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.

The Mankiw Rule with Quantitative Easing: Why is the Fed So Tight?

In my last post, I suggested that the Fed – at least if it behaves in a reasonable manner consistent with its past practices – is not likely to raise its federal funds rate target any time soon. I argued that the Mankiw Rule (a.k.a. Greg Mankiw’s version of the Taylor Rule) has done a good job of tracking Fed policy in the Greenspan-Bernanke era and that it has now fallen well into negative territory, out of which it will take some time to climb. Some commenters pointed out that, while the Fed obviously can’t make interest rates go negative, it did continue to loosen during the period of zero interest rates, by means of “quantitative easing” or “credit easing” – attempting to pull down the level of riskier or higher maturity interest rates by acquiring unconventional assets. I don’t think this observation really affects the main point of my previous post, but it it’s interesting to take a closer look.

So I tried to come up with a simple measure of monetary policy stance that incorporates both the federal funds rate and quantitative easing. My first thought was to look at the growth of unconventional assets on the Fed’s balance sheet, but as it turns out, it’s not really necessary to specify “unconventional” assets, since the Fed had already reduced holdings of its conventional asset – Treasury bills – to near zero by the time Lehman Brothers failed. We can therefore measure the subsequent quantitative easing as an unusually rapid growth in the Fed’s total assets – or equivalently total liabilities, which is to say, the monetary base. To get a composite measure, we need to somehow graft a measure of this monetary base growth onto the federal funds rate. The simplest way is to subtract the monetary base growth rate from the federal funds rate. Here I have chosen to use the average monthly growth rate over 12 months, because it was a simple specification that gave vaguely reasonable results. Those results are summarized in the chart below.



If you take this chart at face value, it looks like the Fed initially far overshot the level of easing prescribed by the Mankiw Rule, but remember that my choice of equivalence between interest rate percentage points and monthly growth rate percentage points was arbitrary. I could have used a weekly growth rate, and the picture would look quite different. Moreover, I could have used a 3-month or 6-month average instead of 12 months, though I think such choices would only have made the picture look even more strange. The one conclusion that is robust to reasonable changes in specification is that the composite measure is now moving close to zero again, even as the Mankiw Rule interest rate remains well below negative 3 percent. (It will likely rise slightly above negative 4 percent based on the May data, but I’m waiting for the CPI report before I update.) Quantitative easing is over, but the economic conditions that justified it are still with us – at least if we measure retrospectively.

Basically, once we recognize that quantitative easing is an option – and one that is no longer being pursued – we can draw the conclusion that the Fed is much tighter today than what the Mankiw Rule would suggest. Indeed, relative to the Mankiw Rule, the Fed is much tighter than at any time during the Greenspan-Bernanke years. Since 1957, when the core CPI data series begins, there have only been two times when the Fed was as tight as it is today relative to the Mankiw Rule. One was in 1973, when the effect of Nixon’s price controls was artificially reducing the retrospective inflation rate used in the Mankiw Rule. The other was during the early 1980’s, when the Fed was targeting monetary aggregates rather than interest rates and attempting (with great success) to reduce the inflation rate dramatically.

So why is the Fed so tight? Here are some possibilities:

1. Fed policy is better described by a rule that is non-linear in unemployment. With the unemployment rate so tremendously high, perhaps marginal increases in the unemployment rate affect the Fed less than they would if the rate were closer to normal. But given the Fed’s mandate to pursue high employment, wouldn’t the need for more aggressive monetary policy in response to higher unemployment rates be even more acute when the employment situation is already so obviously out of whack? And wouldn’t the unusually high unemployment rate, in and of itself, tend to eliminate the risk of pushing the unemployment rate too low and thereby free the Fed to pursue more aggressive policies than it otherwise would?
   
   
2. The Fed is anticipating dramatic declines in the unemployment rate and/or increases in the inflation rate. Except that we don’t see those in the Fed’s forecasts.
   
   
3. The Fed is correcting for its earlier overshoot, for being too loose in 2009. Except we’re not seeing much evidence that the overshoot (if there was one) needs to be corrected. There is no economic boom. The inflation rate has continued to fall. If the Fed did overshoot on the ease side, recent economic data suggest that, in retrospect, the overshoot was a good idea and not one that should be corrected by a reversal in subsequent policy.
   
   
4. The Fed is passing the buck to fiscal policy. But fiscal policy is tightening too now, in relative terms. It doesn’t seem likely that the Fed is irresponsible enough to base its policy on hypothetical fiscal policies that aren’t actually happening.
   
