Must-Read: Martin Sandbu: Mutiny at the Fed

Martin Sandbu: Mutiny at the Fed: “Two governors, Lael Brainard and Daniel Tarullo…

…have publicly spoken out against the rush to raise US interest rates. This is significant for a number of reasons. First, because most noises from individual Fed interest-rate setters have been in the hawkish direction. Chair Janet Yellen herself, while not a hawk, has unwisely tied herself to the calendar…. Tim Duy, the most perceptive Fed-watcher out there….On his reading, Brainard lays down a clear marker….Jared Bernstein, too, annotates the key parts of Brainard’s speech…. She judges the risks of things going worse than expected as more weighty than the chance of things going better…. She takes seriously that it is easier to wait too long and then tighten sharply if necessary, than to make up for the damage caused by a premature rate rise. That is because with very low interest rates it is challenging to make policy much looser…. This ‘option value of waiting’ argument is explained by Brad DeLong in a recent comment on Brainard and Duy…. Tarullo relied on the same two points….

Brainard and Tarullo now echo the dovish arguments of outsiders from the left such as Lawrence Summers, when those arguments have seemingly fallen on deaf ears in the rest of the FOMC…. Both the grumbling governors hail from that political milieu… of the Obama administration. Duy’s explanation is… that Yellen’s professional formative years were the high-inflation period of the 1970s (the same is true for vice-chair Stanley Fischer); Brainard’s experience, meanwhile, ‘is dominated by the Great Moderation’…. Paul Krugman offers a nuance: rather than the Great Moderation, he suggests what most shapes Brainard’s economic world view is… ‘internationally oriented macro types were aware earlier than most that Depression-type issues never went away’…. Hawks are now encountering more determined opposition at the Fed. That is a good thing.

The Extremely-Sharp Tim Duy Sees the Fed Moving Away from Contractionary Policy

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The extremely-sharp Tim Duy sees a much bigger potential impact than I do from Fed Governor Lael Brainard’s recent speech telegraphing future dissents on her part if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates in the current situation. Briefly, this: The failure to raise interest rates over the next nine months will call forth dissents from those whose analytical perspectives have been wrong pretty much all the time since 2007. Raising interest rates will call forth dissents from those whose analytical perspectives have been pretty much right all the time since 2007. Moreover, it is straightforward to undo the damage from being behind the curve in raising interest rates. It is impossible to undo the damage from being ahead of the curve in raising interest rates.

It would be one thing to raise interest rates if it were the unanimous consensus of the committee that it was time to do so. It is quite another, in a world of uncertainty and the need for prudent risk management. It’s quite another to risk making unrecoverable errors by endorsing those whose positions have been wrong in the past over the objections of those whose positions have been right.

Tim Duy: Brainard Drops A Policy Bomb: “Lael Brainard dropped a policy bomb…

…a direct challenge to Chair Janet Yellen and Vice Chair Stanley Fischer. Is was, as they say, a BFD. That, at least, is my opinion…. [She] stands in sharp contrast with Yellen and Fischer. Their efforts have been spent on explaining why rates need to rise soon. Hers… on why they do not…. Brainard asserts….

I do not view the improvement in the labor market as a sufficient statistic for judging the outlook for inflation. A variety of econometric estimates would suggest that the classic Phillips curve influence of resource utilization on inflation is, at best, very weak….

Recall that Yellen, in her most recent speech, made the Phillips Curve the primary basis for her case that rates will soon need to rise…. While Yellen sees the risks weighted toward rebounding inflation, Brainard sees the opposite. Moreover, policymakers have been twiddling their thumbs as the world economy turns against them:

Over the past 15 months, U.S. monetary policy deliberations have been taking place against a backdrop of progressively gloomier projections of global demand. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has marked down 2015 emerging market and world growth repeatedly since April 2014.

While all of you have been arguing about when to raise rates, the case for raising rates has been falling apart!… [Brainard] calls for different risk management:

These risks matter more than usual because the ability to provide additional accommodation if downside risks materialize is, in practice, more constrained than the ability to remove accommodation more rapidly if upside risks materialize….

