Tag: Macroeconomics

Must-read: Tim Duy: [Stan Fischer] “Resisting Change?”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Two takeaways this morning from Stan Fischer, and from Tim Duy reading Stan Fischer:

  1. 1.4%-2% inflation “positive and broadly consistent with price stability” “not in another universe [from 2%]… not a negative number” is the new 2% inflation target.

  2. Because the Federal Reserve has no confidence in its ability to nudge the unemployment rate up to its long-run NAIRU level without overshooting and causing a recession, it must always attempt to glide down to the NAIRU from above–and must not follow policies that risk pushing unemployment below the NAIRU, whatever it really is:

Tim Duy and Friends: [Stan Fischer] Resisting Change?](https://twitter.com/TimDuy/status/694715619929780224): https://t.co/2g24mCkTzv

Lance Bachmeier: @kocherlakota009 @TimDuy: “Good post…

…SF/EG (inadvertently?) communicate that 1.5-2% inflation is ‘good enough’ for them.

NRKocherlakota: “@TimDuy Problem: if 2% is the true symmetric…

…target of policy, the FOMC needs a U-Turn, not just a pause: https://sites.google.com/site/kocherlakota009/home/policy/thoughts-on-policy/1-21-16

Tim Duy: “@kocherlakota009 So…

…I don’t really believe the target is symmetric. Need to prove it to me.

NRKocherlakota: “@TimDuy Yes, and I worry that public/markets…

…have your same (reasonable!) doubts. SF’s and EG’s remarks don’t help assuage those doubts.

Lance Bachmeier: “@kocherlakota009 @TimDuy The strange thing…

…is that they’re lowering the [inflation] target after we’ve learned 2% is too low already.

Lance Bachmeier: “@kocherlakota009 @TimDuy I’m not even sure 2% is a ceiling…

…they want to prevent inflation from [even] reaching 2%.

Tim Duy: Resisting Change?: “Stanley Fischer[‘s]… speech… was both illuminating and frustrating…. Although his confidence is fading… he is resisting change…. The first source of my frustration… [is that] his definition of ‘accommodative’ depends upon a specific idea of the neutral Fed Funds rates. From the subsequent discussion:

Well, I think we have to wait to see…. We expect…. somewhere around 3 ¼, 3, 3 ½ percent, which is on average a bit lower than in the past. But we’ll be data-dependent….

If you don’t know the longer-run rate, how can you know how accommodative policy is? If the longer-run rate is close to 2 percent, then policy is less accommodative than you think it is. The endgame of policy is the dual employment/price stability mandate, not a specific level of interest rates…. [That the] Fed’s forecasts… have been foiled by oil and the dollar… would suggest a slower or delayed pace of rate hikes, but more on that later. As for market volatility and external events:

In addition, increased concern about the global outlook, particularly the ongoing structural adjustments in China and the effects of the declines in the prices of oil and other commodities on commodity exporting nations, appeared early this year to have triggered volatility in global asset markets. At this point, it is difficult to judge the likely implications of this volatility. If these developments lead to a persistent tightening of financial conditions, they could signal a slowing in the global economy that could affect growth and inflation in the United States. But we have seen similar periods of volatility in recent years that have left little permanent imprint on the economy.

This is unimpressive…. The likely implications of the volatility are straightforward. The decline in longer term yields signals the Fed is likely to be lower for longer…. It seems that Fischer does not acknowledge the Fed’s role in minimizing the impact of similar bouts of volatility. They have responded by either easing via additional quantitative easing, or easing by delaying tightening…. When you fail to recognize your role, you set the stage for a policy error. They can’t use the logic that they should hike in March because past volatility had no impact on growth when that same volatility actually changed their behavior and thus the economic outcomes. I guess they can use that logic, but they shouldn’t. So is March on the table still?… I can tell a story where they push ahead on the labor data alone. Back to Fischer….

A persistent large overshoot of our employment mandate would risk an undesirable rise in inflation that might require a relatively abrupt policy tightening, which could inadvertently push the economy into recession. Monetary policy should aim to avoid such risks and keep the expansion on a sustainable track….

Policymakers fear that they cannot allow unemployment to drift far below the natural rate because they do not believe they could just nudge it back higher without causing a recession. They can only glide into a sustainable path from above… [thus] the Fed will resist holding rates steady…. Indeed, one voting member is already working hard to downplay recent events. Today’s speech by Kansas City Federal Reserve President Esther George:

While taking a signal from such volatility is warranted, monetary policy cannot respond to every blip in financial markets. Instead, a focus on economic fundamentals, such as labor markets and inflation, can help guard against monetary policy over- or under- reacting to swings in financial conditions. To a great extent, the recent bout of volatility is not all that unexpected, nor necessarily worrisome, given that the Fed’s low interest rate and bond- buying policies focused on boosting asset prices as a means of stimulating the real economy. As asset prices adjust to the shift in monetary policy, it is to be expected that the pricing of risk will realign to this different rate environment…. If we wait for the data to provide complete confirmation before making a policy decision, we may well have waited too long….

