October Budget 6: Thanks to Truss, bond market scare stories are back

 

In truth they never went away, but after Truss there is a danger that they will be taken more seriously. The FT recently published a classic of its kind, entitled “Gilt investors urge Reeves to keep investment ambitions in check”. The subheading read “Markets on edge ahead of overhaul of fiscal rules that could result in tens of billions of pounds of extra borrowing capacity”. Sounds scary, but worse is to come.

The article warns that Reeves may “bump up against tight constraints in the bond market as investors warn they have a limited appetite for fresh UK debt”. One trader suggested that anything more than £10bn to £20bn in additional borrowing could “push gilts over the edge”. The language of ‘constraints’, ’on edge’ or ‘over the edge’, and ’limited appetite’ all suggest the potential of a crisis where the government can no longer sell its debt.

As a result of this and other similar articles, I have seen plenty of pieces from political commentators warning that the budget might ‘spook the bond market’. This suggestion, along with the accompanying language, is complete and utter nonsense. The idea that if Reeves wanted to borrow an extra £30 billion, say, the markets would refuse to lend that to the UK government is just ludicrous. Reeves will not bump up against any constraints from the bond market for anything she is realistically likely to do.

What is possible is that a lot of extra borrowing might lead lenders to the UK government requiring a better interest rate. But this has little to do with supply and demand for UK government debt, and instead reflects expectations about what the Bank of England might do in the future (‘arbitrage’). If additional borrowing is associated with additional aggregate demand for UK goods, this will increase inflationary pressure, which in turn will mean the Bank keeps interest rates higher than they might otherwise have been. I discussed the mechanism for this in more detail here. At the end if this post I briefly discuss what the inflationary impact of additional public investment might be. 

This is exactly what happened initially with the Truss fiscal event. With inflation high and rising, the Bank of England were raising interest rates because they thought that strong labour demand coupled with weak supply could make the impact of the energy and commodity price shock more persistent. A fiscal event that cut taxes would only add to aggregate demand, meaning that the Bank would have to raise short term interest even further. If short term interest rates are expected to rise, so will the longer term interest rates in the market for government debt. Markets didn’t stop buying government debt, but they made it clear they wanted a higher interest rate on this debt because short term interest rates were expected to be higher as a result of the fiscal event.

With Truss, two factors turned normal market behaviour into a crisis. The first was peculiar to what Truss was doing. By announcing tax cuts without an accompanying OBR forecast, and with no clear indication of whether these would be followed at a later date by spending cuts (and if so, by how much and how credible were such cuts with public services already in crisis), accompanied with suggestions more tax cuts were to come and maybe Truss and others thought these tax cuts would ‘pay for themselves’ by boosting growth (which most people in the markets knew was false), the overall direction of fiscal policy suddenly became much more uncertain. [1]

By throwing a well established fiscal framework out of the window, Truss greatly increased the amount of uncertainty in the markets. If the return on an asset suddenly becomes much more uncertain, then other things being equal most would feel less inclined to buy that asset. The demand for Sterling assets fell, which is why Sterling depreciated when an appreciation would normally have been expected.

This increase in uncertainty led to interest rates in the market for government debt rising further still. That produced a second peculiar event, which was that pension funds suddenly had to sell a lot of their government debt (more details here). With few buyers and many sellers, the market for government debt became too thin for arbitrage to work, leading the Bank of England to step in as buyer of last resort (just as they did during the early stages of the pandemic).

These two factors, Truss’s departure from the OBR monitored method of fiscal policy making and the pension fund crisis that caused, were what turned what might have been a normal and relatively modest upward movement in interest rates into a crisis. Nothing Rachel Reeves will do in her budget is comparable with this. She has not sacked the most senior Treasury civil servant, she has not dispensed with the services of the OBR, and it is the OBR not Reeves that is making the reasonable case that additional public investment will almost pay for itself.

Which makes all talk of markets going ‘over the edge’ if Reeves increases borrowing to fund that investment just ludicrous. So why do we see that kind of nonsense written in otherwise sensible newspapers like the FT, alongside similar scaremongering from more predictable sources. A lot is simply political. Do you remember all the articles warning that the Truss fiscal event would spook the bond markets in the weeks before it happened? I don't.

Scaremongering works because of an absence of understanding, with most people having little idea of how financial markets work. Two things follow. First, articles warning of a crisis will be read rather than dismissed, which is good for the journalists that write them. Second, the words of market participants are given far too much weight, because they are seen as people who do know how markets work. That means all too often that financial markets are treated like a capricious god, and City economists like high priests. 

The reality is that it is not hard for any journalist to find market participants willing to say that extra borrowing will lead to a crisis, but the market also contains analysts who are much more sensible. As an example here is a piece by Will Dunn, which first quotes a City economist warning of a buyers strike if borrowing rises, but then quotes another giving a much more reasonable analysis along the lines outlined above.

The lesson is to ignore any article or any City economist that predicts a bond market crisis as a result of any normal budget where borrowing might be higher than previously planned. Higher public investment financed by additional borrowing might add to inflationary pressures, which might mean the Bank cuts interest rates more slowly than it otherwise might have done leading to moderately higher interest rates on government debt, but that ain’t no crisis and in my view is a price worth paying for much needed investment and improving economic growth.

But will additional public investment add to inflationary pressure? I ask because I read this, where Dan Davies discusses a brief interchange between himself and NIESR head Jagjit Chadha. Jagjit suggests that because public investment supports future supply, and because inflation setters are forward looking, any short term pressure on aggregate demand might not find its way into inflation.

I don’t buy this argument, even on its own terms. Yes, public investment will directly or indirectly improve the future capacity of the economy to supply goods and services, but there is no reason to think that aggregate demand will not expand to fill that capacity of its own accord. For example, if public investment helps improve future productivity, wages are likely to rise in line with that as they normally do, leading to higher consumption and aggregate demand.

