A Euro Tragedy

“Italy, I believe, is the eurozone’s fault line.” Not from an article on the recent crisis, but from a book by Ashoka Mody, called “Euro Tragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts”, just published in the US and due out in the UK in July.

As the title indicates, this is not a pros versus cons assessment. Instead the author treats the Euro as a clear mistake, a triumph of a political ideal of European unity over basic economics. The author provides a clear (and accessible for non-economists) account of how the idea of the Euro began to dominate the political discourse of particularly the French elite and how Germany leaders agreed on the condition that they determined the design, how warning signs during the pre-crisis period were ignored, how the risks from a Greek default were overblown so the wrong policies were adopted in 2009 and 2010, and how subsequent actions exposed the democratic deficit implicit in that German design, encouraging populist movements across Europe. (For UK readers I have to emphasise that this is about the Eurozone and not the EU.)

Many of these points will be familiar to regular readers of my blog, but here the story is told with the knowledge and authority of someone who, as deputy director of the IMF’s European department, was close to the action. The sections on the Greek crisis especially should be read by all those who stick to the ‘official’ line that Greece turned a crisis (excessive deficits) into a disaster because it refused to take the medicine it needed. The reality, as the author describes, is that Syriza’s call for debt relief should have been granted. He writes

“This demand had overwhelming support in both the scholarly economics literature and the practice of economic policy. Scholars for decades had emphasised that excessive debt - ‘debt overhang’ - reduces the ability and incentive to invest, slows economic growth, causes low inflation or even deflation to set in, and makes debts harder to pay.”

And as he notes earlier, these debts should have led to default in 2009/10 rather than being mainly transferred into obligations of the Greek government to other Eurozone governments. Varoufakis may have been unconventional, but many of his proposals, including linking repayments to GDP growth, were “economically sound”.

Indeed he goes further than I have done. He writes about the final days of the standoff between the Syriza government and the Eurogroup after the referendum. The IMF made increasingly strident public noises about the urgency of debt relief, but the Germans - fearing political comeback from their taxpayers - refused to budge. He writes

“The IMF could have forgiven the debt owed to it by the Greeks. This drastic gesture would have created international pressure on the Germans and other European creditors to do the right thing. The IMF had a moral obligation to take such a drastic step, if for no other reason than to make amends for its complicity in the tragedy. At the time of the original bailout in May 2010, IMF management had prevented the Greek government from defaulting on its private creditors, an action that several members of the IMF’s Executive Board and the vast majority of external analysis then and later believed was essential to reduce Greece’s debt burden”

This book is a comprehensive and impressive history of the creation and subsequent performance of the Eurozone, and one of the few books on the subject where I find myself nodding in agreement most of the time.  (Martin Sandbu’s Europe’s Orphan is another.) There is much more interesting detail and analysis that I cannot do justice to in one blog post. I can think of two areas where I might have told a slightly different story. The author in parts writes as if it was commonly understood by economists that the Euro would not work. I think there were, in Europe at least, two other significant groups among academic economists. The first thought that perhaps the Euro could work, but only if it allowed fiscal policy to replace monetary policy as the national stabilisation mechanism. I still remember how astonished I was reading the Stability and Growth pact when it was announced, which effectively ignored this critical role for fiscal policy. Another group gave more unconditional support to the Euro, although whether they did so because they really believed in its merits or because they saw it as politically inevitable is difficult to tell.

The second story which I do not think is given enough emphasis is the role of German wage undercutting in the early 2000s. As Peter Bofinger has argued, this was a deliberate attempt to devalue the German real exchange rate within the Eurozone. It was significant for two reasons. First, it helped Germany to emerge from the financial crisis in an economically stronger position than France and others, which in turn had a strong economic and political influence on subsequent events. Second, it indicated an unwillingness on the part of the strongest country in the union to play by the rules of the game.

But these are just differences in emphasis. I would absolutely agree with the author that to avoid a continuing tragedy the direction of travel has to change. He writes

“The evidence in this book points insistently to specific measures to improve the functioning of the eurozone. These include scrapping the fiscal rules, creating mechanisms for predictable and orderly default on public debt to instill greater discipline in debtor governments and their creditors, and changing the ECB’s mandate to require that reducing unemployment be an objective of monetary policy on a par with maintaining price stability.”

Unfortunately that is not the path the eurozone is currently on. It retains a belief in ‘falling forward’ from each crisis to further integration. If the governing elite is the head and the people are the legs, the great danger is that the legs will not move and the eurozone will fall flat on its face.

