Tag: Austerity

Must-read: Antonio Fatas: “BIS Redefines Inflation (Again)”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: I agree with Antonio Fatas here. The BIS is using model-building 0% as a discovery mechanism and 100% to advance reasons for policy conclusions that have been set in stone in advance. The problem is that the various BIS models do not appear to codify any form of knowledge–for as their predictions are proved false by time the responses not to adjust the framework to reality but to put forward to a new framework. The latest such:

Antonio Fatas: BIS Redefines Inflation (Again): “An interview with Hyun Song Shin…

…reminds us of the strange and heterodox views that the BIS (and others) have about the behavior of inflation… a very special and radical view on what determines inflation… supported by a unique reading of the data…. Here is a summary of the new BIS theory…. 1. Inflation is a global phenomenon, not a national one. Monetary policy has very little influence on inflation…. 2. The idea that monetary policy affects demand and possibly inflation is a ‘short-term’ story that is too simple…. 3. Deflation is not that bad…. 4. While central banks are powerless at controlling domestic inflation, they are very powerful at distorting interest rates and rates of returns for long periods of time (decades). 5. Central banks have a problem when inflation is the only goal (they end up creating distortions in financial markets). 6. Monetary policy is a cause of all China’s problems (he admits that there are other causes as well).

In summary, central banks are evil. Their only goal is to control inflation, but they cannot really control it, and because of their superpowers to distort all interest rates they only end up causing volatility and crises. And this is coming from an organization whose members are central banks and its mission is ‘to serve central banks’. Surreal.

We see this more and more with economists who try to come over to macro from modern finance. They base themselves not in Mill-Malthus or Wicksell-Keynes or Bagehot-Minsky or Fisher-Friedman, but evolve some approach of their own which usually seems to combine the errors of the early Say and of Hayek to produce sub-Econ-1-level fallacies…

Must-read: Paul Krugman (2014): “Why Weren’t Alarm Bells Ringing?”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Paul Krugman (2014): Why Weren’t Alarm Bells Ringing?: “Almost nobody predicted the immense economic crisis…

…If someone claims that he did, ask how many other crises he predicted that didn’t end up happening. Stopped clocks are right twice a day, and chronic doomsayers sometimes find themselves living through doomsday. But while prediction is hard, especially about the future, this doesn’t let our economic policy elite off the hook. On the eve of crisis in 2007 the officials, analysts, and pundits who shape economic policy were deeply, wrongly complacent. They didn’t see 2008 coming; but what is more important is the fact that they even didn’t believe in the possibility of such a catastrophe. As Martin Wolf says in The Shifts and the Shocks, academics and policymakers displayed ‘ignorance and arrogance’ in the runup to crisis, and ‘the crisis became so severe largely because so many people thought it impossible.’…

Focusing, as Martin Wolf does, on the measurable factors—the ‘shifts’—that increased our vulnerability to crisis is incomplete…. Intellectual shifts—the way economists and policymakers unlearned the hard-won lessons of the Great Depression, the return to pre-Keynesian fallacies and prejudices—arguably played an equally large part in the tragedy of the past six years. Say’s Law… liquidationism… conventional economic analysis fell short…. But when policymakers rejected orthodox economics, what they did by and large was to reject it in favor of doctrines like ‘expansionary austerity’—the unsupported claim that slashing government spending actually creates jobs—that made the situation worse rather than better. And this makes me a bit skeptical about Wolf’s proposals to avert ‘the fire next time.’ The Shifts and the Shocks… Wolf’s substantive proposals… are all worthy and laudable. But the gods themselves contend in vain against stupidity. What are the odds that financial reformers can do better?

More musings on the current episteme of the Federal Reserve…

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Paul Krugman’s Respectable Radicalism politely points out (at least) one dimension along which I am a moron.

Let me back up: Here in the United States, the current framework for macroeconomic policy holds that the economy is nearly normalized, that further extraordinary expansionary and fiscal policy moves carry “risks”, and that as a result the right policy is stay-the-course. I was arguing that the Economist Left Opposition demand–for substantially more expansionary monetary and fiscal policies right now until we see the whites of the eyes of rising inflation–was soundly based in orthodox lowbrow Hicks-Patinkin-Tobin macro theory. That is the macro theory that economists like Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Stan Fischer taught their entire academic careers.

Paul Krugman points out—politely—that I am wrong.