   
5. The Fed has “abandoned the Mankiw rule” and is now setting its policy stance according to very different criteria than it has used over the past 23 years. But is there any evidence that Ben Bernanke has had some sort of conversion experience? And is there any reason why the Fed would be interpreting its mandate differently than it has in the past?
   
   
6. The Fed has dramatically altered the parameters of its “Taylor Rule.” But why?
   
   
7. The Fed is uncomfortable with quantitative easing and would like to minimize its use and reverse it as soon as possible, irrespective of Taylor Rule considerations. I think we have a winner. The long term effects of quantitative easing are uncertain and could be seen as potentially dangerous. (What will happen if, at some point in the future, the Fed has to choose between liquidating its unconventional assets at a loss, exacerbating an inflationary environment, or raising interest rates high enough to risk a fiscal crisis?) So there is arguably reason for the Fed to be uncomfortable with it. But the implications are disturbing, if you believe in a Philips curve or anything like it. Faced with an excessively high unemployment rate and an excessively low inflation rate, the Fed is choosing to risk exacerbating the situation (i.e., to take the intermediate-term risk of deflation) rather than to risk a very different type of difficult situation in the distant future. Maybe it’s the right decision, but it’s an awfully scary one.
   

Here’s one way to think about the situation. Fed policy typically affects output and employment with a lag of less than a year. Over the past year, the Fed has tightened dramatically. The super-duper-easy aggressive quantitative easing policy of 2009 (especially early 2009) has given the US economy enough monetary fuel to get it almost to an employment growth rate (exclusive of the Census) that could stabilize, but not significantly reduce, the unemployment rate. That policy is gone. In order to believe that the economy is going to strengthen from here, you have to believe either (1) that the lag associated with monetary policy is longer than usual or (2) that the underlying strength of the economy, holding monetary policy constant, has improved dramatically. Maybe one (or both) of those things is true. Or maybe not.






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.

US Monetary Policy in the 2010’s: The Mankiw Rule Today

To make a short story even shorter, the Mankiw Rule suggests that the Zero Interest Rate Policy will continue for quite some time, barring dramatic changes in the inflation and/or unemployment rates.

“The Mankiw Rule” is what I call Greg Mankiw’s version of the Taylor Rule. “Taylor Rule” is now the general term for a rule that sets a monetary policy interest rate (usually the federal funds rate in the US case) as a linear function of an inflation rate and a measure of economic slack. Such rules provide a simple way of either describing or prescribing monetary policy. Unfortunately, there are now many different versions of the Taylor Rule, which all lead to different conclusions. Not only are there many different measures of both slack and inflation; there are also an infinite number of possible coefficients that could be used to relate them to the policy interest rate. In fact, if you ask John Taylor today, he will advocate a very different set of coefficients than the ones he proposed in his original 1993 paper (pdf).

Parsimony suggests that a good Taylor rule should have 3 characteristics: it should be as simple as possible; it should use robust, easily defined, and well-known measures of slack and inflation; and it should fit reasonably well to past monetary policy. Also, to have credibility, such a rule should have “stood the test of time” to some extent: it should fit reasonably well to some subsequent monetary policy experience after it was first proposed. The Mankiw Rule has all these characteristics. It uses the unemployment rate and the core CPI inflation rate as its measures, and it applies the same coefficient to both. This setup leaves it with only two free parameters, which Greg set in a 2001 paper (pdf) so as to fit the results to actual 1990’s monetary policy. As you can see from the chart below, the rule fits subsequent monetary policy rather well, although policy has tended to be slightly more easy (until 2008) than the rule would imply.



You will notice a substantial divergence, however, after 2008, between the Mankiw Rule and the actual federal funds rate. If the reason for this divergence isn’t immediately clear, you need to take a closer look at the vertical axis. Extrapolating from pre-Lehman experience, this chart suggests that the Fed is still doing the best it can to approximate the Mankiw Rule. When banks lend money to one another in the federal funds market, lenders stubbornly refuse to pay for the privilege of lending, and this perversity does limit the Fed’s options.

If we wanted to make a guess as to when the Fed will (or should) raise its target for the federal funds rate, a reasonable guess would be “when the Mankiw Rule rate rises above zero.” When will that happen? (Will it ever happen?) Nobody knows, of course, but the algebra is straightforward as to what will need to happen to inflation and unemployment. If the core inflation rate remains near 1%, the unemployment rate will have to fall to 7%. If the core inflation rate rises to 2%, the unemployment rate will still have to fall to 8%. Do you expect either of these things to happen soon? I don’t.