Brexit and Sterling

Is the Brexit induced decline in Sterling a blessing in disguise? So argues Ashoka Mody, and to a lesser extent Paul Krugman. Their basic argument is that Brexit will hit the City, and it is the City that has created an unbalanced economy and an overvalued currency. Reducing the size of the financial sector is a necessary condition to rebalancing the economy, and Brexit can achieve this.

Ashoka Mody’s disdain for the City is absolutely clear. He writes: “The banking-property complex has been a parasite on the British economy, creating pathologies of financial vulnerability and exchange rate overvaluation.” We can see the overvaluation in the large UK current account deficit. Paul Krugman is less pejorative. The City is just an important UK exporter that Brexit will cut down to size, so we will need to make other UK exporters more competitive to fill the gap.

Neither author disagrees that, because the depreciation of Sterling will raise import prices (in economic speak it will lead to a deterioration in the terms of trade), people in the UK will be poorer. But there is also a difference in mechanisms between the two authors, which has implications for how you view this effect. For Mody the City has caused Sterling to be temporarily overvalued as a result of a “finance-property bubble”. As this is a temporary effect (bubble), sterling was bound to fall at some point anyway. As a result, Brexit has only brought forward the day that UK citizens became poorer.

Krugman on the other hand does not argue that sterling was overvalued in this sense: the City is just an important export industry that will particularly suffer from Brexit. As a result, Brexit does make the average citizen poorer permanently. But he notes that, to the extent that this depreciation also results in a redistribution from the City to more dispersed manufacturing, it might benefit some of the parts of the UK that heavily voted for Brexit.

There is nothing wrong with the logic of both arguments, as you would expect given the authors. The key question is whether they are empirically appropriate in this case. I have argued, prior to Brexit, that Sterling was overvalued, and it also seems that the IMF agrees as well. The key issue is why it was overvalued. If the reason for the overvaluation was something Brexit has ‘cured’, then Brexit has indeed ended that overvaluation. If Brexit has not taken away the reason for overvaluation, then the correction to that overvaluation has still to come.

Paul Krugman’s logic is closer to the one I have also used in arguing that the Brexit depreciation is a result of Brexit making it more difficult for UK industry to export. The twist Paul applies is a distributional one: rather than Brexit making it more difficult to export across the board, it hits one particular industry, allowing other industries to grow. Once again the key issue is whether Brexit does have this distributional effect, hitting the City harder than UK manufacturing.

Suppose there is something in what both authors suggest. I would make a very basic point. If we wanted to cut the City down to size, we didn’t have to achieve this using Brexit. We could instead have imposed much stronger regulations on the UK financial sector (basically higher capital requirements), and watch some of the industry leave in disgust. That way we would have avoided all the additional costs that Brexit will impose (recently restated by the Treasury, but only now considered ‘news’ by the Times), and with the additional benefit of having a financial sector that was not too big to fail. My fear is that after Brexit the opposite will happen: policymakers will go even easier on City regulation in an effort to make up for the damage Brexit will do. So I’m still finding it hard to see any silver lining in the Brexit decision.

Greece and Trust

Nick Rowe pulls me up on a point that I didn’t make in my account of what should have happened to Greece after 2010. I argued that some external body (e.g. IMF) should lend sufficient money for Greece to be able to achieve primary surplus (taxes less non-interest government spending) gradually, thereby avoiding unnecessary unemployment. Gradual adjustment is required because the improvement in competitiveness required to achieve ‘full employment’ with a primary surplus cannot happen overnight because of price rigidity.

Nick’s point is that for this to happen, the external body has to have a degree of trust in Greece: trust that it will not take the money and at some stage default on this new loan. This trust may be particularly problematic if Greece had defaulted on its original debt, which I think it should have done. This, after all, is one reason why Greece would not be able to get such finance from the markets.

This is what the IMF is for. Governments are more reluctant to upset the international community, and so defaults on IMF loans are rare. As Ken Rogoff writes: “Although some countries have gone into arrears, almost all have eventually repaid the IMF: the actual realized historical default rate is virtually nil.”

