There Is No Such Things As Monetary Policy

In my last post, I argued that bank reserves, if they pay interest, are essentially a form of government debt. They’re issued by a different institution and have a different maturity than most government debt, but in their essential nature, they’re just a special case of government debt.

In that post, I was agnostic about whether bank reserves should be considered “money.” If bank reserves are government debt, then, to be consistent, we should either consider all government debt to be money or consider bank reserves to be something other than money. In particular, Ben Bernanke’s use of the phrase “printing money” is consistent if you consider all government debt to be money, in which case QE2 only exchanges zero-maturity money for high-maturity money whereas QE1 exchanges money for private sector assets. If you take the second option, however, then neither QE1 nor QE2 was “printing money.”

I want to explore that second option, which seems pretty reasonable in terms of the way I learned liquidity preference theory in school. In the simplest version of liquidity preference theory, money (1) pays no interest and (2) is controlled by policymakers. Obviously bank reserves no longer meet the first criterion, and bank deposits (as we learned painfully during the policy experiment of the early 1980’s) do not meet the second criterion. I’m increasingly coming to believe that the most reasonable definition of “money” is simply “cash” (negotiable central bank notes plus coins).

But the Fed does not attempt to control the supply of cash. Banks can withdraw reserves from the Fed, or deposit them, whenever they choose, and the Fed will normally compensate for aggregate net withdrawals or deposits by adjusting the total level of reserves to bring it back to where it was before the net withdrawals or deposits took place. Moreover, the amount of cash outstanding, as determined by the demand for cash, is not a significant factor in the setting of Fed policy. If “money” simply means cash, then the Fed’s “monetary policy” is unlimited accommodation. And moreover, nobody cares, or should care, about how this policy is going. For practical purposes, there is no such thing as monetary policy.

The Fed does do something active, and they call it monetary policy. But what is it really? The Fed does several things that usually come under the heading of monetary policy, but they can all be reasonably classified as something else. For one thing, it manages the level of bank reserves through open market operations. But this is really government finance policy, not monetary policy: it consists of substituting zero-maturity government debt (bank reserves) for higher maturity government debt (Treasury securities), or vice versa.

The Fed also sets the interest rate on reserves. This is also government finance policy. Suppose that, instead of auctioning off fixed quantities of securities, the Treasury were to sell as much as it could at a given interest rate and leave any excess cash in a vault. If we’re talking about, say, one-month T-bills, which have only slightly higher maturity than bank reserves, then the effect would be essentially the same as when the Fed sets the interest rate on reserves. (In particular, imagine that, starting from today’s near-zero interest rates, the Treasury were to start selling T-bills with a fixed 1% yield. That would be just like an increase on the interest rate on reserves, except that others besides banks could participate. That difference is really irrelevant except for the arbitrage opportunity provided to banks when the IOR rate exceeds the T-bill rate. If the IOR rate were to rise, banks – being in competition with one another for funds – would have an incentive to let others participate indirectly.)

Granted, this doesn’t work in reverse: the Treasury needs to borrow a certain minimum amount to finance its expenditures, so it can’t set an arbitrarily low interest rate. But it doesn’t work in reverse for bank reserves either. If the Fed sets the IOR rate far below the T-bill rate, it becomes irrelevant: banks will simply hold, for emergency purposes, a tiny amount of reserves over and above what is required, and the rest of their reserve assets they will hold as T-bills, which can easily be sold or repoed for federal funds if necessary.

The Fed also sets the reserve requirement, thereby compelling a demand for reserves, but this is not monetary policy either; it is regulatory policy. There is a regulation that requires banks to hold a certain quantity (set by the Fed) of zero-maturity government debt (reserves). There are other regulations that effectively require banks to hold certain quantities of more broadly defined safe assets to satisfy capital requirements. All these regulations create an increased demand for government debt; it’s only the maturity of the debt that is different. To the extent that such policies are used for macroeconomic demand management, they are essentially a form of taxation: the Fed can pay a lower rate of IOR than it otherwise would because it is compelling banks to hold reserves instead of using the money for profitable activities; it could achieve the same effect by raising IOR until those activities are no longer profitable (in risk-adjusted opportunity cost terms) and taxing the banks an amount equal to the difference in the interest they pay. To the extent that regulatory policy is used for macroeconomic demand management, it is just a form of fiscal policy.

Finally, the Fed lends (or purchases the assets from those who have lent) to the private sector, via its discount window, via various emergency programs in times of crisis, and in particular via QE1. But this isn’t monetary policy; it’s fiscal policy. It’s no different than what the TARP did: an exchange of government debt for private debt. Anything the Fed does through such programs could also be done by the Treasury, which could issue T-bills to obtain funding, and it would surely be considered fiscal policy. The Fed issues bank reserves instead of T-bills: a slight difference of maturity, not a fundamental difference of substance.

So there you have it: there is no such thing as monetary policy. There is “central bank directed stabilization policy,” and, for convenience, you can refer to that as monetary policy if you want. If so, recognize that you are using the term loosely, and let’s not get into arguments about whether some particular Fed action is “really” monetary policy. None of it is really monetary policy.


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

What Does “Printing Money” Mean?

When I heard Ben Bernanke on 60 Minutes Sunday, I was initially taken aback when he said that QE2 did not constitute “printing money.” Obviously it’s not physically printing money, but nobody ever uses that phrase literally. If creating bank reserves is not “printing money,” then what is? My first thought, maybe he means that the increase in base money is not expected to lead to an increase in bank deposits. But if that’s the case, why would they be doing it? It’s hard to imagine QE2 being effective without causing bank deposits to increase. Sure, they may not increase via the textbook money multiplier process, given that reserve requirements are not currently binding and reserve ratios are not expected to be stable. But that’s a cop out: the Fed is increasing bank reserves; it hopes this action will lead, by whatever process, to an increase in bank deposits. How is that not printing money?

Apparently it gets worse. I had forgotten what Bernanke said on his earlier 60 Minutes appearance, but Jon Stewart has a clip where, in reference to QE1, Bernanke essentially acknowledges that the Fed is printing money. Naturally, Jon Stewart was amused by this seeming inconsistency, as was I.

But I’ve been thinking about this a bit more, and I no longer think Bernanke’s statements are inconsistent. The problem is that the definition of the word “money” is not as clear cut as it seems. Indeed, one might argue that the whole concept of “money” is no longer useful (at least to economists) in a world where bank reserves pay interest and people pay bills with credit cards and with checks drawn on bond mutual funds.

Long, long ago, before I started graduate school, I used to think that the concept of money was fairly straightforward. There was cash (Federal Reserve notes, as well as coins), and there was money in the bank, and those were money. And OK, there were money market mutual funds, and those were “sort of” money. When I really started to think about it, I realized this framework was inadequate, especially given the concept of liquidity preference that I was trying to use, where the cost of holding liquid money was supposed to be the interest rate. (Money market funds pay interest, and they’re almost just like money, and even some bank accounts pay interest, so apparently you can hold liquid money without giving up the interest, so where’s the cost?)

At the time I had a solution: stop thinking of bank accounts and such as money and instead just think of “outside money,” money created by the central bank. This approach sort of seemed to work. If you wanted to hold “money” in this sense, you had to give up the interest, and a bank’s willingness to pay interest on deposits (no longer considered money) was influenced by the amount of actual money that the bank needed to hold in order to maintain that deposit. And policymakers actually had control over this kind of money, so the concept fit well with the simple assumption that the quantity of money is determined by policy.

But in 2008, the Fed started paying interest on bank reserves. (Some other central banks had already been doing so for a while, but, being a provincial American, I hadn’t really noticed.) To be honest, it didn’t occur to me at the time, but this change totally destroyed my concept of money. If bank reserves pay interest, then they aren’t money, because you don’t have to give up the interest in order to hold them. But surely they are money, because monetary policy consists primarily of manipulating the quantity of bank reserves. Epistemological fail!

So are bank reserves money or not? I don’t know. But here’s something to think about: what is the difference between bank reserves and Treasury securities? They both pay interest. They’re created by different institutions, but so what? They’re both ultimately obligations of the government: the interest paid on reserves comes out of the Fed’s profits which would otherwise go into the Treasury.