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.

Inflation Targets and Financial Crises

There are basically four ways to deal with the possibility of severe financial crises. First, you can just cross your fingers, hope such crises don’t happen very often, and live with the consequences when they do. Second, you can publicly insure and regulate your economy heavily in an attempt to minimize the risk and severity of such crises. Third, you can have your central bank monitor the fragility of general financial conditions and “take away the punch bowl” when it thinks conditions are in danger of becoming too fragile. Fourth, you can have your central bank target an inflation rate that is high enough to give it a lot of room to respond to a crisis (or an incipient crisis) by cutting interest rates far below the inflation rate.

For most of the past 20 years, the first approach – supported by a liberal dose of optimism that was buttressed (in the US, anyhow) by the experience of several financial crises with only mild consequences – was in favor. It’s suddenly unpopular now that we have gone through a crisis with severe consequences.

The order of the day seems to be some combination of the second and third approaches. Congress wants to overhaul financial regulation, and the Fed is reconsidering its erstwhile rejection of the role of bubble-popper. I am by no means the world’s foremost opponent of government involvement in the economy, but I find myself rather uncomfortable with these approaches, for much the same reasons that such a minarchist might be.

Regulation is costly, and I am skeptical as to whether Congress is smart enough, or has the right motivation (or the right group dynamic), to produce a regulatory regime that will be successful in achieving the benefit (avoiding future severe financial crises) without imposing unduly large costs. Regulators are human, subject to blind spots, bouts of unwarranted optimism and pessimism, and the temptation to rationalize actions that benefit their own interests more than those of the public. Without denying that some aspects of our financial system have been under-regulated in recent years (particularly given the public’s direct financial interest via actual or implied insurance programs), I question whether regulatory reform will be a significant improvement. Some things that have been under-regulated will be regulated appropriately, no doubt, but some things that have been appropriately regulated will become over-regulated, and some things that have been under-regulated will remain so.

As to the punch bowl approach, my concerns are similar. Undoubtedly there have been times when the Fed – if it had seen that as part of its function – would have popped an incipient bubble and avoided a much larger pop in the future. But if the Fed considered itself to be in the bubble-popping business, it might well have popped some healthy expansions long before they began to pose severe systemic risk. In retrospect, we can all agree that the last phase of the 1990’s tech boom was “bubbly;” but overvaluation concerns were being raised long before it reached that phase. If Alan Greenspan had followed up immediately on his famous 1996 “irrational exuberance” remark by using monetary policy to beat down that exuberance, I dare say the cost to economic growth would not have merited the benefit to financial stability. And, as it happened, by the time things had gotten dangerously bubbly, a lot of his skepticism seemed to have disappeared. A bubble is mediated through the public consciousness and reaches its peak when normal skepticism has all but evaporated. Are central bankers somehow immune to that consciousness?

The only conservative approach to the possibility of financial crises – the only approach that minimizes the damage without relying on authorities to behave better or more presciently than they normally do behave – is the last of the four I mentioned: inflation. Of the four approaches, it’s probably the least popular right now, especially among those who consider themselves conservative. All alike, populists, traditionalists, and technocrats hold that inflation is bad, and that low inflation, once achieved (as it has been) is so precious that it must be not be risked, let alone intentionally tossed aside, for the sake of some imagined greater good. That attitude brings to my mind the perfectly cleaned and ordered living room in which nobody is allowed to sit, lest they mess it up again.

Low inflation does have its advantages, but economists have been hard pressed to come up with any big advantage. The typical economic argument would be that the disadvantages of low inflation are even smaller than the advantages. But in the light of recent experience, that argument no longer holds much water: the big disadvantage of a low inflation regime is that, by putting a floor on interest rates that is not far below the inflation rate, it ties the hands of monetary policy when responding to a severe financial crisis. Surely, to the 17 percent of the today’s broadly defined US labor force who are wishing vainly for full-time employment (not to mention the apparent majority of Americans with full-time jobs, who, according to polls, suddenly hate those jobs, probably because they’re being asked to do the additional work of those whom their employers can no longer afford to keep on payroll, or because they feel their own job security in jeopardy), that should seem rather a severe disadvantage!

