Tag: Macroeconomics

Will Somebody Please Tell Me Again Why the Federal Reserve Has Embarked on a Tightening Cycle?

Posted on by Brad DeLong
Real Gross Domestic Product Growth Personal Consumption Expenditures Excluding Food and Energy Chain Type Price Index FRED St Louis Fed

With 2017Q1 real GDP growth currently forecast at a 1.2% annual rate—down from 2.7% expected last December—it is worth pausing to remember that if that number comes true:

  • 4Q real GDP growth is: 2.0%/year
  • 8Q real GDP growth is: 1.9%/year

Maybe this is an economy in which slow productivity growth is constraining expansion. But if that is the case, where is the inflation? More likely this is the case in which overly-tight fiscal and monetary policy are constraining an economy that still has some significant amount of macroeconomic slack in it…

Plus: this is what you would expect from a central bank that regards 2.0%/year core PCE inflation as a ceiling not to be crossed, rather than as a central-tendency target…

(Late) Monday Smackdown: In Which I Am Annoyed at Being Paired with John Taylor

Posted on by Brad DeLong
Clowns (ICP)

The IMF’s Finance and Development has paired me on “secular stagnation” with John Taylor.

When they told me that I would be paired with John Taylor, I protested: As I see it, sometime in the early 2000s John Taylor ceased being an economist and became a politician. Hence, I thought, he was likely to have very little of value to say to professional economists–to those of us who are trying to use the tools of economics to understand the world.

And I see that I was right: I do not think Taylor’s piece has any value at all to professional economists.

Let me take especial note of five passages in Taylor’s piece: passages that, in my view, a professional economist simply could not write:

The fact that central banks have chosen low policy rates since the crisis casts doubt on the notion that the equilibrium real interest rate just happened to be low. Indeed, in recent months, long-term interest rates have increased with expectations of normalization of monetary policy…

People did not just change their expectations with respect to the chances of “normalization” of interest rates. To say that they did is a politician’s and not a professional economist’s statement. Long-term interest rates increased with the shifting expectations of Trump deficits and the belief that an inflation targeting Fed to respond.

And claiming that central banks feely “chose” low policy rates… Central banks were impelled and compelled by what they saw and see as very strong evidence of a low equilibrium real interest rate. A professional economist would not say that their “choice” of such low rates casts doubt on the notion of a low equilibrium real rate. A professional economist would say that low policy rates reflect central banks’ judgment that the equilibrium real rate was low–and that the failure of inflation to accelerate with low policy rates affirms the correctness of that judgment.

As bad is:

Low policy interest rates set by monetary authorities, such as the US Federal Reserve, before the financial crisis were associated with a boom characterized by rising inflation and declining unemployment—not by the slack economic conditions and high unemployment of secular stagnation…

Again, this is not something that a professional economist would say. Core inflation was 2.8% on the eve of the 2001 recession and 2.4% on the eve of the 2008 recession. A professional economist simply cannot say that the course of inflation over that business cycle is in any way evidence that policy interest rates over the cycle were in any Wicksellian sense “too low”. A professional economist simply can not say that the course of employment over that business cycle is in any way evidence of an unsustainable boom:

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This third is, I think, worst of all:

The evidence runs contrary to the view that the equilibrium real interest rate—that is, the real rate of return required to keep the economy’s output equal to potential output—was low prior to the crisis…

If inflation stable over the cycle and subpar employment performance with very low real policy rates is not “evidence… [for] the view that the equilibrium real interest rate… was low prior to the crisis”, what could possibly be evidence for that view?

Professional economists like John Williams who estimate r* find a 1.25%-point decline in it from the late 1980s to 2007–and then another 1.25%-point decline in the crisis.

Cursor and Whatever happened to secular stagnation

But perhaps Taylor’s most political statement of all is:

During the 1980s and 1990s, tax reform, regulatory reform, monetary reform, and budget reform proved successful at boosting productivity growth in the United States…

“Tax reform”–for the Republicans who are Taylor’s main audience, “tax reform” means the 1981 Reagan tax cut. But productivity growth did not rise until after 1995. That is a very long fuse indeed to run a claim from policy cause to economic effect.

“Regulatory reform”–Anne Gorsuch’s actions as EPA head giving a pass to lead polluters in 1981-2 was particularly unfortunate given what we have learned since about lead and human cognition. Again, the timing does not work, and is hidden by Taylor’s artful reference “during the 1980s and the 1990s”. Again, productivity growth did not rise until after 1995. That is a very long fuse indeed to run a claim from policy cause to economic effect.