What the Treasury can do is be aware of any inflationary dangers in choosing what investment to prioritise (as well as ensuring that projects are worthwhile in standard cost benefit terms). For example, as I have mentioned before, projects that involve buying stuff from abroad (e.g. MRI scanners) put less pressure on aggregate demand than projects that are entirely home produced. The US experience suggests it is possible to substantially increase investment without creating significant persistent inflationary pressure, and with sensible planning it may be possible to do the same in the UK. 

[1] If these tax cuts were quickly followed by credible spending cuts, the overall impact on aggregate demand would be negative, because some of the tax cuts would be saved. This would mean the Bank would lower, not increase, interest rates. In contrast, if those in charge really did think these tax rises would pay for themselves, and intended to do more of them, then the Bank would have to increase interest rates by a lot. 

Why are the Conservatives ignoring the median voter?

If the candidates for the Tory leadership sound much like ministers in the last year of the Conservative government, it’s because the leadership campaign started well before Sunak lost the election. But they lost that election very badly. To many it seems odd that the leadership contenders, at least publicly, appear in complete denial about this loss, and are carrying on as if it hadn’t happened. Given the nature of the leadership election, that puzzle quickly becomes why Conservative party members appear to be in disbelief about why they lost so badly.

It is easy to say that this is what happens when a party loses after being in government for so long. Many compare the current contest to what happened after Callaghan was defeated in 1979, or Major in 1997, or Corbyn’s victory in 2015. I think these comparisons are not very helpful. Let me start with the comparison that tells us very little. Corbyn’s victory in 2015 was five years after the previous Labour government, and it happened not because the membership were in denial about why they lost power in 2010 but because many shadow ministers were in denial about the appeal of austerity.

You could argue that Labour lost in 2010 because of its large budget deficit and their failure to prioritise reducing that deficit. [1] It is certainly true that the Conservative victory in 2015 owed a lot to the almost total acceptance by the media that reducing the deficit was more important than declining living standards and a pathetic recovery from recession. Perhaps as a result, the consensus among shadow ministers in 2015 appeared to be that Labour had to accept even more of the austerity agenda than they already had.

But that consensus was wrong, and the instincts of Labour members to want a much stronger opposition to austerity was correct. As I argued at thetime, the appeal of austerity was always going to be time limited, and Labour did well in 2017 partly because it wanted a larger rather than smaller state. The reasons for Corbyn’s failure in 2019 were not the reasons why he won in 2015.

A potentially more relevant comparison is with the victory of Ed Miliband after 2010. Yet one of the big mistakes Miliband made was not to defend the Labour government’s record, which allowed the Coalition to get away with ridiculous ideas that the country had been on the brink of a financial crisis in 2010 and that the recession was all Labour’s fault.

Is Labour’s shift to the left after its 1979 defeat a better comparison? Just as Labour then was deeply split between left and centre, you could say the Conservatives are split between the right and a One Nation centre. But whereas the split within Labour in 1979 onwards was both very evident and extended to the membership, if the Conservatives are split the centre is both remarkably quiet and appears largely absent from the membership.

In addition, 1979 is very different from 2024 in terms of the government the opposition is facing. It became quickly clear that Thatcher represented a sea change in ideology on the right, while Starmer’s victory was based on ensuring that the policy differences between Labour and the Conservatives were both minimal and minor. Starmer might be bolder in government, but the extent of that is far from clear at the moment.

Such comparisons also fail because of the unique feature of both the last election and the current contest, and that is the presence of a strong party further to the right of the Conservatives. Reform showed in 2024 that it was able and willing to win large numbers of votes at a General Election at the cost of seats lost by the Conservatives.

For party members it is convenient to believe that Reform was why they lost so badly, in part because many of those members have considerable sympathy for Reform’s agenda and would quite like Farage as part of the party. Little that they read in the right wing press would lead them to ask more fundamental questions about why their party became so unpopular. In addition, the victor of the 2024 election hardly presented a radically different policy platform to the last government, which can be read (if you are predisposed to) as suggesting that there wasn’t that much wrong with what the last government was doing.

However it is too simple to suggest that the nature of the leadership contest would be very different if members didn’t have the final say, for two reasons. Many Conservative MPs appear to believe that Reform poses an existential threat to the Conservative party ever returning to government. The idea that a far right party could dominate a more centre right party is not that fanciful if you look at what is happening in many other countries. Even dominance is not necessary to prevent the Conservatives winning if Reform continues to split the right wing vote.

Of course such comparisons need qualifying for various reasons. Trump dominates the Republican party because he took over the leadership of that party, and so far Conservative MPs have been sensible enough not to let Farage repeat the same trick in the UK. The first past the post system in the UK is also pretty effective at preventing a third party replacing the big two.

Nevertheless Conservative MPs may feel that they have to at least match the Reform offering on immigration and other socially conservative issues, so voters where these issues are a priority will go back to voting Tory once memories of the failures of the last government fade away. If the Labour government becomes unpopular enough, then the Conservatives can persuade potential Reform voters that they need to vote Conservative to get Labour out. This might work if enough disillusioned Labour voters switch to the Greens or LibDems.

Even on its own terms, the strategy of following rather than confronting Reform has significant problems. Reform will always be able to outflank the Conservatives on immigration and other issues because they can suggest policies that are even more fanciful, which can survive because the party is subject to less media scrutiny than the Conservatives. (They also survive because media scrutiny can be pretty poor - see Rwanda - and the political right is increasingly able to ignore evidence - see climate change.)