Among the most well-informed of the most vocal advocates of a low-inflation regime, the advantage cited most vociferously is stability. Only by maintaining low inflation rates, we are told, can central banks instill confidence in their policies. Even just raise the unofficial target from 2% to 3%, and all Hell will break loose, because….well, if 3%, then why not 4%? and if 4%, why not 5%? and if 5%, why not 10%? and so on. It’s a variation on the old “slippery slope” argument: not that we would actually slide down such a slope (since most sophisticated economists wouldn’t want to be caught making a standard slippery slope argument), but that it would be hard to give credible assurances to the contrary. The idea, I think, is that unless you can maintain something that looks reasonably close to true price stability (0% inflation), nobody will know what to expect. (2% is apparently considered close enough to zero – essentially the highest you can go and still be “close enough” to zero – and some argue that, once we have fully accounted for quality improvements, changes in consumer choices, and other such distorting factors, a measured 2% is more-or-less the same as a true 0%.).

Some would also argue that, whatever the ideal might be, an expectation of 2% inflation (actually just above or just below, depending on which price index you use) is what we have, what has crystallized over the past 10-15 years, and that it is therefore the only inflation rate about which we can have stable expectations going forward. It’s much easier to have confidence in a well-established existing regime than in a new regime that has only just been announced. Of course, this argument relies on the premise that markets do in fact still have confidence in the 2% regime – a premise for which supporters present as evidence the average results of long-range inflation expectation surveys. I do not find such averages very convincing. More people than usual expect deflation, and more people than usual (compared to the last 10 years) expect high inflation. And even those who expect canonical low-but-positive inflation – as the most likely single outcome – are more worried than usual that their expectations may be wrong in one direction or the other. Confidence – in low, stable, positive inflation – is not what I am hearing or seeing. Or feeling.

But this is one of those situations where you thank your adversary for bringing up the most important issue. “Stability” is what we all want. And it is precisely the pursuit of stability – in the long run – that leads me to advocate higher inflation targets. Let me, for the moment, concede, for the sake of argument, that higher inflation targets today might increase uncertainty, and that this increase in uncertainty might damage the recovery more than the expectation of higher product prices would help. Even so, the world does not end when this recovery is complete. (I do rather fear, however, that the world may end before the recovery is complete, only because the world must end eventually, and – in the light of Japan’s experience – there is no guarantee that the recovery will ever be complete.) Let’s suppose that the “stable inflation” medicine proves fully effective, the economy makes a complete recovery, and growth resumes a normal path --- for a while. What will happen next time there is a severe financial crisis?

Let’s distinguish between financial stability and economic stability. Financial instability often – but not always – leads to economic instability. I recall from 1987 (when I was in my first year of graduate school) a certain episode of financial instability in the equity markets. It didn’t last long, but it was huge news for a couple of weeks. It did not induce economic instability: in fact, it turned out to be almost a complete non-event economically. By contrast, instability in credit markets, over the past couple of years, has induced the worst economic crisis most living Americans can remember. The financial crisis itself has been a particularly severe one, and it would not have been possible to avoid some economic impact. But surely we could have gotten off with a much milder recession (and a more robust recovery than we are likely to experience) if the Fed had been able to pursue conventional monetary policy more aggressively.

But the Fed’s hands were tied. The Fed dropped its federal funds rate target by 5 percentage points in the year and a half following the onset of the financial crisis, and that was as far as conventional monetary policy could go. If the inflation target had started out at 4% instead of 2%, and the federal funds rate had started out at 7.25% instead of 5.25%, the Fed would have had a lot more ammunition. Moreover, the market would have known that the Fed had more ammunition, and investors would have been more confident in the Fed’s ability to minimize the economic impact of the financial crisis, and this would have made financial instruments less risky and thereby ameliorated the financial crisis itself.

You may therefore add my name to the list of those who blame past Fed policies for the severity of the recent crisis – but not because the Fed allowed a bubble to develop. Quite the contrary. The Fed eventually popped the previous bubble – the tech bubble – not because it was a bubble but because the economy was nearing the overheating stage, and the inflation rate risked eventually rising back to levels of a decade earlier. In my opinion, the Fed was wrong to pop that bubble. The Fed should have let the economy overheat, for a while, and let the inflation rate rise. (Higher future product prices might, in fact, have turned out to justify stock valuations that proved to be, in the retrospect of the path actually taken, unreasonable: a bubble is a slippery thing.)

I’m not saying that anyone at the Fed made a mistake. Indeed, Alan Greenspan handled that episode quite a bit better than I (and most others) expected, and quite possibly better than any of us would have under the same circumstances. I haven’t changed my opinion on that point: the Maestro conducted a near-perfect performance; all the instruments were in tune with one another, they entered precisely on the right beats, at just the right tempo, with just the right amount of “personal touch.” But the whole performance was in the wrong key.