“Monetary reform”–that was Paul Volcker’s accession to the Fed Chairship in 1979. But, once again, productivity growth did not rise until after 1995. And, once again, is a very long fuse indeed to run a claim from policy cause to economic effect.

Tax “reform”, regulatory “reform”, and monetary “reform” were not obviously helpful “during the 1980s and 1990s”. The big pushes come at the start of the 1980s. The productivity boom comes more than a decade and a half later.

Only with “budget reform” is there a case that a professional economist might make. “Budget Reform” is, in this context, the 1993 Clinton administration Reconciliation Bill—the bill that undid a lot of what Taylor’s employers and allies had done in the previous fifteen years. There are possible and plausibly strong links for a professional economist to draw between the adoption of not-insane and sustainable U.S. fiscal policies in 1993 and the post-1995 productivity boom propelled by the leading high-tech sector. How strong are these links? That is uncertain.

But “during the 1980s and 1990s, tax reform, regulatory reform, monetary reform, and budget reform proved successful at boosting productivity growth in the United States” is not a statement a professional economist could or would make.

Last:

The recent US election has raised the chances for tax, regulatory, monetary, and perhaps even budget reform…

Are any words necessary?

Finance and Development, I think, made a bad mistake in choosing Taylor for this role. Taylor’s is a political document. It is written for political purposes. If fall the readers of Finance and Development understand that–and do not take it as an attempt to analyze the economy–no harm will be done. But not all readers will. Some will think they are supposed to learn something about the economy from it. They will be misled thereby.

Major Malinvestments Do Not Have to Produce Large Depressions

Posted on by Brad DeLong

The United States had an immense boom in the 1990s. That was in the end financial disappointing for those who invested in it, but not because the technologies they were investing in did not pan out as technologies, not because the technologies deliver enormous amounts of well-being to humans, but because it turned out to be devil’s own task to monetize any portion of the consumer surplus generated by the provision of information goods.

Huge investments in high tech and communications. Huge amounts of utility generated. Little financial return. $4 trillion of investors’ wealth destroyed as assets were revalued. That is something like 8 times the fundamental losses we saw in subprime mortgages and home equity loans made on houses in the desert between Los Angeles and Albuquerque from mid 2006-mid 2008.

A 1.5%-point rise in the unemployment rate after 2000 is not nothing–it is a bad thing. But it is not a 7%-point rise. And it is not a failure to close any of the gap vis-a-vis the pre-crisis trend of potential thereafter and a dark shadow over economic growth for a generation thereafter. Yet the fundamental shock from dot-com looks to me 8 times as large as the fundamental shock from subprime.

That tells me that we can deal with such shocks to private sector credit that go wrong: Have them be to equity wealth in the first place, or rapidly transform all the financial asset claims affected into equity on the fly as the crisis hits. Easy to say. Hard to do. We make sure they are diversified. And we do not, not, not, not, not, not let the people in Basle get too clever with their ideas of what reserves and capital structure look like, and allow core reserves to be placed in assets that are not AAA–even if some ratings agency whose revenues depend on pleasing investment banks has labeled them as AAA.

Axel Weber tells this story:

In Davos, I was invited to a group of banks–now Deutsche Bundesbank is frequently mixed up in invitations with Deutsche Bank. I was the only central banker sitting on the panel. It was all banks. It was about securitizations. I asked my people to prepare. I asked the typical macro question: who are the twenty biggest suppliers of securitization products, and who are the twenty biggest buyers. I got a paper, and they were both the same set of institutions. When I was at this meeting–and I really should have been at these meetings earlier–I was talking to the banks, and I said: “It looks to me that since the buyers and the sellers are the same institutions, as a system they have not diversified”.

That was one of the things that struck me: that the industry was not aware at the time that while its treasury department was reporting that it bought all these products its credit department was reporting that it had sold off all the risk because they had securitized them.

What was missing–and I think that is important for the view of what could be learned in economics–is that finance and banking was too-much viewed as a microeconomic issue that could be analyzed by writing a lot of books about the details of microeconomic banking. And there was too little systemic views of banking and what the system as a whole would develop like. The whole view of a systemic crisis was just basically locked out of the discussions and textbooks…

Axel Weber knew that this was a dangerous situation. Of course, he had no idea how dangerous it was. Barry Eichengreen, Alan Taylor, and Kevin O’Rourke think that, once the run on the shadow banking system was underway, this was the largest shock relative to the size of the market financial markets have ever experienced. We could have avoided this. If we had done our surveillance sufficiently deeper, we would have seen that this might be coming…

But, even so there was nothing baked in the cake of the housing bubble that in any sense required what the world economy has gone through in the past decade.