The Economist Left Opposition framework contains at least one claim that is substantially non-orthodox: We claim that worries about the debt accumulation from expansionary fiscal policy right now are profoundly misguided. Under current conditions, the government’s borrowing money or printing money and buying stuff does not raise but lowers the debt-to-annual-GDP ratio. However large you think the influence of an outstanding debt burden on interest rates happens to be, interest rates in the future will be lower, the debt as a multiple of annual GDP will be lower, and thus the debt financing burden and all debt-related risks will be lower in the future with a more expansionary fiscal policy than baseline. This is definitely nonstandard. And it is embarrassing to note that this is my idea–or, rather, Larry Summers and I were the ones who did the arithmetic to show how topsy-turvy the macroeconomic world currently is with respect the fiscal policy. This was a really smart thing for us to do. And it is definitely not part of the standard orthodox policy-theory framework in the way that the rest of the Hicks-Patinkin Economist Left Opposition framework is.

As Paul writes:

Paul Krugman: Respectable Radicalism: “Hysteresis [in the context of very low interest rates]… is indeed a departure from standard models…

…But the [rest, the] case that the risks of hiking too soon and too late are deeply asymmetric comes right out of IS-LM with a zero lower bound… the framework I used….

Being an official… can create a conviction that you and your colleagues know more than is in the textbooks…. But… [at the] zero-lower-bound… world nobody not Japanese [had] experienced for three generations, theory and history are much more important than market savvy. I would have expected current Fed management to understand that; but apparently not.

I wrote about Rawls’s reflective equilibrium idea yesterday, so let me just cut and paste: Are models properly idea-generating machines, in which you start from what you think is the case and use the model-building process to generate new insights? Or are models merely filing systems–ways of organizing your beliefs, and whenever you find that your model is leading you to a surprising conclusion that you find distasteful the proper response is to ignore the model, or to tweak it to make the distasteful conclusion go away?

Both can be effectively critiqued. Models-as-discovery-mechanisms suffer from the Polya-Robertson problem: It involves replacing what he calls “plausible reasoning”, where models are there to assist thinking, with what he calls “demonstrative reasoning”. in which the model itself becomes the object of analysis. The box that is the model is well described but, as Dennis Robertson warned,there is no reason to think that the box contains anything real. Models-as-filing-systems are often used like a drunk uses a lamp post: more for support than illumination.

In the real world, it is, of course, the case that models are both: both filing systems and discovery mechanisms. Coherent and productive thought is, as the late John Rawls used to say, always a process of reflective equilibrium–in which the trinity of assumptions, modes of reasoning, and conclusions are all three revised and adjusted under the requirement of coherence until a maximum level of comfort with all three is reached. The question is always one of balance.

What I think Paul Krugman may be missing here is how difficult it is to, as Keynes wrote:

The composition of this book has been for the author a long struggle of escape… from habitual modes of thought and expression. The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds…

In this case, the old ideas with respect to the budget deficit are those of various versions of fiscal crisis and fiscal price level theory developed largely out of analysis of Latin American and southern European experience, and those of various versions of monetarist theory based upon the experience of the 1970s. How difficult this is is illustrated by one fact I find interesting about Paul Krugman (1999): Back then, his analysis of the liquidity trap and fiscal policy back in 1999 was… very close to Ken Rogoff’s analysis of the liquidity trap and fiscal policy today:

Paul Krugman (1999): Thinking About the Liquidity Trap, Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 14:4 (December), pp. 221–237: “The story… [of] self-fulfilling pessimism is… a multiple equilibrium story…

…with the liquidity trap corresponding to the low-level equilibrium…. Over some range spending rises more than one-for-one with income. (Why should the relationship flatten out at high and low levels? At high levels resource constraints begin to bind; at low levels the obvious point is that gross investment hits its own zero constraint. There is a largely forgotten literature on this sort of issue, including Hicks (194?), Goodwin (194?), and Tobin (1947))….
Thinking about the liquidity trap

Multiple equilibria… allow for permanent (or anyway long-lived) effects from temporary policies. There may be excess desired savings even at a zero real interest rate given the pessimism that now prevails… but if some policy could push the economy to a high level of output for long enough to change those expectations, the policy would not have to be maintained…. Balance-sheet problems… may involve an element of self-fulfilling slump: a firm that looks insolvent with an output gap of 10 percent might be reasonably healthy at full employment….

‘Pump-priming’ fiscal policy is the conventional answer to a liquidity trap…. In either the IS-LM model or a more sophisticated intertemporal model fiscal expansion will indeed offer short-run relief…. So why not consider the problem solved? The answer hinges on the government’s own budget constraint….

Ricardian equivalence… is not the crucial issue…. Real purchases… will still create employment…. (In a fully Ricardian setup the multiplier on government consumption will be exactly 1)….