The Fed can’t cut rates quickly, but they can raise rates quickly…. Suppose that the Fed needs raise rates at twice the pace they currently anticipate.  What does that mean? 25bp at every meeting instead of every other meeting? Is that really an ‘abrupt tightening?’ Not sure that Yellen has a very strong argument here. Or one that would withstand repeated attacks from her peers…. I think Yellen wants to raise interest rates. I think Fischer wants to raise rates.  I think both believe the downward pressure on inflation due to labor market slack is minimal, and the Phillips Curve will soon assert itself. I think both do not find the risks as asymmetric as does Brainard…. I think that Brainard knows this. I think that this speech is a very deliberate action by Brainard to let Yellen and Fischer know that she will not got quietly into the night…. And now that Brainard has laid down the gauntlet, it will look very, very bad for Yellen and Fischer if their plans go sideways….

Brad DeLong suggested the Fed commit to one of two policy messages:

I must say that they are not doing too well at the clear-communication part. I want to see one of following things in Fed statements:

  1. We will begin raising interest rates in December at a pace of basis points per quarter, unless economic growth and inflation fall substantially short of our current forecast expectations.

  2. We will delay raising interest rates until we are confident that it will not be appropriate to return them to the zero lower bound after liftoff.

If we had one of these, we would know where we stand.

But Stan Fischer’s speech provides us with neither.

I think that Fischer wants the first option, but knows Brainard’s views, and hence knows that December is not a sure thing if Brainard can build momentum for her position. Hence the muddled message. Brainard could be the force that drives the Fed toward option number two… closer to that of Evans and… Kocherlakota…. This is the most exciting speech I have read in forever…

As a matter of economic reality, Brainard is correct: The lesson of Staiger, Stock, and Watson (1997) is that the Phillips Curve is much too imprecisely-estimated to weigh as more than a feather in the scales to reduce uncertainty about the state of the economy two years from now. The risks are asymmetric: The option to change course and quickly neutralize the effects of your past year’s policies is a very valuable one. Raising interest rates and starting a tightening cycle throws away that option. You can always raise interest rates quickly and further and undo the effects of being behind the curve in withdrawing monetary stimulus. You cannot lower interest rates below zero and undo the effects of premature tightening away from the zero lower bound.

As I have repeatedly said, the mystery is why the lessons of SSW and the asymmetry of the risks have not been the decisive arguments among the serious members of the FOMC all along.

An Excellent Nobel Prize for Angus Deaton–But Was Eugene Fama Always Such a Total [Redacted]?

A truly excellent economics Nobel Prize–I have learned a lot from Angus Deaton.

And I look at my desk and see my copy of Akerlof and Shiller’s Phishing for Phools that I am halfway through on my desk. And I think about the panel I was on with Paul Krugman at New York Comic Con yesterday. There is a subset of economics Nobel Prize winners who are true geniuses, from whom I have learned and continue to learn an immense amount.

But then I turn to my computer to sort through my unread browser tabs.

And the first thing that comes up is: Eugene Fama: http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/magazine/fall-2015/whos-really-in-charge.

And all I can think is: “What a maroon!”

I first remember becoming really aware of Eugene Fama in the aftermath of the stock market’s Black Monday in 1987. He and Merton were out there in its aftermath opining that the 25% fall in the value of equities on Black Monday was a rational revaluation in response to that day’s market news–it was just that we economists were just not smart enough to figure out what that news was that the marginal trader on Wall Street had learned that day, but it was probably something about the tax treatment of takeovers.

That struck me as moronic. I asked my elders: “They’re kidding, aren’t they?” My elders said: “Nope.”

Today I find Eugene Fama saying something else that strikes me as equally moronic:

Is Sally taking Lucy for a walk, or is Lucy taking Sally for a walk?… The Fed isn’t all powerful. Obviously, they couldn’t set interest rates at 10% and leave them there forever, any more than Sally could make Lucy go for a walk if she really didn’t want to. So who’s really in charge?… 83% of the movements in the Fed’s target rate just follow other short-term rates. There are a lot of forces affecting interest rates, and the Fed is just one small part…. And remember, this isn’t the interest on one loan–the Fed claims to control all the interest rates in the economy…

We did this experiment of seeing who was taking whom for a walk–or, rather, the German Reichsbank did it.