Watch for policymakers to downplay the inflation numbers as well. Back to George:

Finally, inflation has remained muted as a result of lower oil prices and the strong U.S. dollar…. Yet… core measures of inflation have recently risen on a year-over-year basis. And although inflation rates… have hovered below the Fed’s goal of 2 percent, they have been positive and broadly consistent with price stability.

Note the ‘positive and broadly consistent’ line. And Fischer:

And our view of progress is what the law calls maximum employment and what we call maximum sustainable employment, and a 2 percent inflation rate. And when we get there—we’re there—we’re very close to there on employment, and on inflation the core number that came out this morning was 1.4 percent. You know, that’s not 2 percent. It’s not in another universe. It’s not a negative number. But inflation’s been pretty stable, and we’d like it to go up.

Not in ‘another universe’ from 2 percent. Not negative. Sure we’d like it to go up, but are we really worried about it? Doesn’t sound like it to me.

Bottom Line…. I suspect market volatility and lack of inflation data keep them on hold in March and maybe April…. However (although not my baseline), I can tell a story where they feel like the employment data forces their hand. Especially so if they continue to downplay the inflation numbers. A substantial part of their policy still appears directed by a pre-conceived notion of ‘normal’ policy. This I think is the Fed’s largest error; the fact that the yield curve stubbornly resists being pushed higher suggests that the Fed’s estimates of the terminal fed funds rates is wildly optimistic. There appear to be limits to which the Fed can resist the global pull of zero (or lower) rates.

Must-read: Martin Sandbu: “Four Takes on the Fed Fumble”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: That the Fed would be facing significant chances of recession and would be moving in the opposite policy direction than its peers over the winter was a serious risk of beginning a tightening cycle in December, and a risk that has now risen from a possibility to a probability.

What was the countervailing serious risk that starting the tightening cycle in December took off the table? I really do not see it…

Graph 5 Year 5 Year Forward Inflation Expectation Rate FRED St Louis Fed

Martin Sandbu: Four Takes on the Fed Fumble: “Remember September? Markets seemingly couldn’t wait for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates…

…Now, however, markets seemingly can’t wait for the Fed to definitively snip the fledgling tightening cycle in the bud. And a growing chatter wonders whether the Fed made a mistake…. Market pricing now implies nearly a two-thirds probability that Fed policymakers will get past next September without a single further rate rise. The change in market sentiment is easy enough to understand… financial turmoil in China… slide in global stock markets… sharp US growth slowdown…. There are (at least) four different ways one may assess the Fed’s actions. First, the plain ‘the Fed goofed up’ view… Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong and Larry Summers. Free Lunch readers will know that this column shares their view on this issue… Jed Graham….

A second, perhaps more interesting, take is that in hindsight the Fed shouldn’t have raised rates, but that it couldn’t have known this at the time…. A third take… the mistake was to create expectations that caused financial conditions to tighten long before December…. A fourth view… the Fed was right to hike but wrong in thinking it would then proceed to lift rates through this year…. But… the arguments for a rise were… for the beginning of a sustained if gradual process. If that is now derailed, it removes much of the rationale for the first increase.

It also leaves open the question of what to do next…. Should the Fed reverse course? That is the view of Narayana Kocherlakota…

Must-read: Athanasios Orphanages: “The Euro Area Crisis Five Years After the Original Sin”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Athanasios Orphanides: The Euro Area Crisis Five Years After the Original Sin: “Why did Europe fail to manage the euro area crisis?…

…Studying the EU/IMF program… imposed on Greece in May 2010–the original sin of the crisis–highlights both the nature of the problem and the difficulty in resolving it. The mismanagement can be traced to the flawed political structure of the euro area…. Undue influence of key euro area governments compromised the IMF’s role to the detriment of other member states and the euro area as a whole. Rather than help Greece, the May 2010 program was designed to protect specific political and financial interests in other member states. The ease with which the euro was exploited to shift losses from one member state to another and the absence of a corrective mechanism render the current framework unsustainable. In its current form, the euro poses a threat to the European project.