Indeed, John Maynard Keynes had a good deal to say about this in Notes on the Trade Cycle:

The preceding analysis may appear to be in conformity with the view of those who hold that over-investment is the characteristic of the boom, that the avoidance of this over-investment is the only possible remedy for the ensuing slump, and that, whilst for the reasons given above the slump cannot be prevented by a low rate of interest, nevertheless the boom can be avoided by a high rate of interest. There is, indeed, force in the argument that a high rate of interest is much more effective against a boom than a low rate of interest against a slump.

To infer these conclusions from the above would, however, misinterpret my analysis; and would, according to my way of thinking, involve serious error. For the term over-investment is ambiguous. It may refer to investments which are destined to disappoint the expectations which prompted them or for which there is no use in conditions of severe unemployment, or it may indicate a state of affairs where every kind of capital-goods is so abundant that there is no new investment which is expected, even in conditions of full employment, to earn in the course of its life more than its replacement cost. It is only the latter state of affairs which is one of over-investment, strictly speaking, in the sense that any further investment would be a sheer waste of resources.[4] Moreover, even if over-investment in this sense was a normal characteristic of the boom, the remedy would not lie in clapping on a high rate of interest which would probably deter some useful investments and might further diminish the propensity to consume, but in taking drastic steps, by redistributing incomes or otherwise, to stimulate the propensity to consume.

According to my analysis, however, it is only in the former sense that the boom can be said to be characterised by over-investment. The situation, which I am indicating as typical, is not one in which capital is so abundant that the community as a whole has no reasonable use for any more, but where investment is being made in conditions which are unstable and cannot endure, because it is prompted by expectations which are destined to disappointment.

It may, of course, be the case — indeed it is likely to be — that the illusions of the boom cause particular types of capital-assets to be produced in such excessive abundance that some part of the output is, on any criterion, a waste of resources; — which sometimes happens, we may add, even when there is no boom. It leads, that is to say, to misdirected investment. But over and above this it is an essential characteristic of the boom that investments which will in fact yield, say, 2 per cent. in conditions of full employment are made in the expectation of a yield of, say, 6 per cent., and are valued accordingly. When the disillusion comes, this expectation is replaced by a contrary “error of pessimism”, with the result that the investments, which would in fact yield 2 per cent. in conditions of full employment, are expected to yield less than nothing; and the resulting collapse of new investment then leads to a state of unemployment in which the investments, which would have yielded 2 per cent. in conditions of full employment, in fact yield less than nothing. We reach a condition where there is a shortage of houses, but where nevertheless no one can afford to live in the houses that there are.

Thus the remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest but a lower rate of interest! For that may enable the so-called boom to last. The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom…

Fiscal Policy in the New Normal: IMF Panel

Helicopter Money: When Zero Just Isn’t Low Enough: Milken Review

Posted on by Brad DeLong

At Milken Review: Helicopter Money: When Zero Just Isn’t Low Enough: If you pay much attention to the chattering classes — those who chatter about economics, anyway — you’ve probably run across the colorful term “helicopter money.” At root, the concept is disarmingly simple. It’s money created at the discretion of the Federal Reserve (or any central bank) that could be used to increase purchasing power in times of recession. But the controversy over helicopter money (formally, money-financed fiscal policy) is hardly straightforward… Read MOAR at Milken Review

Money Demand a Function of Private Consumption Spending, Not Income

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Note to Self: I alway find it interesting that Friedman and the monetarists formulated money demand as a function of income rather than of private spending, or even of private consumption spending. You don’t need or want money when your income is high, unless you want to spend it.

And it seems highly likely that the ratio of desired money holdings to planned spending is much higher for consumption than investment. Money demand should therefore be a function of private sector consumption spending–and nominal interest rates–not a function of income. We thus have:

C = MV(i)/P

Y = C + I + G + (X-M)

And from this accounting framework it is very difficult indeed to make strong monetarist conclusions appear obvious facts of nature rather than weird and tendentious claims. Mankiw and Summers made this point back in 1982. And they were totally ignored—even though it was and is a very smart point…

Was This the Greatest Failure of the Obama Administration?