The problem instead is that deficit spending does lead to a large government debt, which will if large enough start to raise questions about solvency. One might ask why government debt matters if the interest rate is zero…. But the liquidity trap, at least in the version I take seriously, is not… permanent…. [When] the natural rate of interest… turn[s] positive… the inherited debt will indeed be a problem….

Fiscal policy [is] a temporary expedient that cannot serve as a solution [unless]….

First, if the liquidity trap is short-lived… fiscal policy can serve as a bridge… after [which]… monetary policy will again be able to shoulder the load… a severe but probably short-lived financial crisis in trading partners… breathing space during which firms get their balance sheets in order….

[Second, if] it will jolt the economy into a higher equilibrium…. If this is the underlying model… one must realize that the criterion for success is quite strong…. Fiscal expansion… must lead to… increases in private demand so large that the economy begins a self-sustaining process of recovery….

None of this should be read as a reason to abandon fiscal stimulus…. But fiscal stimulus… [is only] a way of buying time… [absent] assumptions that are at the very least rather speculative…

Since 1999, Paul has changed his mind. He has become an aggressive advocate of expansionary fiscal policy as the preferred solution. Why? And is he right to have done so? Or should he have stuck to his 1999 position, and should he still be lining up with Ken today?

One part of the reason, I think, is–and I say this with whatever modesty I have ever had still intact–that DeLong and Summers (2012) has provided one of the very very few additions of conceptual value-added to Krugman (1999). We pointed out that with a modest degree of “secular stagnation”–a modest fall in safe real interest rates over the long run–and a slight degree of hysteresis, fiscal expansion in a liquidity trap does not worsen but improves the long-run fiscal balance of an economy in a liquidity trap. This was something that Krugman missed in 1999. It is something that people like Rogoff continue to miss today.

This has consequences: The more scared you are of some long-run collapse of the currency from excessive government debt relative to annual GDP, the stronger you should advocate for more expansionary fiscal policy when the economy is in a liquidity trap. The more you think that real interest rates in the long run are coupled to high values of government debt relative to annual GDP, the stronger you should advocate for more expansionary fiscal policy when the economy is in a liquidity trap. The more you worry about debt crowding-out useful and productive government spending in the long run, the stronger you should advocate for more expansionary fiscal policy when the economy is in a liquidity trap. This whole line of thought, however, was absent from Krugman (1999), and is absent from Rogoff and company today.

A second part of the reason is that even modest “secular stagnation” does more than (with even a slight degree of hysteresis) reverse the sign on the relationship between fiscal expansion today and long-run government-debt burdens. It also undermines the effectiveness of monetary policy as an alternative to fiscal policy. Monetary expansion–in the present or the future–needs a post-liquidity trap interest-rate “normalization” environment to have the purchase to raise the future price level that it needs to be effective in stimulating production now. Secular stagnation removes or delays or attenuates that normalization.

Third comes the credibility problem.

Fourth, there is a sense in which Paul has not shifted that much. Look at his analysis of Japan…

Third comes the credibility problem. Back in the days of Krugman (1999), he at least had little doubt that a central bank that understood the situation would want to generate the expected inflation needed. That was the way to create a configuration of relative prices consistent with full employment. That was what a competent central bank would wish to do. And a central bank that wished to create expectations of higher inflation would have a very easy time doing so.

The mixed success of Abenomics, however, has cast doubt on the second of these—on the ability of central banks to easily generate higher expected inflation. Japan today appears to be having a significantly harder time generating expectations of inflation than I had presumed. And

With respect to the first—the desire to create higher expected inflation—Ben Bernanke, while chairman of the Federal Reserve, repeatedly declared that quantitative easing policies were not intended to produce any breach of the 2% per year inflation target upward. These declarations were not something that I expected, and were not something that I understood. They still leave me profoundly puzzled.

Fourth, there is a sense in which Paul has not shifted that much. Look at his analysis of Japan today. In his view, fiscal expansion today is needed to create the actual inflation today that will (i) raise the needle on future expected inflation, and so (ii) allow for a shift to policies that (iii) will amortize rather than grow the national debt. Inflation someday generated by the fiscal theory of the price level and high future interest rates generated by the risks of debt accumulation still have their places in his thought.