You might say that Treasury securities have to be paid back, while bank reserves don’t, but that’s merely a function of the banks’ willingness to hold reserves: if the banks (and their customers) want cash instead, the reserves have to be “paid back” to the banks/customers. And if Treasury security holders want to roll over their securities, then Treasury borrowing doesn’t have to be paid back. So there’s no real difference there. The maturity is different, it’s true: bank reserves have zero maturity, while Treasury securities have maturities ranging from one month to 30 years. But that’s not a fundamental difference: it just means that bank reserves are a special case, not that they’re a different kind of entity.

OK, bank reserves can be used to fulfill reserve requirements, and Treasury securities cannot, but again so what? Banks are subject to a number of regulatory requirements, which depend on various aspects of their asset structure. There’s really nothing special about the reserve requirement. Today capital requirements are closer to being a binding constraint than reserve requirements, so for most banks Treasury securities are just as good as reserves when it comes to fulfilling regulatory requirements. Maybe someday in the future banks will once again have a particular need for Fed-issued zero-maturity assets to fulfill a regulatory requirement, but I don’t see how that makes such assets a fundamentally different type. Show me junk bonds, T-bills, and bank reserves, and it seems to me that, if anything, the bonds are the fundamentally different type of asset.

I submit that bank reserves are essentially just zero-maturity government debt. You can call them “money” if you want, but the application of the term is pretty arbitrary. And if you’re going to call bank reserves money, why not call T-bills money as well? And for that matter, T-notes and T-bonds: those are just long-maturity money.

So back to Ben Bernanke. What is QE2? It’s an exchange of bank reserves for longer-maturity Treasury securities: both forms of government debt; the only substantial difference is the maturity. QE2 is not, in any important sense, “printing money” but merely a restructuring of the government’s debt.

And what was QE1? It was (largely) an exchange of bank reserves for private sector assets, essentially an exchange of government debt for private debt. It’s very important that QE1 involved “printing” substantial quantities of government debt that would not otherwise have existed. That government debt happens to be “money,” though, rather than what we usually think of as government debt. So, rather than go through a whole explanation of how bank reserves are really government debt, the simple and substantively correct way of explaining QE1 is that it constituted “printing money” in exchange for private sector assets.


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

Profits, Interest, and Inflation

US corporate profits set a record in the third quarter. As Matthew Yglesias points out, that’s not as impressive as it sounds: profits are measured in nominal dollars, and they normally rise during times of economic expansion, so there’s nothing at all unusual about seeing them make new highs. After taking a closer look at the data, Justin Fox is even less impressed: as a fraction of the national income, domestic nonfinancial corporate profits are nowhere near a new high; the big numbers are coming from financial corporations (which are bouncing back strongly from the losses they had a few years ago) and from foreign earnings of US corporations. Kevin Drum is not quite so unimpressed, though: he looks at the data and sees domestic nonfinancial corporate profits recovering nicely in any case.

Count me with the unimpressed, but for different reasons. It’s really not appropriate, in my view, to look at profits in isolation from the rest of the national income. Profits are a form of capital income. Capital income can be roughly divided into profits and interest, depending on how the capital was financed. If we’re interested in the general profitability of business activities, rather than the narrow question of whether current stockholders are getting rich, we should be looking at total capital income. You might have noticed that interest rates are way down from where they were a few years ago, which probably means that there has been a substantial decline in the interest portion of capital income. So total capital income from domestic nonfinancial operations is almost certainly lower than it was before the recession.

It’s true that, even if capital returns are not very high, they can still be conducive to a recovery if the required return on capital has fallen. Indeed, the lowness of interest rates partly reflects attempts by the Fed to reduce the required return on capital. To that extent, we can be impressed by rising profits.

But the lowness of interest rates also reflects a decline in the expected inflation rate. This factor is not reflected in the raw profit statistics, and it does make them less impressive. In nominal terms, before the recession, corporations were expecting to see rising product prices, so, for any given nominal rate of profit, they were more likely to invest in new projects and more likely to hire. Today, product prices are not expected to rise very much, so today’s nominal profit has to “stand on its own,” as it were, as an indicator of how profitable any new project will be. So, by comparison, things are not going as well today as they might appear. As Justin Fox says, members of the domestic business community “have every right to be cranky.”

I do, however, concur with Matthew Yglesias’ conclusion that the trends are in the right direction. An increasing number of indicators suggest that things are improving, but I don’t expect the improvement to be rapid.




DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

I Didn’t Realize How Influential I Was :)

I noticed this chart in David Beckworth’s blog. Here’s what I see. On June 16, I warned of the danger of deflation. The expected inflation rate immediately began to fall, and it fell by a total of about 50 basis points over the next two-and-a-half months. Then on September 1 (with the expected inflation rate near its low), I urged the Fed to take quick action as bond yields were getting dangerously low, leaving increasingly little margin for the potential effectiveness of monetary policy. The Fed then began hinting at policy changes (partly realized in the QE2 announcement), largely as a result of which the expected inflation rate has since risen by about 40 basis points.

OK, I can see I’m going to have to start writing some more blog posts, so you all will know what to do next. (By the way, Mr. Bernanke, I second what David Beckworth said in the post where the chart appeared.)




DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

Bond Market Instability in a Liquidity Trap

For simplicity, let’s assume that the Fed’s policy instrument (now that the federal funds rate is stuck near zero) is the 10-year Treasury note. As an example, suppose the yield is 4%. In that case, it’s all but certain that the Fed, if it chooses, can do something to stimulate the economy and raise the inflation rate.

For example, suppose the Fed were to bid the 10-year note yield down from 4% to 1%. It would take out a whole slew of marginal noteholders in the process. Banks that had been satisfied with a 4% return would be unsatisfied with a 1% return and would lend more aggressively. Domestic investors that had been satisfied with a 4% return would be unsatisfied with 1% and would bite the bullet and buy stock. International investors would be unsatisfied and would shift their investments into foreign assets, thus weakening the dollar and making US products more competitive. Households would refinance their mortgages and spend some portion of the increased cash flow. Others who previously couldn’t afford houses could now afford them, so demand for houses and home furnishings would go up. And so on. With such a huge policy action, it’s virtually certain that business activity would accelerate enough to reverse any deflationary pressure.

One way to think about that example is in terms of the natural rate of interest, the rate at which the prospective scenario theoretically crosses the line between disinflation and inflation. Suppose the expected inflation rate is 1.5% and the natural real interest rate on the 10-year note is 1%. Then, with a 4% yield, there is a disinflationary gap of 1.5% (that is, 4% nominal yield, minus 1.5% expected inflation, minus 1% natural real interest rate). If expectations remained constant, the hypothetical policy action – reducing the nominal yield to 1% – would reverse the 1.5% disinflationary gap into a 1.5% inflationary gap, thus switching the prospective scenario from one of disinflation to one of inflation.

However, expectations would not remain constant. Naturally, if the prospective scenario switched from disinflation to inflation, the expected inflation rate would rise. Moreover, since the inflationary scenario involves an economic recovery, the natural real interest rate would rise too. When disinflationary stagnation was expected, there wasn’t much reason to borrow money, or to invest the money one already had in any productive project, so it would require a very low interest rate to get an inflationary scenario going. When inflationary recovery is expected, there are much better investment opportunities, so even a relatively high interest rate could justify the kind of demand that would lead to recovery and inflation. Perhaps the natural real interest rate would rise to 2% and the expected inflation rate would rise to 2.5%, leaving a very large (3.5%) inflationary gap at a 1% nominal yield.

Indeed, these expectations would even create an inflationary gap (of 0.5%) if the yield were still at 4%. Thus the Fed could let the yield go back up to 4% and still produce the desired effect of stimulating recovery and raising the inflation rate. In fact, the Fed wouldn’t even need to bid down the yield in the first place. If the Fed had enough credibility, all it would have to do is threaten to bid down the yield. It’s even possible to come up with a plausible example where the Fed’s threat to bid down the yield causes the yield to go up. That’s the magic of expectations. And that’s why, when the yield begins at 4%, it won’t be very sensitive to disinflationary shocks. A disinflationary shock will push down the yield a little bit, but the Fed can make a credible threat to push it down further, and, paradoxically, the result will be a that it won’t have to go down further. Consequently, a yield of 4% is fairly stable.