But does this help explain why other Eurozone countries keep going on about how Greece has lost their trust? I think the answer is a clear no. In fact I would go further: I think this talk of lost trust is largely spin. The issue of trust might have explained the total amount the Troika lent from 2010 to 2012. However, as I have said often, the mistake was not that the total sum lent to Greece was insufficient, but that far too much of it went to bail out Greece’s private sector creditors, and too little went to ease the transition to primary surplus. (The mistake is hardly ever acknowledged by the Troika’s supporters. Martin Sandbu discusses the - misguided - reasons for that mistake. [0])

The reason the Troika give for lack of trust is that Greece has repeatedly ‘failed to deliver’ on the various conditions that the Troika imposed in exchange for its loans. The Troika has tried to micromanage Greece to such an extent that there will always be ‘structural reforms’ that were not implemented, and it is very difficult to aggregate structural reforms. However this is exactly what the OECD tries to do in this document, and if I read Figure 1.2 (first panel) correctly, Greece has implemented more reform from 2011 to 2014 than any other country. [1] We can more easily quantify austerity, and here it is clear that Greece has implemented almost twice as much austerity as any other country. [4] The narrative about failing to deliver is just an attempt to disguise the fact that the Troika has largely run the Greek economy for the last five years and is therefore responsible for the results. [3]

You could argue with much more justification that the failure of trust has been on the Troika’s side. Greece was told that the austerity demanded of it would have just a small impact on growth and unemployment, and the Troika were completely wrong. They were then told if they only implemented all these structural reforms, things would come good, and they have not. You could reasonably say that the election of Syriza resulted from a realisation in Greece that the trust they had placed in the Troika was misguided.

Given these failures by the Troika, a reasonable response to the election of Syriza would have been to acknowledge past mistakes, and enter genuine negotiations. [2] After all, as Martin Sandbu points out in a separate piece, a pause in austerity in 2014 had allowed growth to return, and because Greece had achieved primary surplus new loans were only required to repay old loans. But it is now pretty clear that large parts of the Troika never had any real wish to reach an agreement. Over the last few months we were told (and the media dutifully repeated) that the lack of any agreement was because the ‘irresponsible adolescents’ of Syriza did not know how to negotiate and kept changing their minds. We now know that this was yet more spin to hide the truth that large parts of the Troika wanted Grexit.

The lesson of the last few months, and particularly the last few days, is not that Greece failed to gain the trust of the Troika. It is that creditors can be stupidly cruel, and when those creditors control your currency there is very little the debtor can do about it. 

 

[0] Greece was prevented from defaulting because of fears of contagion of one kind or another, which meant that Greece was taking on a burden for the sake of the rest of the Eurozone. The right response to these fears was OMT, and direct assistance to private banks, as Ashoka Mody explains clearly here. But given that this was not done, what should have then happened is that once that fear had passed, the debt should have been written off. But politicians cannot admit to what they did, so the debt that was once owed to private creditors and is now owed to the Troika remains non-negotiable.

 

[1] The Troika can also speak with forked tongues on this issue: see Mean Squared Errors here (HT MT).

[2] I am often told that the Troika had to stand firm because of a moral hazard problem: if Greek debts were written down, other countries would want the same. But the moral hazard argument has to be used proportionately. Crashing an economy to avoid others asking for debt reductions is the equivalent of the practice in 18th century England of hanging pickpockets.

[3] I am sometimes asked why I focus on the failures of the Troika rather than the mistakes of Syriza. The answer is straightforward - it is Troika policy that is the major influence on what happens in Greece. And when the Troika gives Greece’s leaders the choice between two different disasters, it seems rather strange to focus on the behaviour of Greece’s leaders.

[4] Postscript: Peter Doyle suggests that, all things considered, Greece overachieved on fiscal adjustment     

Greece and the political capture of the IMF

When governments borrow too much, and cannot repay, it generally falls to the IMF to sort things out. In playing this role, the IMF should be pretty tough on creditors. As Interfluidity so lucidly points out, this is where real moral hazard lies.

So what went wrong with Greece? Remember the Troika made a huge mistake in using their citizens’ money to lend to Greece so Greece could partially repay these private sector creditors - that is where most of the Troika’s rescue package went. The IMF’s own internal analysis was deeply flawed (being predictably wrong in how austerity would impact on the Greek economy), and even then the deal failed its own tests, so special dispensation had to be made.

The IMF should have been very worried about motivations here. After all, many of these creditors were banks from European countries, so the motivations of those bailing out these creditors were conflicted to say the least. They were nevertheless persuaded to go along because of fears of contagion. If the worry was contagion to other countries governments that was an obvious mistake, because it happened anyway but could have been solved ‘at a stroke’ by the ECB (as it eventually was). If the worry was a collapse in the European banking system, then that was the responsibility of the governments concerned, and not the Greek people.