Musings on the current episteme of the Federal Reserve

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Larry Summers attributes the Federal Reserve’s decision to tighten policy, in what appears to him and to me to be a weakly-growing and high-slack economy, to four mistakes, which are themselves driven by a fifth, overarching mistake. The four mistakes are:

  1. The Fed has much too much confidence in its models that tell it that the unemployment rate takes the temperature of the labor market and the Phillips Curve now still has the slope it had in the 1970s.
  2. The Fed operates as though FOMC members are tased whenever inflation rises above 2%/year, with no countervailing painful consequences of low inflation, low employment, or low output.
  3. The Fed believes–without empirical support anywhere that I can see–that quick sharp moves up or down in interest rates have larger effects in total than the same interest-rate change made gradually and over a longer term.
  4. The Fed thinks–without theoretical support that I can see–that zero interest rates are not a reflection of an economy in a pathological state, but rather a cause of economic pathology that is dangerous now that the economy is once again “normal”.

And Summers sees the fifth, overarching mistake the Fed is making right now as:

(5) The Fed is excessively committed to “existing models and modes of thought… in the thrall of orthodoxy”:

Larry Summers: My Views and the Fed’s Views on Secular Stagnation: “First, the Fed assigns a much greater chance that we will reach 2 percent core inflation…

…than is suggested by most available data…. Second, the Fed seems to mistakenly regard 2 percent inflation as a ceiling not a target…. Third, the Fed seems to be in the thrall of notions that… do not… have analytic support premised on the idea that the rate of change of interest rates, as distinct from their level, influences aggregate demand…. I know of no model in which demand will be stronger in say 2018 if rates rise and then fall than if they are kept constant at zero. Nor… do I know of a reason why recession is more likely if the changes are backloaded…. The argument… is in the category with the argument that I should starve myself in order to have the pleasure of relieving my hunger pangs. Fourth, the Fed is… overestimating the neutral rate…. The desire to raise rates reflects… a sense that zero rates are a sign of pathology and an economy creating 200,000 jobs a month is not diseased….

Why is the Fed making these mistakes if indeed they are mistakes? It is not because its leaders are not thoughtful or open minded or concerned with growth and employment.  Rather I suspect it is because of an excessive commitment to existing models and modes of thought…

I do think–confidently–that Summers is absolutely 100% correct in his identification of the four component intellectual errors that the Federal Reserve is currently making. And it is certainly true that these are the result of an excessive commitment to some current modes of thought–there are, after all, a lot of people who join the Fed in thinking that zero interest rates are a cause rather than the proper treatment of pathology right now, that the Fed needs to raise rates now to give it the space to lower them if need be later, that it is dangerous for inflation to rise above 2%/year ever, that the Phillips Curve somehow has a steeper slope than the recent evidence of the past generation can justify belief in, and that the unemployment rate rather than the detrended employment-to-population ratio gives the temperature of the labor market.

But do these beliefs on the part of the Fed really reflect an excessive commitment to existing models? There I have my doubts. Or, rather, it depends on what you think the proper function of economic modeling is. Are models properly idea-generating machines, in which you start from what you think is the case and use the model-building process to generate new insights? Or are models merely filing systems–ways of organizing your beliefs, and whenever you find that your model is leading you to a surprising conclusion that you find distasteful the proper response is to ignore the model, or to tweak it to make the distasteful conclusion go away?

Both can be effectively critiqued. Models-as-discovery-mechanisms suffer from the Polya-Robertson problem: It involves replacing what he calls “plausible reasoning”, where models are there to assist thinking, with what he calls “demonstrative reasoning”. in which the model itself becomes the object of analysis. The box that is the model is well described but, as Dennis Robertson warned,there is no reason to think that the box contains anything real. Models-as-filing-systems are often used like a drunk uses a lamp post: more for support than illumination.

In the real world, it is, of course, the case that models are both: both filing systems and discovery mechanisms. Coherent and productive thought is, as the late John Rawls used to say, always a process of reflective equilibrium–in which the trinity of assumptions, modes of reasoning, and conclusions are all three revised and adjusted under the requirement of coherence until a maximum level of comfort with all three is reached. The question is always one of balance.

But it is clear to me that if you give even minor weight to the first–see well-founded models as a way of generating new insights rather than just organizing old beliefs–that the line of work into the economics of the liquidity trap that I see as well-represented by Krugman’s (1999) “Thinking About the Liquidity Trap” tells us, very strongly, that the Federal Reserve is on the wrong track intellectually right now. It tells us that what is out of whack has not been and is not the real money stock, but is instead the expected inflation rate. Or, rather, that because the expected inflation rate is too low, there is no value of the real money stock consistent with full employment equilibrium. If expected inflation were higher, the existing money stock would be ample, or even require shrinking.