But now let’s take another example. Suppose the yield starts out at 1%. The economy is expected to be weak, so the natural real interest rate (for the 10-year note) is 0%. Say the expected inflation rate is 0.5%, leaving a disinflationary gap of 0.5% even at the 1% nominal yield. What can the Fed do?

Theoretically, given the parameters that I’ve imagined, the Fed can still shift the scenario from disinflation/stagnation to inflation/recovery by bidding the yield down to zero. That would leave an inflationary gap of 0.5%. But in reality, we never know exactly what the natural real interest rate is. If the yield were 1% and the economy still appeared to be stagnating, bond market participants would rightly question the Fed’s ability to revive the economy. A drop in the yield from 1% to 0% might do the trick, or it might not. Given this lack of confidence in the Fed’s ability to revive the economy, the threat to do so (by hypothetically bidding down the yield) would no longer be credible. The only way the Fed could potentially revive the economy would be by actually bidding down the yield.

And what if the Fed chose not to do so? Since I’ve assumed a disinflationary gap, the inflation rate would, in the absence of policy action, tend to decline. To the extent that this decline were unanticipated, yields would then tend to fall. Thus, no matter what the Fed does or doesn’t do, the fact that the yield is low (and thus the Fed lacks a credible threat to revive the economy) creates a reason why the yield should go even lower.

Of course, in equilibrium, this decline should have been anticipated and should already have happened. But suppose there is a disinflationary shock. It has the direct effect of lowering the yield because it is disinflationary in its own right. But then it has the indirect effect of reducing the Fed’s ability to make a credible threat to revive the economy. This indirect effect causes the yield to decline more than it otherwise would. Thus, the lower bond yields go, the more unstable they become in response to shocks.

(Note that the process also works in reverse. If bond yields are low, and we are in an disinflationary environment, but we get an inflationary shock, not only does it raise the yield by increasing inflation directly, it also increases the Fed’s ability to stimulate the economy, thus adding an additional inflationary component and raising the yield still further. Conversely, when bond yields are high, there is little question of the Fed’s ability to stimulate the economy, so an inflationary shock does not alter that perceived ability, and it has only its direct effect on the yield.)

So what does all this mean? Well, for one thing, it suggests that, with bond yields having fallen significantly over the past few months, the Fed ought to get off its ass and start making credible threats to revive the economy before bond yields fall even more and reduce its ability to do so. For another thing, it means that we shouldn’t be too surprised to see the bond market behaving oddly. Whether or not one can reasonably call it a bubble (and the term may not be entirely inappropriate), it is quite normal for the bond market to react strongly to disinflationary shocks when the yield is already low.



DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

The Real Activity Suspension Program

(Think of this as a guest post by the Cynic in me. I’m not sure my Cynic is entirely right on either the facts or the economics, but he has a provocative point. And I apologize for the fact that he misuses the word “recession” to include the period since our inadequate recovery began.)


Americans got angry when the federal government tried to bail out banks by buying assets or taking capital positions. Whatever you may think of those bailout programs, they at least had the advantage that taxpayers were getting something in return for their money. There is another bank bailout program going on now – one that allows the federal government to recapitalize banks with public money, receive nothing at all in return, and somehow escape criticism for doing so. That bailout program is called the Recession.

How does the Recession allow the government to bail out banks? With the recession going on, people are afraid to do anything risky with their assets, so they keep them deposited in banks, earning no interest. Banks can then invest these deposits in Treasury notes and credit the interest on those Treasury notes to their bottom line, thus improving their balance sheets. So the government pays to recapitalize banks while receiving nothing in return.

Now this bailout program is not without its risks. The biggest risk is that the economy will recover, which would be a disaster for the program. Suddenly, not only would banks be holding losses on their Treasury notes, but their cost of funds would go up, as depositors realized that there were more attractive investments available than zero-interest bank deposits.

Another risk, with similar implications, is an increase in the expected inflation rate. That would also lead to capital losses on the banks’ Treasury note holdings and an increase in their cost of funds.

Finally, there is reinvestment risk. Treasury notes mature and need to be rolled over, the coupon payments need to be reinvested, and banks have new inflows of funds that need to be invested. A substantial decline in the yields on Treasury notes (perhaps a continuation of what we are seeing now) would benefit banks in the short run because of the capital gains involved, but ultimately it would effectively terminate the bailout program, since banks would no longer be able to earn a large spread on their safe investments.

So the success of this bailout program depends on avoiding recovery, avoiding increases in inflation expectations, and avoiding major declines in Treasury note yields. Now do you understand why the Federal Reserve Bank presidents – representatives of the banking sector – are the most hawkish voices at the FOMC’s policy meetings?


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

Do Umbrellas Cause Rain?

In a recent speech Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota argues that low interest rates could ultimately be dangerous in that they could lead to deflation. His argument seems bizarre to me. I’ll go through it piece by piece.

The fed funds rate is roughly the sum of two components: the real, net-of-inflation, return on safe short-term investments and anticipated inflation.

OK, so far, so good. This is just the definition of the real return: it’s the return that’s anticipated after accounting for inflation.

Monetary policy does affect the real return on safe investments over short periods of time. But over the long run, money is, as we economists like to say, neutral.

I’ll agree to that, although I shall subsequently quibble with his definition of “neutral.”

This means that no matter what the inflation rate is and no matter what the FOMC does, the real return on safe short-term investments averages about 1-2 percent over the long run.

Not necessarily true. (The long-run real return on safe short-term investments depends on a lot of things besides what the FOMC does, and we can’t say a priori that it will remain in that range.) But I’ll accept it for the sake of argument.

Long-run monetary neutrality is an uncontroversial, simple, but nonetheless profound proposition.

True, as far as it goes, but in his subsequent statement he’s actually talking about superneutrality – the proposition that the growth rate of the money stock (rather than its absolute size) doesn’t affect real activity – which is not entirely uncontroversial. But let’s grant superneutrality, for the sake of argument.

In particular, it implies that if the FOMC maintains the fed funds rate at its current level of 0-25 basis points for too long, both anticipated and actual inflation have to become negative. Why? It’s simple arithmetic. Let’s say that the real rate of return on safe investments is 1 percent and we need to add an amount of anticipated inflation that will result in a fed funds rate of 0.25 percent. The only way to get that is to add a negative number—in this case, –0.75 percent.

Here Kocherlakota seems either disingenuous or irrational. It’s true that, in a long run equilibrium where the funds rate remains near zero, it also must be the case that there is negative inflation (provided that money retains any value at all). But how do we get to that long run equilibrium? And would we ever get to that equilibrium?

Suppose that the Fed were to keep the funds rate near zero but people began to be dissatisfied with that rate and began anticipating the 1% to 2% long-run real rate. What would happen? People would stop lending short-term money to the government at the near zero rate and instead start lending money elsewhere – for longer terms and to riskier borrowers. The more this continued, the easier it would get to borrow money. The easier it got to borrow, the more people would buy with the borrowed money, and the higher the prices of those purchases would go. And prices would continue going higher until...when?

Prices would continue going higher until they were so high that they were expected to fall. At that point, there would be expected deflation, and we would be at the long run equilibrium. There would be deflation, but it would necessarily be preceded by rising prices – that is, inflation.

However, there is no reason to expect that we would ever get to that long run equilibrium. Instead, if the Fed kept interest rates too low, we would move toward another long-run equilibrium – which Kocherlakota ignores – where money becomes worthless. In that case, the Fed could continue targeting near zero interest rates, but the rates would be meaningless, since nobody would be willing to sell anything, so there would be no reason to borrow money. Now I doubt we would actually get anywhere near that long-run equilibrium, because I think the Fed would raise interest rates long before money became worthless. But the dynamics of market responses will tend to drive toward the worthless-money equilibrium rather than the deflation equilibrium. Why would people ever start to think prices will fall after they start rising rapidly?

To sum up, over the long run, a low fed funds rate must lead to consistent—but low—levels of deflation.