The Reichsbank did it back in the 1910s. It set its discount rate at 5%/year nominal. It left it there. It had no problem doing so. There was none of this “the Fed can’t make the market go for a walk if it really didn’t want to…” BS.

Of course, the Reichsbank wished, after the fact, that it had not done so.

By 1922 its policy of fixing the discount rate at 5%/year nominal had created one hell of an inflationary mess:

Reichsbank discount rate 1920s Google Search

Eugene Fama: Who’s Really in Charge?:

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Must-Read: Oregon Economic Forum

Must-Read: Oregon Economic Forum to examine the post-recovery economy: “The 2015 Oregon Economic Forum… will be held Thursday, Oct. 15, at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave…

…Forum director Tim Duy, an economist at the UO, and Bruce McCain, chief investment strategist of Key Private Bank, kick off the hour-long event with a status update of Oregon’s and the country’s economies. They will take a closer look at the financial markets and preview the economic forecast for 2016. Moderator Brad DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, will then guide a broader conversation about Federal Reserve policy, the extent of any effect on the U.S. from China’s slowing economy and what is–or isn’t–happening to inflation….

Mark McMullen, state economist for Oregon, Tom Potiowsky, chair of the Department of Economics at Portland State University and former state economist, and Christopher Allanach, an economist in the Legislative Revenue Office, will look at the changing structure of the state’s economy and its revenue streams… [and] about what Oregonians can do to ensure a bright economic future.

Jim Tankersley of The Washington Post will delve into the current economic health of the middle class in the keynote address, ‘Reflections on the Middle Class in the Aftermath of the Great Depression’…

Must-Read: Bruce Bartlett: The Fed: Being Goaded into Raising too Soon?

Must-Read: I see three things going on in Federal Reserve desire to raise interest rates once there is even half an excuse to do so:

  1. A desire to placate members of the FOMC who believe that what is good for commercial bankers must be good for America, and who see higher interest rates now as good for commercial bankers.
  2. A belief that the normalization of the unemployment rate ought to carry with it a normalization of interest rates.
  3. Excessive trust in models with shaky empirical foundations that predict rising inflation in 2017 and beyond. As I have said, for too many members of the FOMC rising inflation is as tangible and visible and real as the peanuts handed out in small 70-calorie packages by Southwest Airlines pursers.

My suggestion: the Federal Reserve should invite Lars E.O. Svennson to come to every FOMC meeting and speak first. And the Federal Reserve should listen to him:

Bruce Bartlett: The Fed: Being Goaded into Raising too Soon?: “All year… markets have been expecting the… Federal Reserve to begin… normalising interest rates…

…An initial rise… expected in September… [was] derailed by a less-than-stellar jobs report. Now… December. The pressure to raise rates is a bit of a puzzle. Generally, the Fed raises rates… [to] curb inflationary pressures. But inflation is well-behaved, bordering on deflation… below the Fed’s own target of 2 per cent a year. And all the indicators of future inflation are signalling no sign of inflation…. So why is the Fed on the path to tightening? Some… believe… pressure… from banks having a hard time making money…. Another… the Fed has grown weary of the constant drumbeat of attacks from political conservatives who have been continuously warning about impending inflation, even hyperinflation…. When the Fed began its policy of quantitative easing… inflationary fears were often expressed here in the Financial Times by top Republican economists…. John Taylor… on March 24 2009…. On April 19 2009… Martin Feldstein…. Alan Greenspan… [on] June 26 2009 commentary…. [But] the policy that conservatives were concerned about was [the] textbook conservative macroeconomic[s of]… Milton Friedman… the conservative alternative to the Keynesian idea that government spending and deficits were needed….

What happened… conservatives… endors[ed] the ‘Austrian’ view propounded by Friedrich Hayek and others that the government should do nothing and just let economic imbalances right themselves. Friedman was always highly dismissive of the Austrian do-nothing policy, saying in a 1998 interview, it ‘has done the world a great deal of harm.’ The de facto adoption of the Austrian do-nothing policy by Republicans left no… Friedmanite[s]… except Ben Bernanke… [who] has detailed his frustration at repeated attacks on him and the Fed….