This is the conclusion of Krugman (1999): that the economy needs higher expected and actual inflation, and that the free-market economy with full price flexibility would deliver that inflation. But the Fed does not appear to acknowledge either that the economy needs higher inflation, that the flexible-price benchmark would deliver this inflation, or that the job of the Fed is to mimic that full employment-generating price structure as closely as possible.

Moreover, the Fed does not engage in reflective equilibrium. It rejects the conclusions of what I regard as the standard Patinkin-style existing model of Krugman (1999). But it does not propose an alternative model. There seems to me to be no theoretical ground, no model even considered as a filing system, underpinning the “orthodox” modes of thought that the Fed believes. And it does not seem to feel this absence aaa a problem. I find that somewhat disturbing.

Must-Read: Simon Wren-Lewis: The Knowledge Transmission Mechanism and Austerity

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: A good wrestle with a very tough intellectual problem by the truly excellent Simon Wren-Lewis:

Simon Wren-Lewis: The Knowledge Transmission Mechanism and Austerity: “How do economic policy mistakes happen?…

…Policy makers want to do the right thing (although they have political preferences), and the academic consensus is correct, but policy makers do not follow it because they rely on imperfect intermediaries….

In contrast to the 1930s, the key features of the current situation are explicable in terms of textbook macroeconomic theory. Governments are actively trying to reduce their budget deficits through fiscal austerity, and this is having a predictably negative impact on economic activity when monetary policy is unable to offset its effects. So the current macroeconomic crisis does not seem to be the result of lack of macroeconomic understanding….

[The] folk story… often told by policy makers [has basic problems. It is that] in response to the Great Recession… some countries had employed a limited fiscal stimulus… this intervention, the recession itself and earlier failures of governments to be fiscally prudent led to a debt-funding crisis. Economies realised that they too could become like Greece, and so were forced to embark on a sharp fiscal contraction, commonly called austerity…. [But] there is no clear evidence that there were serious fiscal problems [outside of Greece] before the financial crisis… debt increased… because of the impact of the recession itself… no evidence whatsoever of a debt-funding crisis outside the Eurozone… if anything a shortage of debt…. How can I blame the second Eurozone recession on fiscal austerity with such confidence?… First, it is what basic macroeconomics – the macroeconomics taught to every undergraduate and post-graduate around the world, including in Germany – tells us. Second, it is what every independent model based exercise that I have seen also tells us….

Things have gone wrong in the Eurozone not because of any inadequacies in macroeconomic theory, but because that theory was ignored by policymakers…. I think it is worth exploring [the] alternative: that policy has gone wrong because the knowledge transmission mechanism (KTM) has failed…. Why might [policymakers] have been getting the wrong advice? One response is that they asked the wrong people…. The expansionary austerity line… appeared to be the one that many policymakers adopted. If the KTM had been working, then this result could only have been a consequence of policy makers willfully choosing to adopt a minority academic point of view for political ends…. Political commentators… unlikely to be economists… relate to… financial bookkeeping. It is… easy… to tell stories about excessive borrowing, but rather more difficult to talk about multiplier effects and the ZLB…. There are also important interactions between economists working in the financial sector and the media…. There is a saying in financial markets: “bond economists never saw a fiscal tightening they didn’t like”….

Among the governors of the three major central banks, only Ben Bernanke seemed prepared to say publicly that a severe fiscal contraction would make his job much more difficult. Central banks also seem far too optimistic, at least when they talk publicly, about the impact of unconventional monetary policy measures…. It seems to me that the main reason why central banks failed to give good advice on fiscal consolidation is that, among their leaders at least, there is a deep seated fear of fiscal dominance. They fear that if deficits are large, then at some stage they will be asked (or required) to monetise those deficits and that inflation will increase as a result. As Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England in 2010, once said: “Central banks are often accused of being obsessed with inflation. This is untrue. If they are obsessed with anything, it is with fiscal policy.”… It possible to argue that King’s role in 2010 was actually quite pivotal…. Central banks therefore played a crucial role in the failure of the KTM in 2010. They were naturally seen as a source for macroeconomic received wisdom, and indeed they were, if those seeking advice had talked directly to those involved in modelling the business cycle. In practice, however, advice was received from central bank governors, and in most part that did not convey received macroeconomic wisdom…

But…

My memory of what the bulk of policy-oriented macroeconomists were saying in 2008-10 is:

  1. Central banks are not tapped out at the zero-lower bound.
  2. Even at the zero lower bound, fiscal multipliers are relatively low.
  3. Debt issued now will have to be refinanced later at high interest rates.
  4. Hence expansionary fiscal policy can be a temporary bridge, but is not a solution.
  5. North Atlantic economies recover robustly and rapidly from demand shocks on their own.