OK, that is (almost) pure nonsense. It’s true that a low fed funds rate can exist, in long run equilibrium, only if people expect deflation (or if money is worthless). But the causation goes in the opposite direction. People lend at a low interest rate because they expect deflation. People carry umbrellas because they expect rain. An equilibrium with umbrellas must include a significant possibility of rain, but we don’t say that carrying umbrellas must “lead to” rain. If we take away people’s umbrellas, it will not prevent rain, and if we require people to carry umbrellas, it will not cause rain.

The good news is that it is certainly possible to eliminate this eventuality through smart policy choices. Right now, the real safe return on short-term investments is negative because of various headwinds in the real economy. Again, using our simple arithmetic, this negative real return combined with the near-zero fed funds rate means that inflation must be positive. Eventually, the real economy will improve sufficiently that the real return to safe short-term investments will normalize at its more typical positive level. The FOMC has to be ready to increase its target rate soon thereafter.

That sounds easy—but it’s not. When real returns are normalized, inflationary expectations could well be negative, and there may still be a considerable amount of structural unemployment. If the FOMC hews too closely to conventional thinking, it might be inclined to keep its target rate low. That kind of reaction would simply re-enforce the deflationary expectations and lead to many years of deflation.

That is pretty much the same nonsense as above, except for one thing: perhaps people believe that the Fed knows more about the likely inflation rate than outside forecasters do. If so, people could interpret the continued low interest rates as a signal that the Fed expects deflation, and the deflation could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If that’s what Kocherlakota means, then he isn’t insane – but he’s still wrong.

The Fed does have a little more information than the public does. For example, it has a better idea of how its own policies will react in the future. And perhaps it has slightly better forecasts than the public. And maybe it has a little bit of inside information about the economy. People may take Fed policies as a signal of its expectations for future inflation, and may react accordingly, but this effect is likely to be far outweighed by the actions of people who disagree with the Fed – or who find the Fed’s expectations irrelevant to their own projects – and want to take advantage of its low interest rate policy.

What does it mean to say that “the real economy will improve sufficiently that the real return to safe short-term investments will normalize at its more typical positive level”? It means there will be opportunities for real investment that have more attractive expected returns. Even if the Fed’s actions lead people to increase slightly their expectations of falling prices, people will also notice these real investment opportunities and will start investing in those rather than in safe short-term investments. Or they’ll take money and spend it on consumer purchases in anticipation of continued employment. Either way, there will be more purchases made, which will tend to drive up prices, and the deflation prophecy will not fulfill itself.

Ultimately, as people notice the economy improving, they will come to expect rising rather than falling prices, no matter what the Fed does. Ultimately, the effect of having the Fed keep interest rates too low for too long will be inflation, not deflation. Of course, the Fed will notice this and then raise interest rates to slow down the economy and stop the inflation rate from rising further, so it shouldn’t be a big problem.


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

What Housing Bubble?

How does the world economy adjust when the propensity to save exceeds the propensity to invest? It has to adjust somehow, since total saving has to equal total investment. Broadly speaking, there are two mechanisms by which it can adjust. The first is that incomes can fall, held down by weak demand from firms choosing not to invest or households choosing not to spend. (This leaves less income available for saving and thus forces total saving to fall.) The second is that asset prices can rise, bid up by savers looking for a place to put their savings. (This increases the incentive to invest and decreases the incentive to save.) Over the past decade, the world has consistently faced an environment in which the propensity to save exceeded the propensity to invest, and various nations, at various times, have adjusted by one mechanism or the other. It should be obvious – and used to be obvious, at least to mainstream economists – that the latter mechanism is preferable.

During the recent US housing boom, I was of the school that believed rising house prices were an example of that preferred mechanism taking effect. At the time, I had plenty of company. Today – now that we have transitioned to the less preferred mechanism for equating saving and investment – my cohorts all appear to have deserted. Apparently it is now generally accepted that the rise in house prices was an aberrant bubble, justified only in the minds of irrational buyers who ignored the fundamentals and expected house prices to keep rising simply because they were already rising.

But what were the fundamentals? Certainly, if one had foreseen today’s circumstances, it would have been clear that housing was not a good investment. If one had been able to say, “In a few years, the unemployment rate will rise to 10%, the inflation rate will fall to nearly zero, and policymakers will be too timid to undertake the policies necessary to reverse those trends,” then it would have been clear that 2005 was not a good time to buy a house. But that’s not what most housing bears were saying at the time. And in any case, while investors must of course do their best to anticipate actual policies, it is hardly appropriate for economists to consider the anticipation of future policy timidity as part of the intrinsic fundamentals. It is hardly reasonable to declare an episode a bubble just because investors failed to anticipate the timidity of policymakers.

Less timid policies – which are indeed advocated today by a great many of the erstwhile housing bears – would have two salient features: a commitment (in some form) to higher inflation rates over the medium run and (in pursuit thereof) an aggressive attempt to reduce interest rates across the yield curve. Under those circumstances, houses – a classic inflation hedge that could be purchased with ultra-cheap financing – would seem like a very good thing to own. If such policies were undertaken, and housing prices were to rise once again to their former level, would the bears once again declare the housing market to be a bubble? Perhaps housing prices wouldn’t rise quite so much, but some asset prices would have to rise quite a lot to bring about full employment and moderate inflation. It seems to me that if one advocates such policies but is inclined to describe the result as a bubble, then one is taking a rather self-defeating attitude.

It is of course conventional (but wrong, in my opinion) to regard the current malaise as the result of the housing bubble’s collapse, so perhaps it will be argued that such asset-boom-inducing policies are needed now only because that housing boom already took place. That argument makes little sense to me. Back in 2003, as the housing boom was already taking form, the US economy was weak enough to raise deflation concerns at the Fed. The housing boom (along with its collateral effects on things like consumer spending) was precisely what drove the subsequent recovery and alleviated those concerns. And even with the tremendous stimulus of the housing boom, that recovery barely reached full employment and stopped far short of a macroeconomic boom. Surely, without the housing boom, the US economy would have remained weak, and we would have ended up in much the same situation we are in today.

I would challenge those who believe there was a housing bubble (which is, today, nearly everyone) to come up with a coherent and believable scenario in which those supposed bubble prices would have proven unjustified without either (1) bringing back the macroeconomic weakness and disequilibrium from which the housing boom originally extracted us or (2) being replaced by a “bubble” in something else. I submit that the term “bubble” is inappropriate. What we had were the makings of an equilibrium that involved very high asset prices (and low subsequent asset returns), the only equilibrium that would have allowed saving and investment to equate at a level high enough to avoid foregoing potential aggregate income. Perhaps, in 2006, housing prices were a little bit overvalued relative to that equilibrium, while some other asset prices were a little bit undervalued; but in general, very high asset prices were a critical feature.

In any case we are far away from that equilibrium today. Asset prices are far too low to bring us anywhere near full employment. Relative to that “classical” equilibrium, asset prices are far below where they should be, and prospective asset returns are far above where they should be. That’s not to say that prospective returns are necessarily high in historical terms: in the classical equilibrium, when a lot of people (and nations and institutions) are trying to save, they bid down the returns that can be earned on those savings. And that’s just the thing: we need to get to the point where houses (and stocks and bonds and everything else that people hold for the future) are very expensive, not because prices are expected to keep rising forever but because people realize that low returns are the best deal they’re going to get. Along the way to that equilibrium, though, asset prices will have to rise. Unfortunately, current policies do not appear to be moving us in that direction – at least not very quickly.



DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

What Will Happen If the Fed Stops Paying Interest on Reserves?

1. Banks will try, ultimately unsuccessfully, to get rid of their reserves by exchanging them for T-bills and other safe, liquid, short-maturity assets. Collectively, they will be unsuccessful because the previous owners of those assets will deposit the proceeds back in banks, leaving them with the same level of reserves. Some of the reserves that were previously excess reserves will now be required reserves, given the higher level of deposits. Most, however, will probably still be excess reserves, as banks will continue this process only until it has driven down the yields on T-bills and similar assets to the point where those assets are no more attractive than zero-interest reserves.
   