In addition, Reform has Farage (Reform is Farage!), and a strong charismatic leader has particular appeal to socially conservative voters. None of the current Conservative candidates can match Farage in this respect. In addition, some analysis suggests that among all potential Tory voters, those voting Reform are more difficult to win over than those who switched to Labour, the LibDems or who did not vote at all. Finally the emphasis given to very socially conservative policies may alienate some traditional Blue Wall Tories.

An equally significant problem is that this strategy ignores economic policy. Where the current Conservative party really appears to be in denial is its faith in the appeal of low taxes, its silence on how to improve public services, and the failures of Thatcher’s privatisation policy. It is the unpopularity of these policies that require the Conservatives to emphasise issues like immigration in the first place, which in turn gives credibility to the likes of Farage. Some Conservative MPs must understand this, but the wishes of the right wing press, party donors and members prevent those MPs even suggesting a move to the centre on economic issues.

As a result basic questions remain unanswered, or their answers can only be voiced in private. How can you be a tax cutting party when the health service continues to require a larger share of total national resources (GDP) over time? The only answer the Conservatives have is for the NHS to become a bare bones, inferior service which the majority of the middle class opts out of, but that answer is electoral suicide. How can you insist on cutting red tape when that leads to tragedies like Grenfell and a water industry exploiting both its customers and the environment. The only answer the Conservatives have is that these are acceptable costs in order to free the burden on business, but again saying this publicly would be electoral suicide. They have no answer to how can you cut immigration without damaging industry, universities or the public services, or how ‘taking back control’ has led to less international influence and power (as well as economic harm) And most fundamentally of all, how did fourteen years of a policy supposedly designed to help business thrive lead to the worst period of UK economic growth since WWII?

The best comparison for the Conservative party today is what happened after Major’s defeat in 1997. It also failed to ask whether some of its Thatcherite/neoliberal economic policies might have been responsible for its defeat, and relied on issues like immigration to attack Labour. That strategy failed in two general elections, and eventually Shadow Chancellor Osborne was forced to move to the centre by accepting Labour’s public spending levels. They only just won in 2010, but even that was largely down to luck (Labour being blamed for the Global Financial Crisis) and disastrous opportunism (convincing both the media and voters that reducing the budget deficit should become the country’s macroeconomic priority).

In 2024 the state of the public services is far worse than in 1997. In addition, the privatisation of rail companies is ending and the privatised water industry is a national scandal. Simple median voting models imply that being so far to the right on both social and economic issues compared to the views of the average voter should condemn the party to perpetual opposition. Does denial by the Conservative party of the unpopularity of its economic policies condemn it to indefinite opposition?

That ignores a key lesson of 2024, which is that the popularity and competence of the government matters more than the policies of the opposition in influencing votes. It ignores that Labour too need to worry about losing votes on both flanks thanks to the success of the Greens in 2024. It ignores the lessons of 2010 and 2015, which is how easily the wider media can be manipulated. For these reasons, even a party in denial about the unpopularity of its policies can win elections. For this reason it will take more than one election defeat for any party leader to challenge the views of party members, financial donors or press barons, and attempt to move the Conservative party away from the ideological cul-de-sac it now occupies.

[1] I have argued the opposite: that the Treasury persuading Darling to put deficit reduction on a par with recession recovery played into Conservative hands.

October Budget 5. The UK’s Fiscal rules: one good and one bad

 

On 30th October Rachel Reeves will be setting out her first budget, rather than responding to someone else’s decisions. She will be leading the public discussion, not following the narrative set by another. That will be obvious in terms of tax, because she will be raising taxes rather than pretending to permanently cut them. But it should also be true for the fiscal rules that she commits the government to follow.

In his first budget of 1997, Gordon Brown set out his own fiscal rules. They were very different from anything followed by his predecessor, and they were innovative at the time. They lasted for ten years, derailed only by a global crisis and the worst recession since WWII. The forthcoming October budget is also a chance for Rachel Reeves to establish her own fiscal rules that are better and last much longer than those of her predecessors. [1]

Last week’s discussion of why we have fiscal rules gives us three basic properties that good fiscal rules should have:

1. They should discourage politicians from using deficit finance (paying for higher spending or lower taxes by borrowing or creating reserves (money)) simply to avoid the unpopularity of raising taxes or cutting spending, rather than for any good economic reason.
   
   

2. Conversely they should not prevent deficit finance when this makes sense in economic terms. For example there are good reasons why fluctuations in public investment should be financed by borrowing, and overwhelming reasons why a deficit financed fiscal stimulus should be used when an economy is at risk from, in, or recovering from a recession.
   
   

3. Fiscal rules should focus on underlying trends, rather than short or medium term fluctuations in spending (wars, pandemics, greening the economy) that have no strong implications for sustainability.
   

Fiscal rules that do not have these properties are bad rules, and it is better to have no fiscal rules than bad fiscal rules.

One of the fiscal rules that Reeves says she will follow largely has these properties, and one clearly does not. The rule that does is sometimes called the golden rule, and it states that in the medium term day to day public spending (all spending except investment) should be equal to total taxes. Specifically this involves a rolling five year ahead target for the current budget deficit (public spending excluding public investment minus taxes) of zero. However, as governments since Cameron/Osborne have acknowledged, and as first proposed in Portes and Wren-Lewis, this target has to be conditional on the economy not being close to, in or recovering from a recession. [2]

The conditional golden rule achieves property (1). It achieves (2) because it doesn’t apply during a recession, and the current balance excludes public investment. A rolling five year ahead target helps achieve (3), because forecasts five years ahead almost always involve the economy being on its medium term path. It is often suggested that having a rolling target rather than a target for a fixed date is bad because it ‘lets politicians off the hook’. This is false, particularly if forecasts are done by an independent body like the OBR. In contrast having a target for a fixed date fails property (3). As we move closer to that date fiscal policy will be responding to short term shocks, which makes for bad policy.