In real life, I don’t have perfect pitch, and if I were listening to the performance in my metaphor, I might not notice anything wrong. But experience can be a substitute for ability. I’ve heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony performed in D minor enough times that, if I heard an orchestra perform it in E minor, I probably would notice that it sounded too high. I have been skeptical of the low inflation consensus all along, but I won’t fault those who were playing in the wrong key in 1995 or 2000 or 2005. But after 2008, we have the necessary experience. We’ve heard, first hand, how bad it sounds when the vocal soloist has to strain to reach notes that were easy for him to sing from the original score.

Admittedly, his voice is not nearly as strained as my metaphor, so I will say it in plain English. A number of economists have suggested higher inflation targets as a way to strengthen the recovery. Conventionalists counter that such targets, once implemented, will be difficult or impossible to replace once they have fulfilled their promise. But now, of all times, we should be aware of just why we should never want to replace them. Low inflation is what got us into this mess. And yet the consensus among policymakers seems stronger than ever: “Low inflation is awesome!” Dude, it’s lame.




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 Treasury’s Monetary Policy

For decades, many economists have argued that the effectiveness of fiscal policy is limited because public borrowing “crowds out” private investment. There are several versions of the “crowding out” story. One version goes something like this:

There is a certain amount of money in circulation, which people are holding in their portfolios along with other assets. Money is a special kind of asset, because it’s the only one that can be used to make payments. Therefore people like to hold a certain fraction of their assets in the form of money. (For simplicity, let’s take the plausible case where it’s a constant fraction, independent of their total quantity of assets.)

When the government borrows, it introduces new non-money assets (government securities, in this case) into the system. That means that the fraction of money in people’s portfolios is now too small, since their total assets have increased but money has not. They will compensate by reducing the quantity of other non-money assets. Therefore, businesses will have trouble raising money for capital spending by issuing bonds or by selling new stock, and private investment will have to decline.

In this simple “constant-fraction” version of the story, the crowding out is 100%. People will not be happy with their portfolios until the amount of outstanding private-sector non-money assets declines by exactly the amount of the increase in public sector debt. Thus there is no net stimulus from public spending, because it is offset by reductions in business spending by the amount that businesses can no longer raise in capital markets.

About 30 years ago, Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman asked a question which turned the whole “crowding out” debate on its head. What if people treat government securities in their portfolios more like money than like private-sector assets? (After all, government securities are highly liquid. You can’t normally use them directly to make payments, but you can sell them quickly whenever you have a payment to make, and you can usually have some confidence about the price at which you will be able to sell them, at least in comparison with most private sector assets.)

If so, then, when the government borrows, it is increasing the fraction of “money and money-like assets” in people’s portfolios. Instead of buying less of the (non-money-like) private-sector assets (to get the fraction of money their portfolios back up), they will buy more such assets – to get the fraction of “money and money-like assets” back down. Instead of “crowding out” private investment, public borrowing will “crowd in” private investment.

He also pointed out that some government securities are clearly more like money than are others. Perhaps 30-year Treasury bonds are very much like corporate bonds, in that their prices can fluctuate dramatically with interest rates. But 3-month Treasury bills are a whole lot like money. Whenever you need actual money to make a payment, you can sell your Treasury bills quickly at a reliable price. Most likely, when the government issues Treasury bills, it makes people’s portfolios safer, and thus it increases, rather than decreases, the incentive to purchase private sector assets. Accordingly, Professor Friedman concluded, the Treasury can expect its financing policy to have macroeconomic effects: the more short-term financing the Treasury does, the larger economic stimulus it provides.

When I first read the paper (in a graduate school course taught by Ben Friedman, about 10 years after it was written), I found the idea intriguing, but it seemed not to have a whole lot of relevance at the time. In those days the US inflation rate was still higher than most economists preferred, and the burning issue was not how to provide the most (or the least) stimulus but how to get the inflation rate down without causing a recession. Moreover, there was little question as to the efficacy of conventional monetary policy in providing any stimulus or restraint that might be needed. Treasury financing was at most a minor side show.

Times have changed. The inflation rate is now lower than most economists prefer, and the economy remains extremely weak despite the recent upturn in the business cycle. The burning issue is how to find the most cost-effective and politically feasible way to stimulate the US economy, and conventional monetary policy is not an option.