To the present, and the negotiations that failed. Forget all the fluff you read in most papers about this. What is quite clear is the following. A deal could have been done if the Troika had allowed debt restructuring to be part of the package. The IMF agrees that debt needs to be restructured, as do most economists. It has made no secret of this, yet it has consistently soft pedalled when it came to dealing with the rest of the Troika. So it was allowed to be kept off the table in the current negotiations by the Troika: vague promises to look at this after a deal had been agreed would never be enough for Syriza to sell the deal. There are two reasons why Germany might have wanted it to remain off the table. One is that it never wanted a deal; the other is that to include it would have been politically embarrassing for German politicians.

What seems abundantly clear is that the IMF should have had no truck with either concern. It has to be tough on creditors, and in this case the creditors were the European institutions. It clearly had the political power to face down European governments on this issue, and if it had done so a deal could have been achieved. The only conclusion I can come to is that the IMF on this occasion has been captured by the rest of the Troika. [1] [2] [3] As Ashoka Mody puts it, it has become trapped by the priorities of [selective] shareholders, including in recent years the U.K. and Germany.

The following are not really true footnotes - they are too important for that - but I wanted to keep the main text crystal clear.

[1] Peter Doyle has also noted how dubious the IMF’s interventions on essential ‘reforms’ are both in economic and political terms. (If this report is true, it is even worse.) While other parts of the IMF seem to understand multipliers (see [2] below), those in charge of the negotiations seem to take a more German view. [Postscript: Ashoka Mody's verdict on this IMF analysis is restrained but blunt.]

[2] One of the reasons that it is part of the IMF’s job to be tough on creditors is that creditors have no concern for social welfare, by which I mean the aggregate welfare of both creditors and debtors combined. (Although, as Interfluidity says, you might have hoped differently on this occasion.) As this point is hardly ever made in the media let me set it out here (the numbers are based on a FT piece by Martin Sandbu). To achieve a primary surplus of 1% of GDP to transfer to the Troika, the Greek government needs to undertake austerity that will reduce Greek GDP by 3% (assuming a multiplier of 1.5, and a tax/transfer loss from lower GDP of a third). That reduction in GDP is a social loss (the loss to the Greek economy is 3% plus the 1% transfer) - at best pure waste, and probably for some the cause of much suffering.

[3] Here is the former head of the IMF's European department, on the need for both debt restructuring and the dangers of demanding larger primary surpluses.       

Greece and educating economists

My first and most important point: pretty well every economist I have read who has expressed an opinion on the matter recognises that a deal which gives Greece at least some of what it wants is both desirable and feasible. Yes, there is some disagreement about how bad a breakdown would be for both sides, but little doubt that both sides would be better off with an agreement that significantly reduces the degree of austerity imposed on Greece. As these negotiations are essentially about economic issues and consequences, that relative unanimity is worthy of an unprecedented intervention from the US President. (Just in case you think that sounds too complacent, in the previous link Ashoka Mody does make it clear the mistakes that some individual economists and economic institutions made getting to this point.)

The second argument I wanted to make was how this example shows the importance of knowing economic history. Defaults are not day to day events, particularly if your focus is on advanced economies, so it is important to know about how these events have gone before, and in particular how debt forgiveness in the past has had positive impacts. This includes Germany’s own history. There seems to be a growing recognition that - at least in some places - economics teaching at both degree and post-graduate levels has involved too little economic history.

Some have used events like the financial crisis to call for a complete overhaul of how economics is taught. Heterodox economists want much more pluralism, and many other social scientists want economists to be much more familiar with what they know and do. I have some sympathy with both views, but - as an economist would say - only at the margin. The reason is very simple: to go even half way towards what these heterodox economists and social scientists want would involve throwing out much that is even more valuable.

That is my third point. What has it got to do with Greece? To be able to say intelligent stuff about what is going on at the moment (which you would hope an economics education would enable you to do), you need to know quite a lot of economic theory. A lot of macro of course, but quite a bit of finance, and also at least some game theory. (Although those who know their game theory should realise that at the moment the last thing on the mind of Yanis Varoufakis is being academically accurate when speaking to particular audiences!) And if you want to get into all those ‘reforms’ imposed by the Troika, you need a lot of micro.

One of the comments on an earlier post of mine said that economists should try and be less like doctors, and more like scholars. I completely disagree. For all our imperfections, economists know a lot of useful stuff. If the last six years has taught me anything, it is how wrong things can go when basic economics is ignored. Those with economic problems to solve know this most of the time (even if advice is often ignored), which is why economics is essentially a vocational subject, not a liberal arts subject.