Must-Read: Frances Coppola: Eurodespair

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Frances Coppola: Eurodespair: “I warned about ‘siren voices’ calling for tighter monetary policy…

…while the Eurozone economy is stuck in a toxic equilibrium of low growth, zero inflation and intractably high unemployment…

…the so-called “German Council of Economic Experts (GCEE)”…. There appears to be no justification for monetary tightening [even] in Germany. So why are a group of German “economic experts” calling not only for the ending of QE, but for its reversal? The clue is….

Low interest rates pose risks for financial stability and erode the business models of banks and insurers over the medium term. Relying only on macroprudential regulation cannot solve these problems.

Yes, as usual it is all about banks…. It is true that persistently low interest rates do reduce banks’ net interest margins. So do the flat yield curves created by QE. But against that should be set the benefit for businesses who can obtain credit both from banks and from markets at much lower interest rates…. The German establishment seems hellbent on steering the Eurozone ship on to the rocks. I despair, I really do.

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: The Not-So-Bad Economy

Posted on by Brad DeLong

**Must-Read: Mark Thoma sends us to Paul Krugman on the Fed’s forthcoming likely policy mistake with respect to this month’s interest-rate liftoff. My take: there is one chance in two that in June of 2018 the Federal Reserve will be wishing it had not raised interest rates in December 2015–it is, of course, unable to effectively catch up in policy terms:

Paul Krugman: The Not-So-Bad Economy: “I believe that the Fed is making a mistake…

…But the fact that hiking rates is even halfway defensible is a sign that the U.S. economy isn’t doing too badly. So what did we do right?… The Fed and the White House have mostly worried about the right things. (Congress, not so much.) Their actions fell far short of what should have been done…. But at least they avoided taking destructive steps to fight phantoms…. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the European Central Bank gave in to inflation panic, raising interest rates twice in 2011–and in so doing helped push the euro area into a double-dip recession….

Unfortunately, the U.S. ended up doing a fair bit of austerity too, partly driven by conservative state governments, partly imposed by Republicans in Congress via blackmail over the federal debt ceiling. But the Obama administration at least tried to limit the damage.
The result of these not-so-bad policies is today’s not-so-bad economy…. Things could be worse.

And they may indeed get worse, which is why the Fed’s likely rate hike will be a mistake…. I’m not sure why this [asymmetric risks] argument, which a number of economists are making, isn’t getting much traction at the Fed. I suspect, however, that officials have been worn down by incessant criticism of their policies, and want to throw the critics a bone. But those critics have been wrong every step of the way. Why start taking them seriously now?

A Powerful Intellectual Stumbling Block: The Belief that the Market Can Only Be Failed

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Over at Project Syndicate: The Trouble with Interest Rates: Of all the strange and novel economic doctrines propounded since 2007, Stanford’s John Taylor has a good claim to propounding the strangest: In his view, the low interest-rate, quantitative-easing, and forward-guidance policies of North Atlantic and Japanese central banks are like:

imposing an interest-rate ceiling on the longer-term market… much like the effect of a price ceiling in a [housing] rental market…. [This] decline in credit availability, reduces aggregate demand, which tends to increase unemployment, a classic unintended consequence…”

When you think about it, this analogy makes no sense at all.

When a government agency imposes a rent-control ceiling, it:

  • makes it illegal for renters to pay or landlords to collect more than the ceiling rent;
  • thus leaves a number of potential landlords willing but unable to rent apartments and a number of potential renters willing but unable to offer to pay more than the rent-control ceiling.

When a central bank reduces long-term interest rates via current and expected future open-market operations, it:

  • does not keep any potential lenders who wish to lend at higher than the current interest rate from offering to do so;
  • does not keep any potential borrowers who wish from taking up such an offer;
  • it is just that no borrowers wish to do so.

The reason we dislike rent-control ceilings–that it stops transactions both buyers and sellers wish to undertake from taking place–is simply absent.

So why would anyone claim that low interest-rate, quantitative-easing, and forward-guidance policies are like rent control?

I think that the real path of reasoning is this:

  1. John Taylor, and the others claiming that central banks are committing unnatural acts by controlling the interest rate, feel a deep sense of wrongness about the current level of interest rates.
  2. John Taylor and his allies believe that whenever a price like the interest rate is “wrong”, it must be because the government has done it–that the free market cannot fail, but can only be failed.
  3. Thus the task is to solve the intellectual puzzle by figuring out what the government has done to make the current level of the interest rate so wrong.
  4. Therefore any argument that government policy is in fact appropriate can only be a red herring.
  5. And the analogy to rent control is a possible solution to the intellectual puzzle.