Although a conditional medium term golden rule goes a long way to satisfying property (3), it fails to take account of spending that is medium but not long term. The clearest example of that today is spending that helps the transition to green energy. For this reason, if I were Chancellor I would task the OBR with calculating how much of the current deficit is due to policy aimed at encouraging this green transition, and adjust the target to exclude this spending. Any government that lets a fiscal rule delay the green transition has got its priorities criminally wrong.

I have seen it recently argued that the last year of the last government showed that deficit based fiscal rules failed, because it didn’t prevent that government from making incredible assumptions about future spending so it could cut taxes. That is a misunderstanding. What the fiscal rules did, combined with an independent OBR forecast, was force the last government to make assumptions that amounted to further austerity in order to make tax cuts. That these plans amounted to further austerity was widely commented on by experts in the independent media. Without a fiscal rule and the OBR to monitor compliance, I’m sure the last government would have claimed that it would cut taxes and increase public spending! [3]

The other fiscal rule that Reeves appears to have adopted, which does come from her predecessor, is for a falling debt to GDP ratio five years ahead. This, when you already have the golden rule, is a terrible fiscal rule. I have not come across a single serious economist who defends it, and plenty of eminent economists who understand the damage it is doing (e.g FT here, or ungated here). The rest of this post is about all the reasons why this rule is not fit for any purpose except keeping economic growth down.

The first point to make is that, if the medium term conditional golden rule is in place, there is no need for an additional rule to achieve property (1). The golden rule does that just fine. In that sense the falling debt to GDP rule is completely superfluous [4]. Unfortunately that rule fails properties (2) and (3), because it discourages much needed investment. This is the reason I sometimes call it the suppressing public investment rule.

Suppressing public investment is exactly what the previous government was doing for fourteen years, and the terrible state of our public sector is partly a result of that. This was perhaps why that government was so attached to this rule. In contrast, Reeves has spoken many times about the need for additional public investment, so it makes no economic sense for her to adopt a rule designed to suppress that investment.

We currently need a surge in public investment to catch up all the ground we have lost. But the case for much higher public investment is even stronger than that, as recent research from the OBR clearly shows. Their paper first shows how public and private investment are really low in the UK compared to other G7 countries.

Public investment began rising towards the G7 average in the first decade of this century, but austerity cuts set that back. Private investment is no better, but that is partly because public and private investment are often complements.

The OBR, using very reasonable assumptions, calculates that if public investment was increased by 1% of GDP permanently, potential output would be 0.4% higher after 5 years. The impact on potential output goes on rising steadily, to reach 2.4% after 50 years. The paper also looks at what these assumptions imply for average rates of return and benefit to cost ratios. Of course the whole point of a good investment strategy is to choose individual projects that have a high return, and make sure these projects are not thwarted by some archaic fiscal rule. What the OBR’s analysis shows clearly is that increasing public investment is an excellent way to help improve the UK’s recently dire growth performance.

The falling debt to GDP rule is classic mediamacro. It comes from the idea that government debt is a 'bad thing' by making false and selective comparisons to household debt, that current levels are 'obviously' too high, and so debt needs to be brought down. It’s a rule that economists advise against but political advisers say is essential to maintain ‘political credibility’, which is code for what non-economists in the media think should happen. Everyone from political journalists to the great and the good like to opine about fiscal rules while having little knowledge. It is they, not economists, the markets or even GOD, that think maintaining such a bad fiscal rule is essential for credibility, and they are wrong about this just as they were wrong about 2010 austerity.

Reeves should take the opportunity of her first budget to consign this rule to the dustbin. The new OBR analysis of public investment provides the perfect excuse to do so, if she needed an excuse. [5] A comment from the National Institute argues that the OBR's analysis may underestimate the impact of public investment on economic growth.   

What should take its place as Reeves’ second fiscal rule? Nothing. You don’t need a second fiscal rule. It serves no purpose, beyond the bad one of suppressing useful public investment. As I argued here, replacing it with a target for falling net public sector worth to GDP is just double counting. It makes sense to look at public sector net worth when looking at sustainability over the longer term (beyond five years), but having it as part of a fiscal rule is not sensible.

Yes, the Conservative opposition will claim that abandoning the falling debt to GDP rule allows the Chancellor to have slightly higher spending (about half a percentage point of GDP, according to the last OBR forecast) and higher public investment. Most voters will be happy about that. No one in the bond market will be worried - why should they be, when the OBR calculates that public investment almost pays for itself in generating higher taxes. [6] Much more importantly, abandoning this rule will allow the Chancellor to expand public investment to boost economic growth and green the economy. Getting rid of the falling debt to GDP rule is really a no-brainer for any Chancellor whose main concern is the health of the economy rather than what the media commentariat might say. 

[1] Part of the cynicism surrounding fiscal rules is a consequence of the last government, which changed fiscal rules even more frequently than the Prime Minister. Sometimes this wasn’t because the rules they replaced would have been broken, but just as a political ploy to wrongfoot the opposition. Essentially the last government used the misconceived media credibility they got from austerity to devalue the concept of a fiscal rule.

[2] Formally, the lower bound for nominal interest rates makes it essential that we have fiscal stimulus to prevent, moderate or recover from a recession. The exact form this conditionality takes is a second order, though important, problem.

[3] There is an issue about the OBR being forced to make forecast assumptions it strongly suspects are false, which I discussed here. This is an issue about the OBR's mandate, not about fiscal rules.

[4] In fact the falling debt to GDP rule has nothing to do with the basic principle of ensuring debt sustainability. Instead it is based on the presumption that the current debt to GDP ratio is too high, and as I discussed in my previous post there is no evidence for this.