And today Treasury bills are not just more like money than like other assets; from a portfolio point of view, on the margin of new issuance, Treasury bills are exactly like money. Holders of short-term Treasury bills are willing to hold them without receiving interest. Anyone who is willing to hold them is placing no value whatsoever on any liquidity or safety advantage that might be had from holding those assets in the form of money.

Issuing more short-term Treasury bills will have exactly the same effect as issuing more money, since people are indifferent between the two. For practical purposes, as long as their interest rate remains at zero, short-term Treasury bills are part of the money stock. A Treasury bill is a million-dollar bill in the same sense that a Federal Reserve note with Abraham Lincoln on it is a five-dollar bill. Conventional monetary policy, which exchanges money for Treasury bills, is ineffective because it is no policy at all: it simply exchanges one form of money for another.

To put it another way, since the Treasury can issue bills that are exactly like money, it is now the Treasury that is in charge of monetary policy. And whatever one may think of the policy it chooses to follow, we should be holding the Treasury responsible. If you’re worried about “exit strategy” and the possibility of inflation in the near future, then perhaps you should congratulate the Treasury for its policy of financing more of its debt long-term. If you’re worried (as I am) about the persistence of a weak and potentially deflationary economic environment, then you should be critical of the Treasury’s policy. By increasing its maturities the Treasury is essentially following a tight-money policy exactly when a loose-money policy is needed.

The Treasury, of course, has its reasons. Officials expect interest rates to rise over the next several years and would like to lock in today’s low rates, to limit how much it will cost to service the national debt over a longer horizon. I’m skeptical, however, of the assumptions underlying these reasons.

Are interest rates going to rise over the next several years? Perhaps, but if so, then why are people being foolish enough to hold longer-term Treasury securities when they could be holding bills and waiting for a better deal? If it’s just a matter of the future course of interest rates, then it’s a zero-sum game. If the Treasury wins, bondholders lose – and bondholders usually make a point of trying not to lose. Are Treasury officials so much smarter than bondholders?

You might argue that it’s a matter of risk. When the Treasury locks in today’s low interest rates, it may not end up paying less (since it gives up even lower short-term rates), but it makes the payments more predictable. Even if the Treasury is likely to end up paying more, the hedge is worth the price, because the Treasury receives some insurance for the worst case, where rates rise more than expected.

But are rising interest rates really the worst case? Interest rates will rise when and if the economic recovery gains enough speed and traction to give the Fed and bond markets reasonable confidence in its eventual convergence toward our potential growth path. As an ordinary citizen, that’s not an outcome against which I would feel a need to hedge. I don’t want to buy insurance against good news. I’d rather hedge against the opposite outcome, where the recovery peters out and interest rates fall.

The US economy has been knocked far off its potential growth path, and it will take fairly rapid growth, for a fairly long period of time, to get back to it. (Either that, or we’ll remain so far off the path for so long that potential will be significantly reduced, in which case we likely have many of years of low interest rates ahead of us before we get to that point.) With rapid and persistent growth, federal revenues will rise, government “bailout” investments will perform well, benefit payments will decline, and the primary federal deficit will fall. Because of higher interest rates, the government will be paying more to service its outstanding debt, but because of an improving economy the government will be accumulating less new debt, compared to the alternative case. So it’s not clear to me that rising rates would be a “worst case” even for Treasury finances, let alone for the general national interest.

It is also argued that, by increasing the maturity of its debt, the Treasury is reducing the risk of default, thereby improving its credit profile and allowing it to finance at lower interest rates than otherwise. If that’s true, I’m not sure it’s a good thing. When the private sector is having such difficulties as it has now, wouldn’t it be better to make Treasury securities more risky and thereby encourage people to put their money in private sector assets instead?

In any case, I’m not sure it’s even true. For Treasury investors, inflation risk is much more important than credit risk. By refusing to be kept on a short leash, the Treasury is increasing the future incentive for the US to “inflate away” its debts. That might make Treasury securities less attractive rather than more so. Of course, as I said, making Treasury securities less attractive wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, since it would help the private sector: but if the Treasury does so by issuing more long-term securities, the benefit gets lost, because the Treasury is then also competing with the private sector for funds.

Be that as it may, I know I’m not going to convince everyone about the specific policy that I think the Treasury should follow. I hope, however, that I have at least convinced some readers that, in today’s environment, the decision is a macroeconomically important one that deserves a great deal more attention than it has gotten. I second Rajiv Sethi (hat tip: Mark Thoma), who finds it “a bit surprising that while the size of the deficit is a topic of endless controversy, there is such little debate about the manner in which the deficit is financed.”



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.