If I am correct here, then the rest of us will never convince John Taylor and company.

Arguments that central banks are doing the best they can in a horrible situation require entertaining the possibility that markets are not perfect and can fail. And that they will never do. We have seen this in action: Five years ago John Taylor and company were certain that Ben Bernanke’s interest-rate, quantitative-easing, and forward-guidance policies risked “currency debasement and inflation”. The failure of those predictions has not led John Taylor or any other of the Republican worthy signatories of their “Open Letter to Ben Bernanke” to rethink and consider that perhaps Bernanke knows something about monetary economics. Instead, they seek another theory–the price-control theory–for why the government is doing it wrong.

Thus all we can do is repeat, over and over again, what both logic and evidence tell us:

  • That with the current configuration of fiscal policy, North Atlantic monetary policy is not too loose but if anything too restrictive.
  • That as far as the real interest rate is concerned, the “‘natural rate’… that would be ground out by the Walrasian system of general equilibrium equations”, as Milton Freidman would have put it, is lower than the one current monetary policy gives us.
  • That our economies’ inertial expectations and contracting structures have combined with monetary policy to give us nominal interest and inflation rates that are distorted, yes–but an interest rate that is too high and an inflation rate that is too low relative to what the economy wants and needs, and what a free-market flexible-price economy in a proper equilibrium would deliver.

Why does the North Atlantic economy right now want and need such a low real interest rate for its proper equilibrium? And for how long will it want and need this anomalous and disturbing interest-rate configuration? These are deep and unsettled questions involving, as Olivier Blanchard puts it, “dark corners” where economists’ writings have so far shed much too little light.

Hold on tight to this: There is a wrongness, but the wrongness is not in what central banks have done, but rather in the situation that has been handed to them for them to deal with.

Must-Read: Mark Thoma Sends Us to Simon Wren-Lewis: Economists and the Eurozone: Wake Up Calls and Political Capture

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Mark Thoma sends us to Simon Wren-Lewis: Economists and the Eurozone: Wake Up Calls and Political Capture: “I have often tried… to ask whether Germany’s strange stance on these macro issues…

…simply reflects this different conjunctural position. I think the answer is no…. Germany’s stance reflects similar political economy pressures as you will find in other OECD economies: there is no German exceptionalism, but rather that the forces that everywhere are pushing austerity and tighter monetary policy happen for various reasons to be stronger in Germany. From this perspective, this post from Frances Coppola is particularly interesting. Perhaps the problem at the heart of the Eurozone is that economic policy advice in Germany has been effectively captured by employers’ interests, and perhaps the interests of banks in particular…

And Mark comments:

Economic policy effectively captured by business and financial interests? That could never happen here…

What is the free-market solution to a liquidity trap? Higher inflation!

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Three seventeen-year old quotes from Paul Krugman (Paul R. Krugman (1998): It’s Baaack: Japan’s Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1998:2 (Fall), pp. 137-205):

Suppose that the required real rate of interest is negative; then the economy ‘needs’ inflation, and an attempt by the central bank to achieve price stability will lead to a zero nominal interest rate and excess cash holdings…

And:

In a flexible-price economy, the necessity of a negative real interest rate [for equilibrium] does not cause unemployment…. The economy deflates now in order to provide inflation later…. This fall in the price level occurs regardless of the current money supply, because any excess money will simply be hoarded, rather than added to spending…. The central bank- which finds itself presiding over inflation no matter what it does, [but] this [flexible-price version of the liquidity] trap has no adverse real consequences…

And:

A liquidity trap economy is “naturally” an economy with inflation; if prices were completely flexible, it would get that inflation regardless of monetary policy, so a deliberately inflationary policy is remedying a distortion rather than creating one…

Thinking about these three quotes has led me to change my rules for reading Paul Krugman.

My rules were, as you remember:

  1. Paul Krugman is right.
  2. If you think Paul Krugman is wrong, refer to (1).

They are now:

  1. Paul Krugman is right.
  2. If you think Paul Krugman is wrong, refer to (1).
  3. And even if you thought Paul Krugman was right already, go reread and study him more diligently–for he is right at a deeper and subtler level than you would think possible.

Let us imagine a fully-flexible distortion-free free-market economy–the utopia of the Randites. Let us consider how it would respond should people suddenly become more pessimistic about the future.