   
2. As a result, the yield on short-term T-bills (currently about 14 basis points for the 3-month bill) will go down to zero (approximately), and returns on similar assets (longer-term T-bills, top-grade commercial paper, repos, etc.) will go down to near zero. But no yields will drop by as much as 25 basis points (because none of those assets are perfect substitutes for reserves), and most will drop by considerably less.
   
   
3. As a further result, yields on nearly all assets will drop very slightly, depending on how closely they substitute for reserves and how long the zero interest rate on reserves is expected to be in effect (and to what extent it was already anticipated as a possibility).
   
   
4. Banks will make a few more loans. Loans are a high-return, high-risk asset, while reserves are a low-risk, low-return asset. They are not close substitutes at all, but they aren’t completely irrelevant, so banks will slightly lower the interest rates on loans (by less than 25 basis points) and probably slightly ease their credit standards and pursue lending business slightly more aggressively. Banks may also be willing to make more loans because they have more assets (due to deposits by those who sold them the T-bills and such), but this effect is also not likely to be large, since Banks’ primary constraint today is capital rather than liquidity.
   
   
5. Banks will stop borrowing from GSE’s in the federal funds market, since they will no longer be able to arbitrage with the interest on reserves.
   
   
6. As a result, the federal funds market will essentially disappear. Since banks are seldom, if ever, short of reserves in today’s environment, there will not be any reason for them to borrow.
   
   
7. Also, GSE’s will instead purchase T-bills and similar assets, thereby contributing to the already noted small declines in yields.
   
   
8. Because yields will now be far too low to cover their expenses, most money market funds will go out of business, and the few remaining will need to be subsidized heavily by their management companies (essentially operating the funds either as a courtesy to customers who use their other products or for the purpose of keeping the infrastructure and/or reputation alive so that it will be available at some future date when the funds are once again able to generate enough income to pay expenses). As implied by the first point in this list, banks will have taken over the role of money market funds. (Technically, this will amount to an increase in M-1, with little change in M-2. If there are still any M-1 fixated monetarists out there, they’ll get very excited.)
   
   
9. With a much larger deposit base than they need, banks will stop encouraging customers to make deposits. Fees will go up. New fees will be introduced. The quality of customer service will go down. Nonessential features will be eliminated. Banks will no longer try to make it easy to open an account. Large depositors will no longer receive any special treatment.
   
   
10. As a result, customers will, on average, hold a bit more of their cash in the form of currency rather than bank deposits. Marginal bank customers won’t bother to open accounts; customers who do have accounts will do fewer transactions; etc. (This implies an increase in the monetary base, assuming that the Fed accommodates the additional demand for currency. But note that this is not an economic stimulus, because it is demand-driven. The Fed will increase the supply of currency only enough to meet the increased demand, so there will be no change in the “value” of currency.)
    
    
11. Bank customers will also participate in the declines in yields described in the third point on this list. As bank accounts will be less convenient and more costly, while money market funds will be largely gone, customers will branch out into using other assets (such as short-term bond funds) for transactions.
    
    
12. Any number of other things will happen, which I haven’t thought of yet, and many of which nobody has thought of. Some will be good; some will be bad; many will be disruptive.
    
    
13. The Fed’s profits will go up slightly (and therefore the federal deficit will go down slightly), since it will no longer be paying the interest on reserves.
    

All in all, we get a mild economic stimulus at the price of some substantial disruptions to the financial system. On my list of priorities, when the two are in conflict, the convenience of a smoothly functioning financial system comes far below the need to create jobs and resist deflation, so if eliminating interest on reserves were the only monetary stimulus option on the table, I would support it. But it’s not the only option. Perhaps if the money the Fed saves from not paying interest on reserves were to be devoted to a well-targeted fiscal stimulus, this option would be more attractive. But that isn’t likely to happen. I won’t say I’m against eliminating interest on reserves, but I’m not particularly in favor of it. Better to do more asset purchases. Much better (in conjunction with asset purchases as necessary) to announce retroactively extrapolated nominal GDP or price level targets. But is any of this going to happen?


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

Inflation Targeting When the Natural Interest Rate is Negative

Over a century ago, in a theory that is still influential today, Swedish economist Knut Wicksell argued that, at any particular time, there is a certain “natural rate of interest” that is consistent with price stability. If the actual rate of interest falls below the natural rate, there is an incentive for entrepreneurs to borrow aggressively and demand more goods and more labor, driving prices up. If the actual rate rises above the natural rate, the incentive to borrow disappears, leading entrepreneurs to demand less goods and labor, driving prices down. Since the opportunities available to entrepreneurs are always changing, the natural rate is always changing, sometimes rising dramatically and at other times falling dramatically. Thus Wicksell argued that, relative to the natural rate, “the interest on money is, in reality, very often low when it seems to be high, and high when it seems to be low.”

As applied to the world we live in today, Wicksell’s original theory has several shortcomings, all widely recognized now. First, it doesn’t account for stickiness in wages and prices: as we observe, the short-run effect of a drop in demand is not so much a fall in wages and prices as a fall in employment. Second, it doesn’t account for the role of expectations in determining the price level and thus, the possibility of “inertial” inflation: it is now generally understood that (under a fiat money regime) a steadily rising price level, rather than a necessarily constant price level, is consistent with the equilibrium “natural” interest rate that Wicksell hypothesized. Third, it doesn’t fully account for the role of inflation expectations in defining the “real” interest rate: for example, a 2% nominal interest rate when prices are expected to be constant is equivalent to a 4% nominal interest rate when prices are expected to rise at a 2% rate. Finally, as I discuss below, it doesn’t account for the role of risk aversion in determining the behavior of entrepreneurs and those who finance them.

Wicksell argued that the natural interest rate was determined by the rate of return on capital. But in practice, the rate of return on capital is never known exactly in advance. Entrepreneurs require a compensation for the risk involved, and lenders (and buyers of stock and other forms of financing) require a compensation for the risk involved in financing them. As a result, particularly in times which are uncertain and when people are particularly risk-averse, there can be a very large wedge between the natural “risk-free” rate of interest and the rate of return on capital. One consequence of having such a large wedge is that, even if the return on capital is necessarily expected to be positive, the natural interest rate can be negative.

When the natural interest rate is negative, since it’s impossible to cut nominal interest rates much below zero, the only way to get back to normal is to create an expectation of inflation. If the nominal interest rate is zero and the inflation rate is positive, then the real interest rate is negative; thus it is possible, with a sufficient amount of expected inflation, to set the real interest rate down to the negative natural rate. But how can that inflation be achieved? Wicksell argues that prices rise when the actual interest rate falls below the natural rate, but in order for that to happen, prices must already be expected to rise. Can a central bank pull itself up by its own bootstraps?

The answer is almost certainly yes, since nearly everyone agrees that a sufficiently reckless central bank will always be able to produce a high inflation rate. (Imagine the Fed buying up the entire national debt, along with all the private sector’s offerings of commercial paper, mortgages, corporate bonds, and so on. Eventually, there will be inflation.) The problem is that it is hard to estimate in advance how aggressive monetary policy needs to be in order to produce the needed expectation of inflation. Not only doesn’t the central bank know what actions would produce a given “happy medium” target between too-low and too-high inflation expectations; it never really even knows what the natural interest rate is, so it doesn’t know how much inflation would be enough to get the real rate down to the natural rate.

If the central bank estimates wrong and overshoots, it risks a period of very high, and unnecessarily high, inflation. If (as seems infinitely more likely to me) it estimates wrong and undershoots, it risks reducing its credibility, so that it becomes more difficult, subsequently, to achieve the necessary inflation rate. (Note BTW that if you take the Mankiw Rule as an estimate of the natural interest rate, then the Fed’s current 2% inflation target is not high enough: the Fed is on a course to fail and thereby reduce its subsequent credibility.)

The solution is to aim not for an inflation rate but for a price level (or, as I suggested in my previous post, a level of nominal GDP). A series of price level targets that rises over time, but that does not get revised when the central bank undershoots or overshoots, allows for policy that automatically becomes more aggressive (or less aggressive) as necessary. If the central bank undershoots the first price level target, the second target is still in place, and this means it must aim for a higher inflation rate. If it undershoots the second target, the third is still in place, and it must aim for yet a higher inflation rate. And so on. Eventually, it will (automatically) find the inflation rate that works.