[5] If Reeves is planning to keep this silly rule, and has already adjusted her plans so that the rule is met, it is not too late. She could be politically clever and announce both the end of this rule, but also that her fiscal plans would have met the rule anyway, showing that the rule is being ditched on good economic grounds rather than so she can spend more or tax less.

[6] That doesn't mean that long term interest rates will not rise. They may if additional public investment adds to already strong aggregate demand (in the face of weak aggregate supply), and markets anticipate that this will put upward pressure on interest rates. The obvious way to avoid that is to increase taxes. 

Why improving health is an excellent investment in the economy

 

Last week the IPPR’s Commission on Health and Prosperity published its final report. The report not only makes a number of important recommendations for future health policy, but it also focuses on how better health can also improve economic outcomes. I must admit, when I was first asked to be a member of that Commission, I did have a minor concern about this. I felt that the argument for better health was strong enough on its own and it didn’t need an additional economic payoff as part of its justification.

That may surprise you coming from an economist, but it is actually a basic part of academic economics. Academic economists typically write papers where the aim is to increase individual and social utility, not economic growth. As countless studies have shown, a person’s health is a key element of their happiness, wellbeing and therefore utility. [1] But I also understood that power in the UK lies in the Treasury, so making the links between better health and a more productive economy are important.

However, what I didn’t know when the Commission was being set up was just how crucial the interactions between health and the economy would become for the UK in the years after Covid. Here is a chart from the report:

The pandemic led to a rise in economic inactivity (those in the potential workforce not working) in many countries, but that rise was partially or completely reversed once the pandemic was over in nearly every country. The exception is the UK, where what had been a downward trend in inactivity became an upward trend. The report estimates that since the pandemic just under a million workers have left the labour force in the UK due to sickness (page 20 of the report). This is a huge number, and impacts on the prosperity of everyone in the UK.

Why has this happened in the UK and not elsewhere? The report debunks the idea that it is a ‘lifestyle choice’, by showing that the increase in inactivity is most marked among those with greater health needs or at greater health risk. My own guess would be that this is yet another consequence of the squeeze in resources going to health in the UK since 2010. The NHS was just about managing even though it was working beyond full capacity, but this meant that the UK health system was particularly vulnerable to a big health shock, and as waiting time data shows it has yet to show any signs of recovery from the shock of the pandemic.

The rise in those with long term health conditions doesn’t just lead to exits from employment, but also lower earnings (page 17) and productivity (page 26) for those who remain. Once again, the latter in particular has knock on effects on everyone else in the UK. For those who worry about this it also puts upward pressure on immigration. If I had to give two ways I was confident about how we could improve the UK’s growth and productivity performance, it would be through additional public investment and through improving UK health.

Most of the report is about how to do the latter, during a period when the government is likely to believe that money is very tight. The key emphasis is on moving away from a health mission all about dealing with acute need (what the report calls the ‘sickness model’, page 35), and instead aiming to create good health (page 39). In the sickness model personal health is seen largely as an individual responsibility, and society only gets involved when health problems arise. The problem with that model is nicely summarised by this graphic from the report:

Social conditions help determine how much people are able to take care of their health, and with a few exceptions we have largely ignored this problem. Focusing on the eventual effects of these social conditions rather than the conditions themselves not only reduces social welfare, but it is also more costly. Rising levels of obesity is an obvious example of this.

The idea that we should focus on prevention rather than cure is not new. What the report does very well is systematically and broadly think about what prevention might involve. It involves improving workplaces, for example, by incentivising firms to reduce stress and improve the workplace culture (page 41). It involves improving the unusually low level of UK sick pay which will help avoid sick people coming to work, taking longer to recover and affecting other workers. It involves taxing unhealthy goods far more than we do at present, and using some of that money to subsidise healthy goods (page 43). It involves providing more help and care for our children outside school (45). It involves reducing inequalities. And of course it involves reorienting more NHS expenditure towards health monitoring rather than treating illness.

For those who say this all sounds like creating a nanny state, let me introduce you to the basic economic idea of a Pigouvian tax. Sometimes individuals do things that have negative effects on others, but society rather than the individual bears the cost of those things. (We are used to thinking about negative externalities in the context of firms and issues like pollution, but the idea is far more general than that.) A Pigouvain tax tries to shift the cost from society back on to the individual. This leads to better social outcomes, and it also raises much needed cash.

Sometimes this idea can be applied directly, and a sugar tax is a very good example. In other situations applying a tax is not possible, so other incentives or regulations need to be employed. To go into all the ideas proposed by the report would make this post far too long, so I strongly recommend reading the report itself (page 53 onwards). It is full of ideas, case studies and international comparisons.

One final point. There are so many reports around nowadays, many of which have worthy goals but which involve additional costs to the public sector that are often left vague. This report includes an appendix which presents a costing of each proposal, or in some cases how much money a proposal will raise. If you take all the reports proposals together there is of course an immediate net fiscal cost, but like public investment this is not only money well spent, but is likely to pay for itself because of the benefits to the economy that will result.

[1] The relationship between happiness, wellbeing and utility is both interesting and complex, but that is for another time.

October Budget 4 - Good and bad reasons to have fiscal rules, and why bad fiscal rules are worse than having no fiscal rules

 

I was going to write a post about current UK fiscal rules, but judging by comments I get I think I first need to set out why fiscal rules exist in the first place. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about why some countries have them and what they are designed to do. So this blog post is a background piece to a later post that will talk about the specific fiscal rules the UK currently has, and what Rachel Reeves should do about them in the Budget.