People feel poorer. Feeling poorer, people want to spend less now. However, today’s productive capacity has not fallen. Thus the market economy, in order to incentivize people to keep spending now at a rate high enough to maintain full employment, drops the real interest rate. It thus makes the future more expensive relative to the present, and makes it sufficiently more expensive to incentivize keeping real spending now high enough to maintain full employment.

The real interest rate has two parts. It is equal to:

  1. the nominal interest rate,
  2. minus the inflation rate.

If money demand in the economy is interest elastic, the fall in the real interest rate will take the form of adjustments in both pieces. First, the free-market flexible-price distortion-free economy’s equilibrium will shift to drop the nominal interest rate. Second, the equilibrium will also shift to drop price level will drop immediately and instantaneously. Then the subsequent rebound of the price level back to normal produces the inflation that is the other part of The adjustment of the real interest rate.

If money demand takes the peculiar form of a cash-in-advance constraint, then:

  1. the interest elasticity of money demand is zero as long as the interest-rate is positive, and then
  2. the interest elasticity of money demand is infinite when the interest-rate hits zero.

In this case, the process of adjustment of the real interest rate in response to bad news about the future has two stages. In the first stage, 100% of the fall in the real interest rate is carried by a fall in the nominal interest rate, as the price level stays put because the velocity of money remains constant at the maximum technologically-determined rate allowed by the cash-in-advance constraint. In the second stage, once the nominal interest rate hits zero, and there is no longer any market incentive to spend cash keeping velocity up, 100% of the remaining burden of adjustment rests on the expected rebound inflation produced by an immediate and instantaneous fall in the price level. These two stages together carry the real interest rate down to where it needs to be, in order to incentivize the right amount of spending to preserve full employment.

The free-market solution to the problem created by an outbreak of pessimism about the future is thus to drop the nominal interest rate and then, if that does not solve the problem, to generate enough inflation in order to solve the problem.

Now we do not have the free-market distortion-free flexible-price economy that is the utopia of the Randites. We have an economy with frictions and distortions, in which the job of the central bank is to get price signals governing behavior to values as close as possible to those that the free-market distortion-free flexible-price economy that is the utopia of the Randites would produce.

In particular, our economy has sticky prices in the short run. There can be no instantaneous drop in the price level to generate expectations of an actual rebound inflation. If the central bank confines its policies to simply reducing the nominal interest rate while attempting to hold its inflation target constant, it may fail to maintain full employment. Even with the nominal interest rate at zero, the fact that the price level is sticky in the short-run may mean that the real interest rate is still too high: there may still be insufficient incentive to get spending to the level needed to preserve full employment.

A confident central bank, however, would understand that its task is to compensate for the macroeconomic distortions and mimic the free-market flexible-price full-employment equilibrium outcome. It would understand that proper policy is to set out a path for the money stock and for the future price level that produces the decline in the real interest rates that the flexible-price market economy would have generated automatically.

Thus a confident central bank would view generating higher inflation in a liquidity trap not as imposing an extra distortion on the economy, but repairing one. The free-market flexible-price distortion-free economy of Randite utopia would generate inflation in a liquidity trap in order to maintain full employment–via this instantaneous and immediate initial drop in the price level. A central bank in a sticky price economy cannot generate this initial price-level drop. But it can do second-best by generating the inflation.

All of my points above are implicit–well, actually, more than implicit: they are explicit, albeit compressed–in Paul Krugman’s original 1998 liquidity trap paper.

And yet I did not come to full consciousness that they were explicit until I had, somewhat painfully, rethought them myself, and then picked up on them when I reread Krugman (1998).

On the one hand, I should not feel too bad: very few other economists have realized these points.

On the other hand, I should feel even worse: as best as I can determine, no North Atlantic central bankers have recognized these points laid out in Paul Krugman’s original 1998 liquidity trap paper.

Central bankers, instead, have regarded and do regard exceeding the previously-expected level of inflation as a policy defeat. No central bankers recognize it as a key piece of mimicking the free-market full-employment equilibrium response to a liquidity trap. None see it as an essential part of their performing the adjustment of intertemporal prices to equilibrium values that their flexible-price benchmark economy would automatically perform, and that they are supposed to undertake in making Say’s Law true in practice.

But why has this lesson not been absorbed by policymakers? It’s not as though Krugman (1998) is unknown, or rarely read, is it?

It amazes me how much of today’s macroeconomic debate is laid out explicitly–in compressed form, but explicitly–in Krugman’s (1998) paper and in the comments by Dominguez and Rogoff, especially Rogoff…