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

Nominal GDP Targeting: the 24-7 Solution

Though I’m skeptical of some of his specific proposals, Scott Sumner has convinced me that nominal GDP targeting is the way to go. I’d like to propose the following law:

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System shall conduct monetary policy in such a way as to increase the nominal gross domestic product to approximately $24 trillion in the year 2017.

I choose 2017 because it’s 10 years after the end of the last growth cycle, and I choose $24 trillion based on an approximate extrapolation of the growth rate from 1997 to 2007. (You get why I like the numbers 7 and 24, right?) This is essentially a retroactive 10-year plan for monetary policy, but it leaves all the details up to the Fed.

I’m proposing this as a law to be passed by Congress, because it’s a little bit easier for me to imagine Congress passing such a law than the Fed making such a radical change on its own. Moreover, it would have more credibility if it were written into law rather than merely an announced policy of the Fed. It does take away a little bit of the Fed’s independence, but, as Dr. Phil might say, “How’s that independent central bank thing workin’ out for ya?” It fully retains the Fed’s operational independence, and it mandates an objective based on what the Fed was already achieving over the 10 years up to 2007 (and very roughly for the prior 10 years as well).

The law would need some sort of enforcement provisions, too, but these need not constrain any specific Fed actions. The Chairman would simply have to explain to Congress, on a regular basis, how the Fed plans to get from here to there. If the plan misses in the early years, it obviously has to become more aggressive in the later years – which is the whole point: the worse things get, the more dangerous it should become for banks, businesses, and individuals to keep sitting on cash instead of investing it. (If you want to give the Fed governors a bonus based on how close they come to the target, I’m down with that, too.)

After 2017, the Fed would be free to go back to its discretion in setting long-range policy goals. But it will have an incentive to continue nominal GDP targeting. It may even ask Congress to pass another law. What incentive? To make up for the abysmal performance of 2008-2010, the 2017 goal will almost certainly require the Fed to allow an inflation rate greater than 2% – possibly much greater than 2% – as 2017 approaches. The Fed will then need a credible way to bring the inflation rate back down. What could be more credible than a promise to continue the nominal GDP pattern of the past 20 years? (Remember, the $24 trillion goal for 2017 was based on an extrapolation of the 1997-2007 trend..)

I would hope that the Fed would then elect to continue with nominal GDP targeting. In the longer run, it’s a policy that solves the problem I discussed when I wrote about inflation targets and financial crises. A financial crisis will (if history is any guide) reduce expectations of real growth. If the Fed is targeting nominal GDP, then inflation expectations should automatically increase when real growth expectations decline. This automatically gives the Fed more room to cut the real interest rate so as to clean up the economic fallout from the financial crisis. And nominal GDP targets should also help prevent such crises by reining in real growth that is driven by speculation rather than actual improvements in productivity. In such cases, inflation may not accelerate, but nominal GDP will, and this will automatically lead to an expectation of Fed tightening. Aside from the arbitrary connection with the numbers 24 and 7, nominal GDP targeting is a 24-7 solution in the sense that it reliably provides help in a variety of circumstances.

I’m hoping my law will receive bipartisan – or even tetrapartisan – support. Progressives can see it as a way to make up for the inadequacy of fiscal policy initiatives. Mainstream Democrats can see it as way to consolidate the gains of fiscal policy. Republicans can see it as an acknowledgment that Democratic fiscal policy initiatives were the wrong solution in the first place. And Tea Partiers can see it as a way to get the Fed out of the business of micromanaging the economy. I don’t really care how you sell it; it’s just a good idea. And since all but about 535 of the members of Congress read my blog...

Yes, I’m hoping that Congress will pick up ideas like this from people like Scott Sumner and me, but I’m not expecting it. I’m still long the bond market in my personal accounts. For the sake of the country, though, I’m begging Congress and the Fed. Take my capital gains. Please.


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

Stop Worrying About Structural Unemployment

The economic blogosphere has suddenly become very concerned about the possibility that structural unemployment – resulting from a mismatch between the needs of employers and the capabilities of available job-seekers – has increased in the US. Paul Krugman is worried; Brad Delong is convinced; it’s obvious to Tyler Cowen; The Economist presents a variety of opinions; and any number of other bloggers and fora have been discussing the topic.

One major source of this newfound concern is a post by Dave Altig of the Atlanta Fed, who has detected a shift in the relationship between job openings and unemployment – the Beveridge curve. While the shift is unmistakable in his chart (see below), I have looked more closely at the data, and I have come to the conclusion that it does not represent a major increase in structural unemployment. Rather, I believe it represents the normal dynamics of the business cycle in the context of an incipient recovery from a historically severe recession that, in some ways, has not quite ended.

First, let’s get a clear idea of what’s going on in the chart:


Consistent with a common practice by people (including me) who plot economic data, Dave Altig has drawn a linear regression line to represent the general relationship between job openings and unemployment. But we should not therefore assume that the true relationship is a linear one. If you ignore the regression line, you can see a distinctly curved pattern to the points. We should expect a curved pattern: a strictly linear relationship wouldn’t make sense, because it would mean that, if there were enough job openings, unemployment could go below zero, and if there were enough unemployment, job openings could go below zero. In practice, when one of the series gets very low, it becomes less responsive to the other series. Thus the pattern in 2009, where the unemployment rate keeps rising while job openings become nearly flat at a very low level, is exactly what one might expect. It’s certainly what I expected, having plotted curves like this before.

But the point labeled “2010 Q2” breaks the pattern. It appears that we’ve suddenly moved off the old Beveridge curve onto a new one that has yet to be traced and that promises to associate a significantly greater amount of unemployment with any given number of job openings. But have we, really?

To answer this question, we need to think about how job openings (as well as other factors) affect the number of unemployed workers. Take a look at the actual numbers: in 2010 Q2 there were about 15 million unemployed workers and just over 3 million job openings. If all 3 million job openings were filled, it would (other things equal) reduce unemployment to about 12 million. But if you were to plot that hypothetical point on the chart, it would still be above the old Beveridge curve. So even with what seems a rather optimistic assumption about the matching process, it was inevitable, given the appearance of a comparatively large number of job openings in Q2, that they produced a point that was off the old curve. That result has nothing to do with structural unemployment; it’s just because there are many more available workers than openings.

My assumption is not really as optimistic as it seems, though, because in fact job openings fill very quickly. The May (most recent) JOLTS report, for example, shows 3.2 million job openings but 4.5 million new hires – which implies that the average job opening gets filled in less than a month. What about all those employers complaining that they can’t find people with the right qualifications? Apparently they are a minority – or else they end up settling.

If we’re looking for evidence of an increase in structural unemployment, we need to compare the rate at which openings fill today to the rate at which they filled in the past. When was the last time that there were this many job openings? In November 2008, there were 3.2 million openings but only 4.1 million hires. So job openings are filling faster now than then. You might expect them to fill faster, since there are more unemployed people with whom to fill them (15 million vs. 11 million). Indeed, the fact that they fill only a little bit faster could be taken as evidence that some of the additional unemployment is structural. But these data don’t support the idea that there has been a dramatic shift, that the pool of the unemployed is a significantly worse match for the available job opportunities than it was a few years ago. To find a point where actual hiring was happening as quickly as it is today, you have to go back to August 2008, before the fall of Lehman, when there were 3.7 million job openings.

So if 4.5 million people (equivalent to 30% of the unemployed) find jobs in a given month, how come so many people are still unemployed? Because people are losing jobs almost as quickly. That’s what I meant when I said that the recession, in some ways, has not quite ended. While the average rate of job losses during the recent recession was not particularly severe, those job losses continued for a long time (as it was a long recession) and pushed more and more people into unemployment, while there was an unusual lack of new jobs to get them out of unemployment. The new jobs are finally starting to appear, but the job losses are continuing. When I declared last year that “job losses are not the problem,” it hadn’t occurred to me how long the job losses might last. By the standards of a recovery, job losses are the problem today.