Must-read: Jed Graham: “The Fed’s Historic Rate-Hike Goof–in One Chart”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: The very-sharp Jed Graham has… strong views… about the Federal Reserve’s rather counterintuitive decision to raise interest rates in a quarter at which nominal GDP grew at a rate of 1.5%/year, at the end of a year in which nominal GDP grew at 2.9%. The Fed is placing an awful lot of weight on the unemployment rate, and not on either non-labor market indicators or the employment-to-population ratio, in its decision to raise. I don’t think we even have to reach for the (very true and powerful) arguments about asymmetric risks to find the interest-rate increase technocratically incomprehensible, and the failure to roll it back last month technocratically incomprehensible as well:

The Fed s Historic Rate Hike Goof In One Chart Stock News Stock Market Analysis IBD

Jed Graham: The Fed’s Historic Rate-Hike Goof–in One Chart: “Janet Yellen’s Federal Reserve has done something that no other Fed has done since Paul Volcker…

…aimed to quash runaway inflation in the early 1980s, even if it meant a recession–and it did…. Nominal GDP grew at a 1.5% annualized rate in the fourth quarter…. (Inflation-adjusted GDP rose just 0.7% in Q4.) With the exception of Volcker’s interest-rate hike in early 1982 amid a recession, no other Fed has raised rates during a quarter in which nominal GDP grew less than 3%, dating back to the early 1970s. In fact, a rate hike when nominal GDP is growing less than 4%… from 1983 to 2014, it only happened twice, and one of those times (the second quarter of 1986), the Fed cut rates by a half-point before retracting 1/8th of a point of the reduction…. The first quarter of 1995, when nominal GDP grew 3.7%, [is] the only time since Volcker that the Fed had, on net, raised rates in a quarter when nominal growth was running below 4%. After that early 1995 hike, it should be noted, the Fed proceeded to cut rates three times before the next rate hike…. If one looks at the pace of GDP growth from the year-earlier quarter, the Yellen Fed stands alone as the only Fed to hike rates when nominal growth was below 3%.

Skidelsky on “The Two Big Economic Policy Failures That John Maynard Keynes Would Be Disappointed by Today”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

I missed this six months ago:

Julie Verhage: The Two Big Economic Policy Failures That John Maynard Keynes Would Be Disappointed by Today: “The famous economist isn’t around for us to ask him…

…but here is probably the next best thing. Robert Skidelsky… said… Keynes would have found two things upsetting. First, he would be frustrated with the lack of  precautions taken to prevent a huge financial crash like the one we saw in 2008. Secondly, Lord Skidelsky believes Keynes… would have wanted a more ‘buoyant response,’ he said.  Specifically, he doesn’t think Keynes would have liked the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing….

We’ve been for many years in a state of semi-stagnation, and the recovery is still very very weak in the European Union. The actual recovery measures we’ve taken, particularly quantitative easing, have actually skewed the recovery towards asset buying and real estate, thus threatening to recreate the circumstances that led to crash in the first place. I think he would have been disappointed by those policy failures…

Skidelsky is certainly correct in saying that Keynes would be driven raving mad by the failure of central banks and other regulatory agencies to take seriously the task of managing and bounding the illusion of collective liquidity, in order to curb the dangers created by systemic risk. And he is correct in believing that Keynes would be astonished at counterproductive fiscal austerity and incoherent worries about debt burdens at a time of extraordinarily low current and projected future interest rates.

But I am puzzled by Skidelsky’s third. He believes that Keynes would have seen not a second- but a first-order loss in responding to tighter-than-ideal fiscal policy with looser-than-ideal monetary policy in order to hold aggregate demand harmless. Good Belsky does not, and to my knowledge nobody has succeeded in, producing a coherent simple model of what they mean. I am going to have to put this down as yet another example of a case in which smart, sensible people claim to know more and know different then what is in the simple file-and-communications systems that are our standard economic models.

I can see that responding to inappropriately-austere fiscal policy with easier monetary policy and lower interest rates than in the first-best creates a world with too-little government capital, too-low a level of social insurance spending, an inappropriately low level of government-provided safe assets, and on inappropriately-high level of long-duration risky assets.

What I do not see is why all of this is a first-order loss, and why it is worth opening up a significant Okun Gap relative to full employment and potential output in order to prevent these Harburger Triangles.

So, I am once again pleading for an answer, or an explanation, preferably in the form of a simple model I can wrap my brain around.

Crickets…

Must-read: Tim Duy: “FOMC Recap”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Once again: if the economy comes in weak, then the FOMC will wish that it had not raised interest rates in December and will find it impossible to induce an offsetting deviation from the ex post interest rate path it will wish it had followed in order to balance things out. If the economy comes in strong, then the FOMC will wish that it had raised interest rates even earlier than December, but it will then find it easy to induce an offsetting deviation from the ex post interest rate path it will wish it had followed in order to balance things out. This ain’t rocket science. This is the simple logic of optionality near the zero lower bound and the liquidity trap.

So why does this logic evade the FOMC? What are they thinking?

Tim Duy: FOMC Recap: “Now they have slow GDP growth and fast employment growth…

…That will make brains explode on Constitution Ave. They don’t know what to do with that when unemployment is at 5%…. If the recessionistas are correct, then they already made a mistake in December. If the optimitistas are correct, they will fall behind the curve if they hold in March. And that is without the uncertainty of the financial markets. Did the Fed release a little steam by shifting into a tightening cycle, the avalanche control of Mark Dow?  Or did they set in motion the next financial crisis? And recognize that this is within the context of a no-win political situation….

