jeopardy, as those whose homes have been flooded have found to their cost.

Must-read: Barry Eichengreen: “Confronting the Fiscal Bogeyman”

Must-Read: Barry Eichengreen: Confronting the Fiscal Bogeyman: “The International Monetary Fund… warned the assembled G-20 attendees…

…[Yet] all that emerged from the meeting was an anodyne statement about pursuing structural reforms and avoiding beggar-thy-neighbor policies…. Once again, monetary policy was left… as the only game in town…. Someone needs to do something to keep the world economy afloat, and central banks are the only agents capable of acting. The problem is that monetary policy is approaching exhaustion…. The solution is straightforward. It is to fix the problem of deficient demand not by attempting to further loosen monetary conditions, but by boosting public spending… in research, education, and infrastructure…. Such investments cost little, given low interest rates. Productive public investment would also enhance the returns on private investment….

Thus, it is disturbing to see the refusal of policymakers, particularly in the US and Germany, to even contemplate such action, despite available fiscal space (as record-low treasury-bond yields and virtually every other economic indicator show). In Germany, ideological aversion to budget deficits runs deep… rooted in the post-World War II doctrine of ‘ordoliberalism’…. The ordoliberal emphasis on personal responsibility… rendered Germans allergic to macroeconomics….

The US did not experience hyperinflation…. But for the better part of two centuries, its citizens have been suspicious of federal government power, including the power to run deficits…. That suspicion was strongest in the American South, where it was rooted in the fear that the federal government might abolish slavery. In the mid-twentieth century, during the civil rights movement, it was again the Southern political elite that opposed the muscular use of federal power…. Lyndon Baines Johnson’s ‘Great Society’… render[ed] the South a solid Republican bloc and leave its leaders antagonistic to all exercise of federal power except for the enforcement of contracts and competition–a hostility that notably included countercyclical macroeconomic policy. Welcome to ordoliberalism, Dixie-style. Wolfgang Schäuble, meet Ted Cruz.

Ideological and political prejudices deeply rooted in history will have to be overcome to end the current stagnation. If an extended period of depressed growth following a crisis isn’t the right moment to challenge them, then when is?