[T]he increasing hostility of the Republicans to the Fed and to me personally troubled me, particularly since I had been appointed by a Republican president who had supported our actions during the crisis. I tried to listen carefully and accept thoughtful criticisms. But it seemed to me that the crisis had helped to radicalize large parts of the Republican Party.

Today, Mr Bernanke no longer considers himself a Republican, having ‘lost patience with Republicans’ susceptibility to the know-nothing-ism of the far right’…. It’s rare for the Fed to tighten under macroeconomic conditions such as… today…. Perhaps the conservative critics are right, but it’s worth remembering that they have been predicting inflation for years and been proved wrong again and again…

I Really Really Do Not Understand the Mental Universe of Today’s Federal Reserve

I suppose my big problem is I keep getting hung up on the following optimal control principle: If you know in which direction your next turn of the wheel is going to be, then either you are steering around an immediate obstacle, or you are headed in the wrong direction. And if you are headed in the wrong direction, you should already have turned your wheel so that you are headed in the right direction.


At the zero lower bound, this principle does not directly apply. You are trying to steer around an immediate obstacle. Thus you know in which direction your next turn of the wheel is going to be. But a corollary to this general principle does apply, and applies very clearly: Optimal-control tells you to stay at the zero lower bound until you are confident that the economy is strong enough. Then you quickly move to point the economy in the right direction–to an interest rate where you are not sure whether your next turn of the wheel will be left or right.

The’s “lift off and pause”–turn the wheel a little bit right, and then wait for a while even though you know your next turn is going to be to the right–seems to me to make absolutely no sense at all. I cannot write down any optimal control exercise in which it does. I cannot even do so if I put my thumb on the scale via assuming an unmotivated substantial aversion to ever making 50 basis-point meeting moves in interest rates…

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Did The Fed Save The World?

Must-Read: Looking back at my archives, I find that my own ratio of “Paul Krugman is right” to “Paul Krugman is wrong” posts is not in the rational range between 10-1 and 5-1, but is 15-1. So I am looking for an opportunity to rebalance. And I find one this morning: Here I think Paul Krugman is wrong. Why? Because of this:

2015 10 06 for 2015 10 07 DeLong ULI key

Housing crashes. And does not bounce back quickly by the end of 2010–or, indeed, at all. And Paul Krugman is correct to write that “Even a total collapse of home lending couldn’t have subtracted more than a point or two more off aggregate demand”:

2015 10 06 for 2015 10 07 DeLong ULI key

But exports collapse as the financial crisis hits, and then bounce back very rapidly as the financial crisis passes:

2015 10 06 for 2015 10 07 DeLong ULI key

And roughly one-third of the financial-crisis associated collapse in business investment is quickly reversed after the financial crisis passes:

2015 10 06 for 2015 10 07 DeLong ULI key

Together these two factors plausibly associated with the reuniting of the web of financial intermediation look to me to be five times as large as the fiscal stimulus measured by government purchases. Now fiscal stimulus worked through channels other than government purchases. And without the Recovery Act we would have seen states and localities not holding their purchases constant over 2008-2011 but cutting them by 1% of GDP or so. And not all of the export and business investment bounce-back in the two years after the 2009 trough can be attributed to lender-of-last-resort and easy-money policies.

But it looks to me like the balance is that–even with housing left to rot on the stalk–monetary and banking policy did more than fiscal policy to stem the downturn and promote recovery up to 2011. And it looks to me that, since 2011, it is the reknitting of the financial system and easy money that has kept the extraordinary austerity that the states and the Republicans imposed and that Obama has bought into from sending the U.S., at least, into a renewed and deeper downturn.

Paul Krugman: Did The Fed Save The World?: “Bernanke’s basic theme is that the shocks of 2008 were bad enough that we could have had a full replay of the Great Depression…

…the reason we didn’t was that in the 30s central banks just sat immobilized while the financial system crashed, but this time they went all out to keep markets working. Should we believe this?… I very much agree with BB that pulling out all the stops was the right thing to do…. But I’m not persuaded that the real difference between 2008 and 1930-31 (which is when the Depression turned Great) lies in central bank action, or related bailouts. It’s true that the 30s were marked by a big financial disruption…. Shadow banking rapidly shriveled up, with repo and other alternatives to bank financing shrinking very fast; liquidity for everything but the safest of assets disappeared even though the big financial firms remained in being. And if we’re looking for effects of the tightening in credit conditions, remember that credit policy usually exerts its biggest effects through housing — and housing investment fell more than 60 percent as a share of GDP….