Posted on by Brad DeLong
Preview of Was This the Greatest Failure of the Obama Administration

Not running the table in January 2009 to make a V-shaped recovery all but inevitable, but instead trusting to good luck and the accuracy of the forecast. An obvious mistake then. An obvious mistake now. And I have never heard a good account of why it was made–other than that Obama, Emmanuel, Plouffe, and Axelrod bonded with Geithner, and that Geithner is always “let’s do less”, no matter how strong the arguments to do more are:

Paul Krugman (2010-07-09): What Went Wrong?: “It’s now obvious that the stimulus was much too small…

…The administration has chosen to deal with this by… condemning Republicans, rightly, for obstructionism, while at the same time claiming, falsely, that we’re still on the right track. How did things end up this way? We’ll never know whether the administration could have passed a bigger plan; we do know that it didn’t try…. It looks as if top advisers convinced themselves that even in the absence of stimulus the slump would be nasty, brutish, but not too long…. [But] even before the severity of the financial crisis was fully apparent, the recent history of recessions suggested that the jobs picture would continue to worsen long after the recession was technically over. And by the winter of 2008-2009, it was obvious that this was the Big One…. Those concerns were what had me fairly frantic….

And here we are. From a strictly economic point of view, we could still fix this: a second big stimulus, plus much more aggressive Fed policy. But politically, we’re stuck: even if the Democrats hold the House in November, they won’t have the votes to do anything major. I’d like to say something uplifting here; but right now I’m feeling pretty bleak.

Paul Krugman (2013-01-06): The Big Fail: “If you had polled… economists… meeting three years ago…

…most of them would surely have predicted that by now we’d be talking about how the great slump ended, not why it still continues. So what went wrong?… Mainly, is the triumph of bad ideas…. Standard [textbook] economics offered good answers, but political leaders—and all too many economists—chose to forget or ignore what they should have known…. A smaller financial shock, like the dot-com bust at the end of the 1990s, can be met by cutting interest rates. But the crisis of 2008 was far bigger, and even cutting rates all the way to zero wasn’t nearly enough. At that point governments needed to step in, spending to support their economies while the private sector regained its balance. And to some extent that did happen: revenue dropped sharply in the slump, but spending actually rose as programs like unemployment insurance expanded and temporary economic stimulus went into effect. Budget deficits rose, but this was actually a good thing, probably the most important reason we didn’t have a full replay of the Great Depression.

But it all went wrong in 2010…. Greece was taken, wrongly, as a sign that all governments had better slash spending and deficits right away…. The warnings of some (but not enough) economists that austerity would derail recovery were ignored. For example, the president of the European Central Bank confidently asserted that “the idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect.” Well, someone was incorrect, all right…. Blanchard and… Leigh… not just that austerity has a depressing effect on weak economies, but that the adverse effect is much stronger than previously believed. The premature turn to austerity, it turns out, was a terrible mistake…. The fund was actually less enthusiastic about austerity than other major players. To the extent that it says it was wrong, it’s also saying that everyone else (except those skeptical economists) was even more wrong. And it deserves credit for being willing to rethink its position in the light of evidence. The really bad news is how few other players are doing the same…. The truth is that we’ve just experienced a colossal failure of economic policy—and far too many of those responsible for that failure both retain power and refuse to learn from experience.

Three, Four… Many Secular Stagnations!

Posted on by Brad DeLong
3 Month Treasury Bill Secondary Market Rate FRED St Louis Fed

I. The Third Coming of John A. Hobson

In my view, the current debate about “secular stagnation” started by Larry Summers is best thought of as the third coming of John A. Hobson.

The first coming of John A Hobson was, of course, Hobson (1902): Imperialism: A Study. In Hobson’s schema, unequal income distribution combined with the limited physical capacity to consume of the rich meant that anything like full employment could be maintained only with a growing share of output devoted to government purchases and investment. But where were there vents for additional investment? Abroad, in the growing empire:

Investors who have put their money in foreign lands, upon terms which take full account of risks connected with the political conditions of the country, desire to use the resources of their Government to minimize these risks, and so to enhance the capital value and the interest of their private investments. The investing and speculative classes in general also desire that Great Britain should take other foreign areas under her flag in order to secure new areas for profitable investment and speculation…

Moreover, the military apparatus necessary to conquer and to defend what had been conquered soaked up productive capacity that would otherwise have been idle. As Winston Churchill put it with respect to Great Britain’s naval construction plans for the year 1909: “The Admiralty had demanded six [Dreadnought-class] battleships: the economists offered four: and we finally compromised at eight.” Thus governments that embarked on imperialism and armaments found their domestic economies in relatively good shape with respect to employment, capacity utilization, and profits; while governments that minded their knitting did not. And even though imperialism and militarism were humanitarian and cost-benefit disasters, governments that pursued them tended to remain in office. And this pushed Europe toward World War I.