Well, part of the problem. Notice that even after the recent jump, there are fewer job openings than there were at any time during the 2001 recession, and only about as many as there were at the depth of the 2003 “job recession” that lingered after the official recession had ended. Whether you measure in terms of job losses or job openings, the job market is still depressed. There’s plenty of reason to expect persistent cyclical unemployment. Structural unemployment, not so much.


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management.

The Opposite of Monetization

One objection to the Fed’s erstwhile policy of purchasing longer maturity Treasury securities was that the Fed was “monetizing the debt.” I find this objection odd. The Fed had set a near-zero target for the federal funds rate, and it was already committed, if necessary, to maintain this target by purchasing an indefinite quantity of Treasury bills. In practice it hasn’t had to do many such purchases, because there are plenty of private sector buyers willing to “monetize the debt” on their own, and when the Fed purchases other assets, the sellers of those assets go ahead and buy T-bills with the proceeds. But generally, open market operations – consisting primarily of purchases and sales of T-bills – are the normal method by which the Fed enforces its interest rate policy, and accordingly, “monetization” of some sort is inherent in the zero interest rate policy that was already in place when the Fed began its longer-maturity Treasury purchases (and that remains in place today).

It will be objected that T-bill purchases – even if they were actually happening – are temporary. T-bills mature quickly, and if the Fed buys T-bills today, it is not obliging itself to roll over those purchases when the bills mature. Thus it is only temporarily monetizing the debt, for such a short period of time that it hardly matters. By contrast, when the Fed purchases longer maturity Treasuries, it is paying for government expenditures without requiring to Treasury to repay any time soon.

But this view is deceptive. Assuming that the Fed maintains its resolve to prevent the inflation rate from rising significantly above 2%, and assuming that the economy does recover before the aforementioned securities mature (because otherwise the question is moot anyhow), the Treasury will have to repay the money. How will it have to repay the money, if the securities are still outstanding? Since the Fed’s profits go into the Treasury, any reduction in the Fed’s profits is equivalent to a payment by the Treasury. And if the economy does recover, the Fed will, to prevent that recovery from overheating, either raise the interest rate it pays on excess reserves or liquidate the Treasury securities at a loss. Either way, its profits go down, and the Treasury loses, just as if the Treasury had had to repay the money directly.

The real issue is whether the Fed will be tempted to abandon its inflation target. So let’s imagine the Fed, say, 5 years from now, under two different scenarios where the Fed faces a dramatic increase in the velocity of money and has to choose whether to allow inflation. In the first scenario, the Fed’s portfolio is full of long-term Treasury bonds. In the second, it’s full of short-term bills. Under which scenario will the Fed be tempted to allow inflation?

Under the first scenario, the Fed would have to choose whether to liquidate its Treasury bonds at a loss. If the Fed were simple-minded, it would be tempted to avoid the loss by holding on to the bonds and allowing the economy to overheat. But the Fed isn’t so simple-minded: Fed officials will be well aware of the effect that inflation would have on the value of their bond portfolio. If they don’t liquidate, they will face the same decision a year later under worse conditions. And if they don’t liquidate then, they will face the same decision a year after that under yet worse conditions. In all likelihood, they will follow the logic through to its conclusion and realize that they have little choice: holding the bonds to maturity is not really an option (unless they want to risk hyperinflation, which we can presume they won’t), and the best alternative is to liquidate the bonds before inflation becomes an issue, because waiting would only increase their losses. So a Fed with a portfolio of long-term bonds is not one that is likely to tolerate inflation.

Now look at the other scenario. With a portfolio of short-term Treasury bills, the Fed faces the decision whether to allow the economy to overheat and produce inflation. There are no losses to worry about, so you might think the decision would be easy: just sell some of the T-bills, contract the money supply, and avoid inflation. But there’s another consideration. If the Fed didn’t buy bonds in the first place, then those bonds remained in the hands of the public. This means the government will have to repay those bonds, which means that it may have to raise taxes or cut public services. Inflation is one form of tax, and when the public debt is large, inflation is a tax that can generate considerable revenue while arguably producing only a minimal amount of distortion in the economy. With no losses of its own to worry about, the Fed may quite rationally decide that an inflation tax is better than the alternatives. So, if anything, the temptation to allow inflation is higher when the Fed’s portfolio doesn’t include long-term bonds.

In terms of its likely implications for future inflation, buying longer-term Treasury securities is not monetization; it is the very opposite of monetization. This conclusion is actually a little bit disturbing, because it means that asset purchases by the Fed may have just the wrong effect on the real interest rate. Rational markets will anticipate less, not more, inflation when the Fed purchases long-term bonds, and this will only serve to make real investment less attractive – just the opposite of the intended effect. On the other hand, Fed bond purchases would have a direct effect on the real interest rate by reducing the available supply of bonds, and my guess is that this effect would outweigh any adverse effect via inflation expectations.

In any case, the implications for bond investors are unambiguous: Fed asset purchases are good for you. Some caveats are needed, though. The likelihood of additional asset purchases (if you believe there is such a likelihood) does not necessarily imply a buying opportunity, since the rest of the market may also be anticipating it. And one has to take into account a couple of important risks. The Fed could come to its senses and announce higher inflation targets, which would clearly be bad for bond investors (at least at a certain horizon, though the dynamics could be complicated). And Fed asset purchases (indeed, even those that have already taken place) may end up having the intended effect by getting a more solid recovery going. The big risk is that things will go back to normal.


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management.

The Phillips Curve Today: Beware the White Swan

The theory, at its core, is pretty straightforward: businesses compete with one another, and they’re constantly looking for ways to cut costs so they can increase – or maintain – their market share. The bulk of their costs are labor costs – wages and benefits. When the unemployment rate is low, it’s hard to reduce labor costs. Businesses are constantly finding ways to make workers more productive, but during good times, those increases in productivity are eaten up by increases in wages and benefits, which are necessary to retain workers who face relatively abundant alternative opportunities and relatively little competition. When the unemployment rate is high, businesses continue to compete by increasing productivity, but they can also compete by keeping wages down. Under those circumstances, they undercut one another’s prices, and the general price level tends downward.

It gets more complicated, of course. The largest complication is that businesses have relationships – and often contracts – with both customers and employees, and unanticipated changes in prices and wages can disturb those relationships. Consequently, businesses anticipate changes in prices, wages, and market conditions, and they set their own prices accordingly, in the hope of minimizing future surprises. As a result, inflation tends to have momentum. If prices have been rising by 2 percent per year, businesses anticipate that price growth, and the actual inflation rate – under idealized “normal” conditions – comes out close to 2 percent per year. But if the unemployment rate is very low, competition for workers forces businesses to raise prices more quickly, and the inflation rate rises. And if the unemployment rate is very high, competition for customers forces business to raise prices more slowly, and the inflation rate falls.

So much for the theory. I could add a lot more complications – the supply and demand for money, the difference between flexible and sticky prices, the impact of different degrees of competition, the various ways businesses might form expectations about prices, the relationship between unemployment and job vacancies, the possibility of structural changes in the economy over time, and so on – but let’s just stop here and take a look at the evidence in its simplest form. (To produce the chart below, I first took the rate of change in the core CPI from December to December for each year. Then I subtracted the previous year’s rate of change from the current year’s rate of change, for each year in the sample, and I plotted the result against the average unemployment rate for the current year. The core CPI series starts in 1957, so the first observation for which I could compute the change in the inflation rate is 1959. All the underlying data are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)



The correlation isn’t perfect – and we wouldn’t expect it to be, since there are other factors that affect the inflation rate in the short run. But it’s strong enough to be quite statistically significant.

And under today’s circumstances, it’s strong enough to be disturbing. The core inflation rate for 2009 was 1.8 percent. If you take the regression line at face value and plug in an average unemployment rate of 9.6 percent – a little toward the low end of what most economists expect for the year – it implies a 1.8 percentage point decline in the core inflation rate. And if you look at the actual data for January through April 2010, we are right on target for a zero percent core inflation rate. I probably don’t have to point out that the unemployment rate will almost certainly still be quite high in 2011, and it won’t be low in 2012.