So, considering all this, you can’t really blame the Fed for taking a pass on quantifying the balance of risks…. Bottom Line: The Fed got lucky this month. They weren’t expected to do anything, which takes the pressure off. But in March they might have a real decision to make. We have only six weeks of data to digest. Even assuming that labor markets hold solid, will that be enough? Doubtful. They will need more.

Must-read: Ryan Avent: “No Take-Backs: The Fed Makes the Best of the Bad Situation It Created”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Back at the end of last October, when the Federal Reserve decided it was going to hike interest rates in December, there were three reasonably-likely outcomes for the US economy over what was then the next six months: the economy could roar ahead, and a 2015:IV rate hike followed by a 2016:I one would look prescient while a 2015:IV pause and a 2016:I double-hike would look a little behind the curve; the economy could plod along, in which one hike in either 2015:IV or 2016:I would look arguable; or the economy could dive, in which case a 2015:IV hike would look like a significant unforced error.

Now roaring ahead is off the table. The prospects now for October-April are for either a plod or a dive…

Ryan Avent: No Take-Backs: The Fed Makes the Best of the Bad Situation It Created: “SUPPOSE for a moment that you are sitting on the Federal Open Market Committee…

…You think that it was sensible to raise the fed funds target in December… [think] the second half of 2015… [shows] employers adding workers at a sustained, rapid clip… oil can’t fall that much farther… payroll growth at this pace and unemployment rate has to eventually lead to much faster wage growth and higher inflation. There’s a risk that high inflation would be hard to bring down, and we don’t want to create a new recession by hiking rates a lot in a short period of time. So best to get started with the hikes now…. So you raise rates. And… all hell breaks loose…. Market-based measures of future inflation trip on a stone and faceplant….

So then you all meet again in January…. What do you do, then? Well, you release a statement… which makes the best of December’s unforced error. And… think very hard about how to change gears in March if things continue on…. The Fed… could not simply point to the real-economy data, which don’t look that different now than they did in December, and say that its outlook hadn’t really changed…. A statement… that it remained… hawkish… would force… to a nasty market panic. And enough panic can become self-fulfilling.

The statement therefore needed to… demonstrate that: the Fed’s view is basically unchanged, but the Fed is also aware of potential trouble brewing and stands ready to act accordingly, but the brewing trouble isn’t the sort of thing that should cause anyone to worry…. The problem is that now the Fed doesn’t meet again until March…. If it chooses to wait while markets do their thing, a March policy reversal could come too late to prevent a sharp deceleration in American economic activity….

It is possible that America’s recovery will roar ahead, and the Fed will be able to hike four times in 2016. But the Fed is now in a very uncomfortable position, which could easily become much more uncomfortable still. That was always the risk in hiking before economic conditions really demanded it. When both interest rates and inflation are very low, there is unlimited room to increase rates in response to an unexpected (and improbable) surge in inflation to a rate well above the target. On the other hand, under those circumstances it is very hard to react in time and with adequate force to an unexpectedly weak economic performance…

Must-read: Tim Duy: “On The Dispersion, Or Lack Thereof, of Economic Weakness”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Tim Duy: On The Dispersion, Or Lack Thereof, of Economic Weakness: “I direct you to my fellow Oregon economist Josh Lehner…

…who correctly notes that in comparison to past recessions, the decline in manufacturing activity is not well-disbursed across the sector…. During a recession, the vast majority of manufacturing industries (or all!) are declining. We are nowhere near that point…. And if manufacturing is not even in recession, it is difficult to see that the US economy [as a whole] is in recession. Or even nearing it…. A recession in Texas does not a US recession make….

Aside from the recession risk, there is another important aspect of Davies’s chart–discounting manufacturing, it indicates growth of just 2% in the US…. I suspect that is the direction we will be heading by the end of the year if not sooner. Key sources of growth, such as autos, multifamily housing, and technology, that helped propel the economy closer to fully employment are likely leveling off. If so, that means the economy is at an inflection point as it transitions back to trend. The Fed expects that process will require addition tightening. The financial markets aren’t so confident.

Must-read: Martin Sandbu: “Ask the big question on central banking”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Martin Sandbu: Ask the big question on central banking: “Mervyn King and Goodfriend… the controversial decision by the Riksbank to raise interest rates…

…We will not adjudicate whether the decision was ‘not unreasonable’, as King and Goodfriend claim, beyond noting that every rich-country central bank that raised rates early in the recovery (that includes not just Sweden, but Israel, Norway, Denmark, and the eurozone) had to lower it significantly later. For more on this point, read Andrew Haldane’s speech from last year on the challenges of being stuck at low interest rates…