It is conventional among economists to not understand Hobson’s “underconsumptionist” argument. As Ben Bernanke commented in 2013:

As I pointed out… [when] Larry first raised the secular stagnation argument… it’s hard to imagine that there would be a permanent dearth of profitable investment projects. As Larry’s uncle Paul Samuelson taught me in graduate school at MIT, if the real interest rate were expected to be negative indefinitely, almost any investment is profitable. For example, at a negative (or even zero) interest rate, it would pay to level the Rocky Mountains to save even the small amount of fuel expended by trains and cars that currently must climb steep grades. It’s therefore questionable that the economy’s equilibrium real rate can really be negative for an extended period…

This, of course, misses the point that risk-bearing capacity is an essential factor of production needed for private-sector business investment, and risk bearing capacity must be mobilized and paid for—and paid for very handsomely given the adverse selection and moral hazard problems in financing private investment. A very healthy average risky rate of profit is perfectly consistent with a short-term safe real rate of interest less than the negative of the rate of inflation.

For Hobson, of course, the solution was progressive tax and transfer (and perhaps predistribution?) policies to end the Gilded Age and create a reasonable distribution of income, in which fortunes would not be in the hands of those whose stomachs were small and whose narrow eyes were not much bigger, and who would thus hoard rather than spend their incomes.

The second coming of John A. Hobson was, of course, Alvin Hansen (1939). Secular stagnation was “sick recoveries which die in their infancy and depressions which feed on themselves and leave a hard and seemingly immovable core of unemployment…” We were “rapidly entering a world in which we must fall back upon a more rapid advance of technology than in the past if we are to find private investment opportunities adequate to maintain full employment…” For Hansen, the solution was either (a) more investment in research and development to speed technological progress, or (b) public investment “in human and natural resources and in consumers’ capital goods of a collective character…”

In some sense Hobson’s fears became true and more than true: World War I, and what followed. And when the world economy reoriented itself after World War II we were no longer in a Gilded Age but, rather, in an Age of Social Democracy with a much more equal income distribution—and so Hobson’s unequal income distribution and resulting underconsumptionist worries were no longer relevant.

Alvin Hansen’s worries were similarly obsolete as the post-World War II order formed itself. We got the greater public investment, both in research and development to spur more rapid technological progress—DARPA—and in the Cold War arms race.

The Wheel Has Turned Again

The Longer Depression: But now the wheel of history has turned once again. We have a Second Gilded Age. We have had what looks to have been either the second-largest or the largest adverse financial business-cycle shock in history. We have had an economic downturn followed by a very slow recovery that has produced and will produce a cumulative output gap vis-a-vis potential that will rival and may well exceed the Great Depression itself as a multiple of the economy’s productive potential.

But it is not just what people call “the Great Recession” and should call “the Longer Depression”. It is the long, steady decline in safe interest rates at all maturities since 1990: the decline in short-term safe real interest rates from 4% to -1.5%, and the decline in long-term safe real interest rates from 5% to 1%.

B. Larry’s Core Worry: And so now we have Larry Summers (2013), reacting to the collapse of the short-term safe nominal Wicksellian “neutral” rate of interest consistent with full employment and with central banks’ ability to hit their inflation targets.

We are handicapped because there is not one place in which Larry has developed his argument: it is evolving. But the debate Larry has started seems to me, as I wrote, “the most important policy-relevant debate in economics since John Maynard Keynes’s debate with himself in the 1930s.”

Summers’s core fear is that the global economy—or, at least, the North Atlantic chunk of it—will be stuck for a generation or more in a situation in which, if investors have realistically expectations, then even if central banks reduce interest rates to accommodate those expectations and even if governments follow sensible but not extravagant fiscal policies, private financial markets will still fail to support a level of investment demand compatible with full employment.