The May CPI comes out tomorrow morning. It’s expected to show a very slight increase in core consumer prices. If it does show only a very slight increase, or no increase at all, how many will report that “inflation is still under control” and describe it as good news? If you’re worried about the black swan of inflation, I guess it is good news each month that the black swan doesn’t appear. But under today’s circumstances, the white swan – the common species that past experience would lead us to expect – is deflation.



DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management.

Second Dip?

As you might surmise from the conclusion of my previous post, I have been worried about the possibility of a second dip, a new recession beginning sometime in the next year or so, before the current recovery has had a chance to produce much improvement. I was surprised to read (hat tip to Mark Thoma’s twitter feed) that Macroeconomic Advisors is suggesting that there is no chance of a second dip. (I was particularly surprised because MA’s own estimates of the growth impact of the waning fiscal stimulus were one of the reasons I was worried.) After reading their case for zero chance, I have to say that I am still worried. Verbally-intuitively, the case for a second dip still seems pretty overwhelming to me. I take comfort in the knowledge that I tend to have a pessimistic bias, and in the fact that sophisticated quantitative models are generally putting the odds of a second dip quite low. On the other hand, successfully forecasting recessions has not been a strong point of quantitative models.

Here is what I see as the case for and against a second dip. As you will see, I am more skeptical about the case against. Maybe someone can tell me what I have overlooked or how I am being too pessimistic.

The Case for a Second Dip

1. The Fed’s policy of quantitative easing, which was temporarily buttressing demand, is over, and its impact will likely decline over time, imparting a downward bias to growth in the coming quarters.
   
   
2. This fiscal stimulus, which was temporarily buttressing demand, has been largely exhausted and has likely reached its point of peak impact (even if additional fiscal measures are taken), so that its impact will be declining in the coming quarters, imparting a downward bias to growth.
   
   
3. Pent-up demand from consumers (many of whom were worried about the losing their jobs last year but no longer are) has been largely exhausted, and its impact will likely decline over time, imparting a downward bias to growth in the coming quarters.
   
   
4. The process of inventory adjustment has run its course, and firms have been able to increase production again to maintain inventories at the new, lower level and to begin slightly increasing inventories in anticipation of a recovery. Significant increases in production are no longer necessary to maintain inventories, so that an upward bias that has been imparted to growth in recent quarters will no longer be present in future quarters.
   
   
5. With the dollar relatively strong again and the pace of world recovery expected to slow, export growth, which had offered the possibility of a robust recovery, no longer seems to offer that possibility.
   
   
6. Normally, the surge in productivity at the beginning of a recovery is followed by a surge in employment. They typical lag is about two quarters. Last year’s surge in productivity took place over the last three quarters of the year, which suggests that a surge in employment should have taken place beginning in the last quarter of last year and continuing through the current quarter. Aside from temporary census employment, the anticipated surge does not appear to be taking place. Meanwhile, productivity growth has settled back into the normal range, which dampens hope for a future surge in employment.
   
   
7. The Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2010, creating an incentive for high-income individuals (and their corporate agents) to shift income out of 2011 into 2010. To the extent that they are successful in doing so, and to the extent that the shifted income is associated with actual economic activity taking place during the period in which it is declared, we should expect a downward bias to growth between 2010 and 2011. (This point comes from a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Arthur Laffer, to which a colleague referred me. People who know my work well know that I have had my quarrels with Arthur Laffer in the past, but in this case, I don’t see any fundamental flaw in his argument.)
   
   
8. Given all these negatives, there is no evidence of any positive stimulus to growth that would offset them. The financial panic of late 2008 subsided long ago, and the residual financial weakness is lifting very slowly, with no suggestion that the pace of improvement will accelerate, especially in the light of potential fallout from financial difficulties in Europe. With capital ratios still an issue, the current regulatory environment is not conducive to rapid increases in bank lending.
   

The Case Against a Second Dip

1. In the years since the Great Depression, there is no precedent for a long recession (longer than 8 months, in this case about 18 months) followed by a short recovery (shorter than 35 months). The two closest “double dip” examples (both with first dips lasting 8 months or less) are 1980 – when the second dip was essentially intentional on the part of the Fed – and 1960 – when the economy had already made nearly a full recovery by the time the new dip happened. On the other hand, double dips appear to have been fairly common in the years before the Great Depression, so the validity of this piece of evidence depends on the premise that something (the fixed gold standard?) fundamentally changed in the 1930’s and has not since reverted.
   
   
2. Recessions seldom begin when the unemployment rate is already high. In particular, since the end of the Great Depression, we have not seen a recession begin with an unemployment rate greater than 7.5 percent. (Today it is 9.7 percent.) Having said that, though, I should note that the second dip of the Great Depression began with an unemployment rate of over 14 percent. (Presumably the reason this happened in the 1930’s is that fiscal and monetary policy were tightened, whereas in subsequent cycles fiscal and monetary policy have generally been loosened when the unemployment rate remained very high. Unfortunately, in the light of the first two points adduced in favor of a second dip, this contrast doesn’t bode well for the immediate future.)
   
   
3. Recessions are normally preceded by stock market declines of greater severity than what we have seen recently. (Of course, if your concern is whether to own stock, the fact that the stock market has not yet had a large decline isn’t much of a comfort.)
   
   
4. Credit spreads do not suggest a high risk of recession. (Again, if your concern is whether to own bonds, this is not much comfort. But perhaps the stock and bond markets should find each other’s lack of severe concern reassuring.)
   
   
5. The price of oil has been reasonably stable, not exhibiting the sort of spike that has helped induce most of the post-WWII recessions. (However, since the second dip, if it happens, is likely to have deflationary characteristics, we need to be concerned that any lack of strength in commodities such as oil could be in anticipation of a second dip.)
   
   
6. The yield curve (difference between long-term and short-term interest rates) is unusually steep. Recessions normally begin with a flat yield curve. Short-term interest rates normally fall during a recession, whereas a steep yield curve suggests rather that short-term rates are expected to rise. However, as Paul Krugman points out, this usual interpretation doesn’t apply now. If there is a second dip, short-term rates will not fall, because there is nowhere down for them to go. Under these circumstances, the steep yield curve likely only indicates the possibility of a rise in short-term rates (without the offsetting possibility of a fall), not the likelihood of a rise. In fact, it could be argued that the steep yield curve is reason to worry more about a second dip: in linear models, a false signal from the unusually steep yield curve could easily outweigh other indicators that are showing valid, but less intense, signs of trouble. (For example, the stock market hasn’t declined dramatically, but it has declined. Should we be worried? Ordinarily, with such a steep yield curve, the answer would be an unambiguous “no.” Today, we’re likely to hear that “no” from linear models, but it could well be based on a single indicator giving a flawed signal.)
   

It’s possible that the case for a second dip is basically right but that we still don’t technically get one. With normal productivity growth and population growth, we could have a severe slowdown, involving maybe one quarter of negative growth, or two quarters of very slightly negative growth, or three quarters of very slightly positive growth, and it might not qualify as a recession. Obviously, it would still suck.

What worries me particularly is that, even if the case for a second dip is completely wrong, the employment picture going forward is still dismal, and there is still a case for deflation. Am I wrong in understanding that this is standard textbook macroeconomics? There is a non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). When the actual unemployment rate is above the NAIRU, the inflation rate declines. The further the unemployment rate is above the NAIRU, the more quickly the inflation rate declines. The unemployment rate is currently 9.7% and is not expected to fall rapidly, even under optimistic scenarios. Recent estimates put the NAIRU at about 5%. The current core CPI inflation rate is about 1%. You do the math.



FOOTNOTE: Well, OK, technically you can’t do the math, since I didn’t give you a Phillips curve coefficient. From what I can tell, Phillips curve coefficients are all over the map these days, with some people arguing that the coefficient is zero as long as monetary policy is credible. (But is monetary policy really credible?) At the other end of the spectrum, coefficients with magnitude as high as 0.5 (implying a half percentage point decline in the inflation rate each year for every percentage point that the unemployment rate is above the NAIRU) seem to be well within the mainstream. I recommend against doing the math with that coefficient if you have a heart condition.


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management.