So really, was putting a limit on the financial crisis the reason we didn’t do a full 1930s? Or was it something else? And there is one other big difference between the world in 2008 and the world in 1930: big government…. Again, Bernanke and company were right to step in forcefully. But I’d argue that the fiscal environment was probably more important than monetary actions in limiting the damage. Oh, and since 2010 officials everywhere, but especially in Europe, have been doing all they can to undo the favorable effects…. And the result is that in Europe economic performance is at this point considerably worse than it was at this point in the 1930s.

Is There a Valid “Stop the Misallocation of Capital” Argument for Raising Interest Rates Right Now?

Kristi Culpepper: @munilass: “Best explanation of difference between people who believe Fed…

…should raise rates vs people who think Fed should hold tight…. People who think Fed should raise rates think Fed is only making things worse by encouraging misallocation of capital. People who think Fed should hold tight are obsessed with inflation measures, pressures from global economy. So Fed is caught between narratives of two groups that are essentially always going to be talking past each other.

That was the keen-eyed observer Kristi Culpepper tweeting a few days ago. It struck me as incisive and insightful both about those who do and about those who do not want the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.

I think she is correct about what those who want the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates are thinking: they are thinking that the prices that are interest rates are somehow wrong, and are leading people who are responding them to do things that are stupid for society as a whole.

But how stupid?

The argument is that the incentives to create long duration assets generated by extremely low interest-rate’s are too high. Therefore we as a society are creating too many long duration assets. But are we? The standard long duration asset is a building. And residential construction is still deeply depressed, well below anything we might think of as its normal equilibrium level. From the standpoint of residential construction, low interest rates are only partially compensating for other market failures that are currently leading us to build too few houses, not too many.

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When I make this argument to those who want the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, they move on. They point to non-residential construction–which is indeed healthy. but they cannot point to anyother long-duration investments in physical objects or organizations. And, indeed, in a world where the chief complaint about business is its short-termism, a configuration of market prices that puts a thumb in the scale in favor of projects of long-duration would seem to be a thing we need, not a thing to avoid.

And so they move on further: The argument becomes a claim that the Federal Reserve has made debt too valuable, and So the Federal Reserve is inducing overleverage. But too cheap relative to what? Issuing debt is richly valued. But the proceeds are not being used to build long-duration physical or organizational assets in excessive amounts. The proceeds are being used to buyback equities, but equities are also richly valued. So where is the incentive to overleverage? I do not see it.

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And so we come to the last argument: Commercial banks are being squeezed between the zero floor on deposits and the low rates they earn in their traditional relatively-safe loan habitats. Commercial banks should be focused on running their banking branch-and-ATM networks efficiently, and efficiently lending on a large scale to loan customers where they understand the risks. But, now, because low safe interest rates and the zero lower bound on what they can pay deposits, commercial banks have to become judges of risk–a task that they are not well qualified to do, which pits them against people who can and do adversely-select and moral-hazard this.

This is, I think, correct: Low interest-rate are bad for the commercial banking sector. But they are very good for labor and for capital. And, as long as they do not induce undue inflationary pressures, for the economy as a whole.

So are we supposed to sacrifice the health of the economy as a whole simply to make life easier for the commercial banking sector?

Now do not get me wrong. I wish that interest rates were higher. I think it expansionary fiscal policy to push up interest rates is clearly the first best policy.

But we are not going to get that–at least not until 2017 at the earliest.

And the scary thing is that the Federal Reserve does indeed seem to contain a great many people whose answer to that question is: Yes: we do want to sacrifice the health of the rest of the economy in order to make life easier for the commercial banking sector. Therefore we are going to raise interest rates now:

  • even though inflationary pressures are not yet visible on the horizon,
  • even though the Federal Reserve has ample ability to raise interest rates in order to catch up should inflationary pressures appear, and
  • even though the Federal Reserve has no ability to reverse course and offset the damage done should raising interest rates to be a mistake.