Let me start with one reason often given for fiscal rules which is just wrong. This says that government debt as a share of GDP is too high, and we need to bring it down. This is not valid because we have no good reason to believe that current levels of debt are too high. After all, from WWI to WWII UK debt to GDP was much higher, and they are much higher in Japan today. The ‘debt is too high’ argument often implicitly assumes that government debt is a bad thing, and as I explain here that is wrong because it appeals to incorrect analogies with household debt. So any fiscal rule (like the current UK 'falling debt to GDP' rule) that presumes lower debt is good is a bad fiscal rule.

However, is there some level of debt to GDP beyond which bad things might happen? A government that borrows in a currency it can create can never be forced to default by the financial markets. However a very high debt level normally involves paying high levels of debt interest, and to do that a government has to raise taxes or cut spending. At some point the political cost of very high taxes or low spending can be so great that the government chooses to default on those interest payments. A more likely option is that the government creates high levels of inflation to devalue that debt. Both outcomes are pretty bad.

The problem with this upper limit to debt to GDP is that it is very hard to work out what it is, because it depends on political choices. What we can say with certainty is that it is much higher than current levels of debt to GDP. That needs to be the case, because often large increases in debt to GDP are absolutely necessary (think of shocks like wars, or major recessions, or pandemics), so governments would always want the ability to raise debt to GDP substantially without risking going past that upper limit. Of course we have little idea when these shocks will happen and how big they will be, so we have little idea how far we need to be away from any upper limit.

While this gives us no guide to what appropriate levels of debt to GDP are, it should make us nervous about forecasts where, because of the current fiscal policy stance (i.e planned tax and spending decisions), debt to GDP is rising inexorably throughout the forecast period and beyond. Economists call this an unsustainable fiscal stance. An example is the US today, which I will come back to. We can say, with a lot of confidence, that dealing with this is something that will have to be solved at some point to ensure sustainability. But is there any reason to believe that it will be better from society’s point of view, or politically easier, to solve it later than solve it now? [1] If not, why not achieve sustainability now?

If sustainability is the goal, this suggests fiscal rules should focus on some measure of the governments deficit, rather than the stock of debt. In addition it is the path of the deficit in the longer term that matters, rather than temporary movements due to economic shocks, or changes to public investment, or temporary changes in spending or taxes. Any fiscal rule that mistakes temporary deficits for a permanently unsustainable path is likely to create bad outcomes. 

 

Why do governments sometims choose to put sustainability at risk? Here we get to the heart of why we have fiscal rules. It is because increasing debt (or bank reserves i.e. creating money) is normally a lot less unpopular than raising taxes or cutting public spending. Generally speaking, voters worry much more about higher taxes or worse public services today than the very uncertain prospect of a future government default. For this reason, politicians who want votes will often be tempted to cut taxes or raise spending by increasing the government’s deficit.

This explains one rather odd feature of fiscal rules. They are commitments governments make themselves to constrain their current and future actions. Why would a government do this if they didn’t have to? The reason is that they know they will face future temptation, particularly as an election draws near, to cut taxes or raise spending (or both) for no other reason than to win votes, and pay for this by increasing the budget deficit. Fiscal rules are their commitment device to stop that happening.

Think of Trump’s tax cuts, for example. Funding these by issuing debt was more popular than cutting spending or raising other taxes, which is why Trump and other Republican politicians did it this way. But by creating a deficit which, at some point, another government might feel they should reduce, Trump was buying popularity at a future government’s expense. It wasn’t a very responsible thing to do, and a system which encourages irresponsible governments isn’t a good system.

Of course that argument is harder to make if we are talking about saving lives by having more doctors rather than cutting taxes paid by the rich. But if the argument for having more doctors is strong, why not ‘pay for them’ with higher taxes rather than a larger deficit? Suggesting that the spending will not happen without deficit finance either suggests that it shouldn’t happen in a democracy, or that we have politicians who are out of touch with what voters want. In reality I think the UK experience suggests balanced budget increases in public spending can be pretty popular.

If you find worrying about unsustainable deficits that might lead at some future date to high inflation or government default too abstract, then there is a more immediate argument for fiscal rules that I set out here. It uses the same idea about governments being tempted to deficit finance to get votes, but the cost is not default at some date in the distant future but higher inflation very shortly. If we start from a position where inflation is stable, then tax cuts or spending increases will lead to inflationary pressure and therefore to central banks raising interest rates.

Why will governments be tempted to do this? Because moderately higher interest rates are often not connected by many voters to tax cuts or spending increases. Central banks rarely say we increased interest rates because of the government’s fiscal actions, which allows governments to deflect blame. Low information voters may therefore credit the government for lower taxes (say) and not punish them for higher interest rates. Again this suggests fiscal rules based on the deficit rather than debt.

It’s a trick that doesn’t always work for governments, as the Truss fiscal event showed. However we know this trick often did work, because of what economists call deficit bias. Government debt in the OECD almost doubled between the mid-70s and mid-90s, for no good macroeconomic reason. Unlike the last two decades, there were no record recessions or pandemics that could explain this increase in debt.

Of course there are some circumstances where deficit finance is appropriate. Public investment that benefits future generations is an example (with the added benefit that this will boost future GDP) or spending in a recession which is essential for Keynesian reasons (where interest rates are unusually low). Often it is responsible to deficit finance and irresponsible not to, which is why fiscal rules have to be more sophisticated than simply always balancing the budget. Anyone in the media who thinks this complexity just represents loopholes for the government shouldn't be commenting on fiscal rules.

Note that, for the UK’s fiscal rules at least, there is a symmetry between spending increases and tax cuts. In that sense, these rules are neutral in terms of the size of the state. In my view that is an important attribute for a good fiscal rule to have.

So fiscal rules are a commitment device for a government that knows it will be tempted to deficit finance to gain votes, which will either add to inflationary pressure in the short term or threaten an unsustainable path for debt in the long term. They will be tempted because a significant proportion of voters don’t see those costs, or do not connect them to the government which uses deficit finance for party political ends.