Thus economic policymakers will find themselves either hoping that investors form unrealistic expectations—prelude to a bubble—or coping with chronic ultralow interest rates and the associated risks of stubbornly elevated unemployment.

III. Causes of Secular Stagnation III

Such “badly behaved investment demand and savings supply functions,” as Martin Feldstein called them when he taught this stuff to me at Harvard back in 1980, could have seven underlying causes:

  1. High income inequality, which boosts savings too much because the rich can’t think of other things they’d rather do with their money. (Hobson)
  2. Technological and demographic stagnation that lowers the return on investment and pushes desired investment spending down too far. (Hansen)
  3. Non-market actors whose strong demand for safe, liquid assets is driven not by assessments of market risk and return but rather by political factors or by political risk. (Bernanke)
  4. A broken financial sector that fails to mobilize the risk-bearing capacity of society and thus drives too large a wedge between the returns on risky investments and the returns on safe government debt. (Rogoff)
  5. Very low actual and expected inflation, which means that even a zero safe nominal rate of interest is too high to balance desired investment and planned savings at full employment. (Krugman, Blanchard)
  6. Limits on the demand for investment goods coupled with rapid declines in the prices of those goods, which together put too much downward pressure on the potential profitability of the investment-goods sector.
  7. Technological inappropriateness, in which markets cannot figure out how to properly reward those who invest in new technologies even when the technologies have enormous social returns—which in turn lowers the private rate of return on investment and pushes desired investment spending down too far.

A. Other Economists’ Views as Partial: The first thing to note is that other economists who have been worrying at related issues have views all of which appear to be a subset of Summers-style secular stagnation concerns. Hobson saw income inequality as the root—that’s number 1 on the list. Hansen saw demographic and technological stagnation—that’s number 2, and today this point of view is echoed by Gordon. Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman, says we have entered an age of a “global savings glut” because of mercantilism and political risk in emerging markets—that’s number 3 on the list. Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard points to the emergence of global “debt supercycles” that have broken the ability of financial markets to do the risk transformation on a large enough scale—that’s number 4. CUNY’s Paul Krugman warns of the return of “Depression economics” and seeks central banks that will “credibly promise to be irresponsible”, while Olivier Blanchard called for a 4%/year inflation target—that’s number 5. And numbers 6 and 7 have not yet made their appearance in the policy-macroeconomic debate. But they should.

Larry Summers is all of the above: all seven.

B. Against Partial Explanations: And his major concern is to argue against those who think that it is just one of the seven that is the problem—that there is a quick fix, which will either come of itself relatively soon or could be brought forward in time via a simple, clever policy move. Thus Summers on Bernanke:

Ben… suggest[s]… the savings glut is a relatively transitory phenomenon that will be repaired. Perhaps in the fullness of time… [but] it is very difficult to read market judgments about real interest rates as suggesting that that is likely…. For the relevant medium‐term policy horizon (as I have no useful views about 2040 or 2050) the challenge of absorbing savings in productive investment will be the overriding challenge for macroeconomic policy…

And Summers on Rogoff:

Ken Rogoff argues… that the current weakness is the temporary result of over‐indebtedness…. The debt super‐cycle view does not have a ready explanation for the low level of real interest rates, nor does it have a ready explanation for the fact that real interest rates have fallen steadily…. Ken suggests an alternative hypothesis for explaining the low level of real interest rates… a generalized increase in the level of risk…. [But] you would… expect [that] to lead to a decline, rather than an increase, in asset values, given that it was those assets that had become more risky. You would expect it to manifest itself in a measurable and clear increase in implied volatilities, as reflected in options markets. You would expect it to reflect itself in a dramatic increase in the pricing of out‐of‐the‐money puts. But the opposite has occurred…. The length of time that markets are forecasting low real interest rates makes the stagnation fairly secular or the debt super‐cycle very long, at which point the distinction blurs.

And what is the temporary debt‐overhand induced headwind that is thought to be present in a major way today but that will be gone in three years? Corporate balance sheets are flush. The spread between LIBOR and other yields are low. Debt service ratios are at abnormally low levels. Whatever your indicator of repair from the financial crisis, it has mostly happened. And yet with interest rates of zero, the United States is still likely to grow at only two percent this year. I do not see a good reason to be confident that that situation will be significantly better three years from now….