Carter Glass and Louis Brandeis are rolling in their graves…

Must-Read: Ryan Avent: Ben Bernanke’s Big Blunder

Must-Read: I find myself thinking about six things:

  1. The failure of the Bernanke Fed to focus on the unwinding housing bubble and learn about the outstanding sources of systemic risk in 2006 and 2007.
  2. The decision by the Bernanke Fed in September 2008 that it was time to demonstrate that it did not guarantee the debt of money-center shadow banks, step aside, and allow the uncontrolled bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.
  3. In fact, the earlier decision by the Bernanke Fed to stand by rather than to handle the situation when, in the summer of 2008, Lehman Brothers crossed the line from solvent to insolvent and thus the Federal Reserve arguably lost the legal power to handle a Lehman-centered crisis.
  4. The failure of the Bernanke Fed to commit to a policy of catching-up to 2%/year inflation should prices fall below its inflation target.
  5. The failure of the Bernanke Fed to choose a more appropriate, higher inflation target than 2%/year.
  6. The failure of the Bernanke Fed to admit that the 2%/year inflation target had proved to be a mistake, and shift to a more sensible nominal GDP target.

These are six major failures of technocratic rationality in monetary policy. Is there anything to offset them, other than “we stopped another Great Depression from happening”?

Ryan Avent: Ben Bernanke’s Big Blunder: “Two weeks ago, The Economist repeated its endorsement of a change in the Fed’s monetary policy target…

…from an inflation rate to a growth rate for nominal GDP (NGDP): or total spending and income in an economy in dollar terms. In November of 2011, during Mr Bernanke’s chairmanship of the Fed, the monetary-policy committee considered a change to an NGDP target, but opted to stay with the old, inflation-focused framework. Mr Bernanke writes:

For nominal GDP targeting to work, it had to be credible. That is, people would have to be convinced that the Fed, after spending most of the 1980s and 1990s trying to quash inflation, had suddenly decided it was willing to tolerate higher inflation, possibly for many years.
And so in January of 2012 the Fed reiterated its inflation-targeting stance and officially designated a 2% rate of inflation, as measured by the price index for personal consumption expenditures, as the target.

We all know what happened next. Since then, the Fed has spectacularly undershot its inflation target…. Markets suspect rates might not rise to 0.5% until well into 2016, and most Fed members think rates will never get any higher than 3.5%. Treasury prices suggest that inflation will be closer to 1% than 2% over the next five years. There is good reason to believe that Mr Bernanke’s Fed made a big mistake, in other words. An NGDP target would have worked out better… helped the Fed choose policy more appropriately at a tricky time in the recovery. In 2011 high oil prices drove headline inflation above 2%… the central bank sensibly shrugged aside calls to raise rates in response to rising prices. Yet it also took no additional action to boost the economy. The recovery subsequently lost pace, inflation fell, and by the end of 2012 the Fed was forced to restart QE. Had the Fed instead focused its attention on NGDP, it would have been forced to react to an economy that was well below an appropriate level of output and which was growing too slowly…. Instead it took the costly choice to dither.

Just as importantly, a switch to an NGDP target would have sent a strong signal about Fed priorities…. Mr Bernanke notes that the Fed spent the 1980s and 1990s trying to quash inflation. It did not arrive at that policy strategy passively…. Paul Volcker… [did not say] that the Fed couldn’t possibly rein in double-digit inflation because it lacked credibility as an inflation-fighter after a decade of neglecting the problem. Instead, he used the tools available to him to demonstrate the Fed’s credibility. Mr Bernanke’s Fed could have, and should have, taken similarly bold action….

Instead, it made itself a prisoner of its own complacency. As a result, inflation and interest rates will spend most of the 2010s at dangerously low levels, leaving the American economy disconcertingly vulnerable to new economic shocks. The book, by the way, is titled The Courage to Act

Macro Situation: Things Are Profoundly Different Today from What 10 Years Ago We Thought Would Be

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