I started by noting one incorrect reason often given for fiscal rules, which amounted to a presumption that government debt was too high. Let me discuss two other reasons, one of which is simply incorrect and one of which is much more complex than normally suggested.

There is a widespread but incorrect view that fiscal rules are there to reassure financial markets. This motive is hardly ever mentioned in the academic literature on fiscal rules, for a very obvious reason. Fiscal rules are there because governments can exploit low information voters, or voters that are not worried about debt sustainability. By contrast financial markets involve high information actors. They don’t need fiscal rules, or ratings agencies for the major countries for that matter, to tell them about the implications of fiscal decisions.

A second reason often given for fiscal rules is that increasing government debt represents a burden on future generations. I wrote extensively about this a decade ago (see here, for example). This claim is neither unambiguously true or false. One of the odd features of a government living forever is that it can make the current generation better off without penalising any future generation, but only if certain conditions hold and they may not hold.

Getting the reason for fiscal rules right tells us about their importance. Of the many problems in this world, moderately higher interest rates or the cost on future governments of restoring sustainability are not top of the list. This is important when trade-offs between following rules and other issues arise.

The most obvious example is climate change. If action to reduce climate change is prevented by fiscal rules, then the government (or courts) involved have got their priorities very wrong (I would say criminally wrong). Indeed, as fiscal policy designed to promote green energy will only be needed to quickly phase out energy that creates CO2, it will not be permanent and will therefore not threaten sustainabiitty (see also here).

This is also why I often say that a bad fiscal rule is worse than no fiscal rule. A bad fiscal rule could prevent a government enacting fiscal stimulus in a recession, for example. That has consequences that are far worse than allowing the irresponsible behaviour outlined above. A government that failed to enact fiscal stimulus in a recession would be far more irresponsible than one that broke a bad fiscal rule that stopped it from doing so.

The same issue arises in the United States. The US has some really dumb fiscal rules, like the debt ceiling, which are worse than useless and should be thrown away. But equally, the US doesn’t have an overriding deficit type rule like the one we have in the UK, for example. In addition, the US is currently running deficits that do not look sustainable. Would it be a good idea for the US government to impose a sensible fiscal rule that avoided this?

Until recently the US was a good example of where a good fiscal rule would have been helpful. Typically the Republicans gained votes by cutting taxes and running up deficits and the Democrats worried about deficits, tried to bring them down and probably became unpopular as a result. A fiscal rule that stopped the former would have produced better outcomes.

However right now the Republicans under Trump look like they have given up on democracy, and as a result it is essential that they are kept out of power as far as possible within the constraints of a democracy. If the Democrats were forced to follow a fiscal rule that meant higher taxes or less spending, this might harm their electoral chances (see above), and that could end democracy in the US. It is also quite clear that if the Democrats introduced a deficit rule, if the Republicans gained power they would rip it up in order to cut taxes for the better off.

One final point is the mirror image of the last. Many of those who oppose fiscal rules cite 2010 austerity. But the world-wide move to austerity in 2010 had very little to do with fiscal rules, and much more to do with political actors who wanted to shrink the state. That is obvious in the US, where there was no deficit-based fiscal rule, but it was also true in the UK. Labour rightly abandoned its fiscal rule of 10 years standing to enact fiscal expansion in 2009, and the Conservatives chose a rule that enabled them to enact austerity. To suggest that their fiscal rule caused austerity gets cause and effect wrong. Indeed, a sensible fiscal rule like the conditional golden rule proposed by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell in 2016 might have exposed austerity for the stupidity it was if it had been in effect under the previous Labour government. [2]

Understanding the case for fiscal rules is crucial for any sensible analysis of them. Often criticism of these rules presumes a responsible government, or highly informed voters, assumptions that if they were true would indeed make such rules pointless. Equally often, misunderstanding what these rules are designed to avoid can lead politicians or others to propose or insist on following harmful fiscal rules, with far worse outcomes than if we had no fiscal rules at all.  

[1] In contrast to the US, in the OBR’s 50 year projections for the UK, debt to GDP only increases above current levels around 2040. That is a good reason why political action, although not thought, can be delayed.

[2] The Eurozone is more complex, because what led to the Eurozone crisis spreading beyond Greece was the actions of the central bank. But otherwise I think the points made in relation to the UK also apply there. In particular German politicians and many voters have a phobia about government debt, which leads to the imposition of damaging fiscal rules.

October Budget 3: In presenting a macroeconomic fiscal stance, Rachel Reeves and Labour need to talk about improving public services rather than book balancing

 

Most of this series will be about the economics behind the budget. So far we have had why tax increases rather than economic growth is how to end austerity. Later posts will look at fiscal rules, public investment and what tax rises are possible within the Chancellor’s commitments. This post is more political. It looks at the extent to which Labour can blame tax rises and continuing poor public services on the last government, and how Reeves needs to frame her forthcoming budget.

As is well known, the 2010 Coalition government did a highly effective job in placing the blame for its own spending cuts on the previous Labour government. As a consequence, and incredibly, more voters blamed Labour than the Coalition government for spending cuts. It was incredible given the macroeconomic reality was very different (see here and initial link to my article). Given the reality of the terrible economic record of the 2010-24 Conservative government, it is quite understandable that the current Labour government wants to place the blame for its unpopular decisions on the last government where it can.

A lot of the criticism of this attempt by Labour is based on vibes. It makes Labour seem gloomy, it is argued, whereas what people want is hope and optimism (usually adding references to the Harris campaign in the US). I prefer to think about the different contexts of 2010 and 2024. In 2010 voters were still recovering from the major shock of the Global Financial Crisis, and were seeing the start of the Eurozone crisis, after a previous decade of what looks by today’s standard pretty good times. In contrast, the whole 2010-24 period has been pretty gloomy in terms of real wage growth and public services.