Any debt overhang would itself be endogenous. Why did we have a vast erosion of credit standards by 2005? Why were interest rates in a place that enabled such bubbles? Because that was what was necessary to keep the economy going with adequate aggregate demand through that period. So even if a debt overhanging were occurring it would in a sense be a mechanism through which secular stagnation or over‐saving produces damage. It is not an alternative to the idea of secular stagnation…

Summers’s rejection of the Krugman-Blanchard higher-inflation-is-the-solution position as a sufficient and quick fix seems to me more subtle. I do not think he has set it out clearly. But what Summers is thinking—or at least what the Larry Summers emulation module I have running on my own wetware is thinking—is this:

There are worthy private risky investment projects and unworthy ones. Worthy risky projects have a relatively low elasticity with respect to the required real yield—that is, lowering interest rates to rock-bottom levels would not induce much more spending. In contrast, unworthy risky investment projects have a high elasticity. Thus, when safe interest rates get too low, savers who should not be bearing risk nonetheless reach for yield—they stop checking whether investment projects are worthy or unworthy.

Put it another way: there are people who should be holding risky assets and there are people who should be holding safe assets. The problem with boosting inflation so that the central bank can make the real return on holding safe assets negative is that it induces people who really should not be holding risky assets to buy them.

I would speculate that, deep down, Summers still believes in one tenet of inflation economics: that effective price stability—the expectation of stable 2 percent inflation—is a very valuable asset in a market economy. It should not be thrown away.

C. Seeking Not a Cure But Palliatives: For Summers, secular stagnation does not have one simple cause but is the concatenation of a number of different structural shocks un- or only loosely-connected with each other in their origin that have reinforced each other in their effects pushing the short-term safe nominal Wicksellian “neutral” rate down below zero. But even though there is no one root cause, there are two effective palliatives to neutralize or moderate the effects.

Thus Summers calls for two major policy initiatives:

  1. Larger and much more aggressive progressive tax and transfer (and predistribution?) policies to end the Second Gilded Age.

  2. A major shift to an investment-centered expansionary fiscal policy as the major component of what somebody or other once called “a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment… [as] the only means of securing an approximation to full employment… not exclud[ing] all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will cooperate with private initiative…”

I think he has a very, very strong case here.

D. Achieving Potential: The standard diss of Larry was that even though his promise was immense—he was brilliant, provocative, creative, and so willing to think outside-the-box that you sometimes wondered whether he knew where the box was or even if there was a box—there was no great substantive contribution but only a bunch of footnotes to lines of inquiry that really “belonged” to others.

I think this is the contribution.

Forthcoming Panel: The Nature of Capitalism and Secular Stagnation

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Live from Chicago: American Economic Association: [The Nature of Capitalism and Secular Stagnation][]: Chair: Matias Vernengo…

…Panelist(s): Bradford DeLong, University of California-Berkeley; Han Despin, Nichols College; William Lazonick, University of Massachusetts-Lowell; Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois-Chicago; Anwar Shaikh, New School…

(Early) Monday DeLong Smackdown Watch: Has Macroeconomics Gone Right?

Posted on by Brad DeLong
U.S. Real GDP since 2009

After three years, how is this working out?…

Paul Krugman (2013): The Neopaleo-Keynesian Counter-counter-Counterrevolution: “OK, I can’t resist this one — and I think it’s actually important…

…Brad DeLong reacts to Binyamin Appelbaum’s piece on Young Frankenstein Stan Fischer by quoting from his own 2000 piece on New Keynesian ideas in macroeconomics, a piece in which he argued that New Keynesian thought was, in important respects, a descendant of old-fashioned monetarism. There’s a lot to that view. But I’m surprised that Brad stopped there, for two reasons. One is that it’s worth remembering that Fischer staked out that position at a time when freshwater macro was turning sharply to the right, abandoning all that was pragmatic in Milton Friedman’s ideas. The other is that the world of macroeconomics now looks quite different from the world in 2000.

Specifically, when Brad lists five key propositions of New Keynesian macro and declares that prominent Keynesians in the 60s and early 70s by and large didn’t agree with these propositions, he should now note that prominent Keynesians–by which I mean people like Oliver Blanchard, Larry Summers, and Janet Yellen–in late 2013 don’t agree with these propositions either.

In important ways our understanding of macro has altered in ways that amount to a counter-counter-counterrevolution (I think I have the right number of counters), giving new legitimacy to what we might call Paleo-Keynesian concerns. Or to put it another way, James Tobin is looking pretty good right now. (Incidentally, this was the point made by Bloomberg almost five years ago, inducing John Cochrane to demonstrate his ignorance of what had been going on macroeconomics outside his circle.)