In 2010 there was therefore a single bad economic event that everyone experienced, and it was natural (though wrong) for ‘low information’ voters to blame that on the government in power at the time it happened. With the Eurozone crisis constantly in the news, and seeing it generally portrayed (wrongly in most cases) as a crisis caused by fiscally profligate governments, it was easy for the Coalition government to argue that it too was having to deal with a fiscal crisis caused by the previous profligate government, and easy to suggest it needed austerity to avoid a market crisis like that happening in the Eurozone. As I have noted so many times, most of the media were happy to promote or go along with this narrative.

The clearest example of this Labour government trying to do something similar was Rachel Reeves statement on 29th July, where she talked about how the fiscal situation she inherited is even worse than the OBR had thought, and outlined the cuts she was making as a result. What evidence we have suggests she failed to transfer the blame for this on to the previous government (source and details).

Since the election Labour support has fallen and Conservative support has risen in the polls, such that the Conservatives are just 4% behind in a recent poll. While it must be true that a lot of this is due to the unpopularity of ending the pensioner winter fuel payment [1], this is also a continuation of a trend that began well before the General Election, a point I will come back to later.

So why is Labour not succeeding in transferring blame to the last government when much of that transfer of blame is justified, while in 2010 the Coalition government succeeded in doing so when it wasn’t justified? There is an obvious caveat and also a partial explanation. The caveat is that it is too early to tell. The Coalition’s ‘it is all Labour’s fault’ was a theme pursued relentlessly for years. The partial explanation is that much more of the media will resist that transfer of blame today compared to the period from 2010. It is also possible to argue, as I suggested here, that this transfer of blame might have worked if Reeves had simply reversed recent Conservative tax cuts rather than hitting pensioners, because then the association with past actions would have been clearer.

However I think there is another explanation, which has an important political lesson for the October budget. Even before 2010, the Conservative party managed to convince many voters (again erroneously) that reducing the government budget deficit was the economic problem, and they had considerable support in that from the Labour Chancellor as well as the media. The Eurozone crisis, and the global turn to austerity in 2010, appeared to back them up. So cutting the deficit was what the Coalition were elected to do.

In contrast, this Labour government was not elected to reduce a huge budget deficit. It was elected, in large part, to fix the NHS and other public services. A 'senior Labour source' said recently that Labour were elected 'first and foremost to sort the public finances'. This is nonsense. The election campaign was not about the public finances, as it was in 2010. What the public were concerned about was the NHS. As a result, justifying cuts to fill ‘black holes’ rather than to improve public services was never going to be popular, because that is what the Conservative government did repeatedly and voters wanted a change.

In this respect it is important to ignore what much of the media writes or says. Journalists are obsessed by what they call black holes in the public finances. The term black hole is mediamacro for a gap between a forecast for the government’s deficit and what the government’s chosen fiscal rule says that number should be. [2] This black hole is the slender reed on which to write speculation about what a future budget may contain in the way of tax or spending changes.

Understandably, people tend to care much more about tax increases or spending cuts than black holes. Journalists know this, which is why the ridiculous term black hole is used in the first place. It is designed to transform what is in reality a highly uncertain forecast about budget arithmetic related to something largely artificial into a number that readers should regard as very important and potentially even dangerous. Of course it is neither very important nor dangerous.

Such tricks might get an article read but it doesn’t stop most people thinking poorly of a politician that cuts spending or raises taxes just to fill a black hole, unless there is a general consensus that this black hole threatens a crisis. What the Conservatives did from 2010 onwards, with the help of Labour, the media and the Eurozone crisis, was create that consensus. The consensus today (if you exclude the Conservatives) is that public services need fixing, and not that we are facing a fiscal funding crisis. Attempts by Labour’s Leader of the House to suggest that the financial markets would have reacted badly if Labour had not immediately filled part of the black hole they discovered were met with general and justified derision. Suggestions that cuts were required immediately to fill an unexpectedly high in year deficit are also economic nonsense.

The script for the Budget at the end of October is already being written by the media. Rachel Reeves will increase taxes to fill the part of the black hole she failed to fill in her recent statement. It would be a big mistake if the Chancellor followed this script. As one of the main thing most voters want to see from Labour is an improvement in public services, it would be much better to justify tax rises as enabling additional public spending rather than filling black holes.

What economists call balanced budget increases in public spending, higher spending matched by tax increases, are likely to be popular among most voters when public services are under stress, particularly if those tax increases mainly hit the better off. The 2017 election campaign clearly shows this, and public service provision has deteriorated significantly since then. In contrast, Labour lost votes during the last campaign, in part I suspect because they kept to what Marc Thomas calls their small target strategy, when many voters were looking for something more substantive. They are still looking.

Taxes are bound to rise in October’s budget, and the Conservative opposition will say I told you so. The way to respond to that is not to talk about black holes that Labour inherited, but talk about the woeful state of public services Labour inherited, how Labour are beginning the long process to restore those services, and that this process requires those with broader shoulders to contribute more to enable that to happen. That is what Labour governments are elected to do, and they are popular when they do it.

[1] Why was cutting the winter fuel allowance so unpopular? After all, it is absurd to give wealthy pensioners hundreds of pounds every winter for something they can easily afford. Some of this is just the power of this voting group. But a real problem I suspect is that there is a large group of pensioners whose income is above the level at which they can obtain pension credit, but below a level where it is easy to save in summer months to prepare for higher winter fuel bills, particularly after recent increases in food prices. The UK state pension is low compared to most other countries. I cannot see any reason why the allowance shouldn't be taxed. 

[2] Which in turn is based on a forecast for GDP, as fiscal rules tend to have GDP in the denominator.