Consider Brad’s five points:

  1. Price stickiness causes business cycle fluctuations: You clearly need price stickiness to make sense of the data. However, there is now widespread acceptance of the point that making prices more flexible can actually worsen a slump, a favorite point of Tobin’s.

  2. Monetary policy > fiscal policy: Not when you face the zero lower bound — and that’s no longer an abstract or remote consideration, it’s the world we’ve been living in for five years. And Tobin, who defended the relevance of fiscal policy, is vindicated.

  3. Business cycles are fluctuations around a trend, not declines below some level of potential output: This view comes out of the natural rate hypothesis, and the notion of a vertical long-run Phillips curve. At this point, however, there is wide acceptance of the idea that for a variety of reasons, but especially downward nominal wage rigidity, the Phillips curve is not vertical at low inflation. Again, a very Tobinesque notion, as Daly and Hobijn explain.

  4. Policy rules: Not so easy when once in a while you face Great Depression-sized shocks.

  5. ‘Low multipliers associated with fiscal policy’: Ahem. Not when you’re in a liquidity trap.

I do think this is important. Among economists who are actually looking at recent events, not doing a see-no-Keynes, hear-no-Keynes, speak-no-Keynes act, there has been a strong revival of some old ideas in macroeconomics. It’s not just new classical macroeconomics that’s in retreat; we’re also seeing, within the Keynesian camp, a distinct if polite rise of Neopaleo-Keynesianism.

I must say I find myself distinctly less optimistic than Paul here. After three years:

  • We seem to me to have had no influence on policy: IS-LM says that if the Federal Reserve wants to be able to respond to the next adverse macroeconomic shock we need a looser fiscal policy in order to normalize interest rates during this expansion. The Federal Reserve is ignoring IS-LM.

  • While it is true you no longer hear people outside of what I call “Chicago” talking about how DSGE is a progressive research program, you do hear nearly everybody still talking about it as if it were a harmless fetish and a useful neutral ground to frame the discussion.

  • As far as actual serious work as to what emergent properties we can expect from what characteristics of our really-existing structure of markets? We have made no progress…

Has Academic Thinking About Countercyclical Fiscal Policy Changed?

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Has academic thinking about countercyclical fiscal policy changed recently? I would not say that thinking has changed. I would say that there is a good chance that thinking is changing–that academia is swinging back to a recognition that monetary policy cannot do the stabilization policy by itself, at least not under current circumstances. But it may not be.

If things are swinging back, it is as a result of a whole bunch of extraordinary surprises.

Back in 2007 we thought we understood the macroeconomic world, at least in its broad outlines and essentials. It has become very clear to us since 2007 that that is not the case. Right now we have a large number of competing diagnoses about where we were most wrong. We clearly were very wrong about the abilities of major money center banks to manage their derivatives books, or even to understand to understand what their derivatives books were. We clearly did not fully understand how those markets should be properly regulated.

Right now, however:

  • We have people who think the key flaw in the world economy today is an extraordinary shortage of safe assets. Nobody trusts private sector enterprises to do the risk transformation properly. Probably people will not again trust private sector enterprises for at least a generation.

  • We have those who think the problem is an excessive debt load where–I think we should distinguish between debt for which there is nothing safer, the debt of sovereigns that possess exorbitant privilege, and all other debts.

  • We have those who think we are undergoing a necessary deleveraging.

  • We have those who look for causes in the demography.

  • And then there is Larry Summers, as the third coming of British turn-of-the 20th century economist John Hobson. (The second coming was Alvin Hansen in the 1930s.) And the question: just what is Larry talking about?

    • Is Larry talking about the inevitable consequences of the coming of the demographic transition and of the end of Robert Gordon’s long second Industrial Revolution of extremely rapid economic growth?

    • Or is he talking a collapse of the ability of financial markets to do the risk transformation–to actually shrink the equity risk premium from its current absurd level down to something more normal?

If you look at asset prices now, you confront the minus two percent real return on the debt of sovereigns that possess exorbitant privilege with what Justin Lahart of the Wall Street Journal tells me is now a 5.5% real earnings yield on the U.S. stock market as a whole. That 7.5% per year equity premium is a major derangement of asset prices. It makes it very difficult for us to use our standard tools to think about what good policy would be…

Fiscal Policy in the New Normal: IMF Panel