Of course we are not as good as doctors, and make more mistakes, although sometimes we get blamed for things that probably would have happened anyway even if we had got it right. I rather liked this study entitled ‘The Superiority of Economists’. It ends as follows:

“Thus, the very real success of economists in establishing their professional dominion also inevitably throws them into the rough and tumble of democratic politics and into a hazardous intimacy with economic, political, and administrative power. It takes a lot of self-confidence to put forward decisive expert claims in that context. That confidence is perhaps the greatest achievement of the economics profession—but it is also its most vulnerable trait, its Achilles’ heel.”

When I read this, I think of Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis - academic economist, and former economics blogger - and hope on this occasion the confidence is retained, and that his Achilles’ heel is just a myth.

The Eurozone Scandal

Imagine that it was revealed that 10% of the European Union budget (the money that goes to the EU centre to fund the common agricultural policy and other EU wide projects) had been found to be completely wasted as a result of actions by EU policymakers. By wasted I do not mean spent on things that maybe it should not have been spent on (rich farmers, inefficient farmers, infrastructure projects whose costs exceed benefits etc), but literally money that went up in smoke. Imagine the scandal. Heads would roll, and some might find themselves in jail.

10% of the EU budget is about 0.1% of EU GDP. Yet sums at least ten times that figure are currently being wasted in the Eurozone, as a result of actions by Eurozone policymakers. Here is the latest OECD assessment of output gaps across eleven Eurozone countries, for both 2013 (blue) and 2014 (red).

A negative output gap means that output could be the amount of the gap higher without raising inflation above target. Of course Greece is a nightmare, and things in the other PIIGS are really bad, but the output gap in the Netherlands is around 3%, in France over 2% in 2014, and even in Germany the output gap exceeds 1%. Estimating output gaps is an imprecise science, but gaps of at least this size are consistent with inflation well below target (currently 0.3%). So output could be at least 1% higher across the Eurozone with no ill effects. This is the equivalent of the entire EU budget going up in smoke.

Sometimes negative output gaps are the result of shocks which were not anticipated by policymakers (like the financial crisis). Sometimes they are engineered by policymakers to bring inflation down. It is unfortunate that these things happen, but they always have. However the output gaps we have in the Eurozone today are neither of these. Instead they have been created by policymakers for no good reason. That is why they can be called a scandal.

At this point you might think I’m being unfair. Surely this is all about tight fiscal policy required to bring down government debt. I agree that it is all about fiscal policy, and in particular the crazy fiscal rules imposed within the Eurozone. However where is the urgent need to bring down debt outside the periphery? The OECD estimate that the primary structural budget balance in the Eurozone will be a surplus at around 1% of GDP in 2014 compared to a deficit in the OECD as a whole of just over 1%. So even if you think that we need austerity to bring deficits down rapidly - which I do not - why should policymakers in the Eurozone be doing this so much more quickly than in the UK, US or Japan? To achieve this goal, they are wasting resources on a colossal scale.

If you think anything has changed as a result of Juncker’s ‘E315 bn’ investment plan, you should read this post from Frances Coppola. As she makes clear, there is not a penny of new EU money in this proposal. Instead money earmarked for existing projects is being used to provide insurance to private sector investment (which may or may not happen). There are so many issues with this kind of stimulus. Besides those raised by Frances, there is also the question of how to prevent firms simply getting insurance for schemes they would have undertaken anyway, and how exactly will the Commission select when to allocate its insurance. Those of a neoliberal persuasion who think government is bad at spending its money cannot feel any more comfortable with the government selecting what private sector projects to back. However a scheme like this will come as no surprise to someone like George Monbiot, who thinks states are increasingly being used to serve corporate ends. 

Equally embroiled in this scandal are those making monetary policy decisions at the ECB. Here I can simply defer to an excellent post by Ashoka Mody. In particular he points out why it is misleading to simply look at the ECB’s balance sheet as an indicator of the force of unconventional monetary policy. There is an important difference between creating money to bail out failing banks, as the ECB has done, and creating money to buy bonds to force down long term rates, which is Quantitative Easing (QE). He argues that the “ECB is set to remain—by far—the central bank with the tightest, most conservative monetary policy among the major central banks.” I thought I would quote the following paragraph in full, for reasons that will be clear to regular readers.

“Others play by the rules of the cognitive frame. Thus, despite the serious concerns with the June 5th measures—documented carefully by my Bruegel colleagues—journalists have no interest in asking ECB officials: “What exactly are we waiting for?” The financial markets have no interest in public policy: once the rules are set, they seek opportunities for short-term bets. On July 9th, the International Monetary Fund’s Executive Board somewhat incredulously concluded: “Directors welcomed the exceptional measures recently taken by the European Central Bank (ECB) to address low inflation and strengthen demand, as well as its intention to use further unconventional instruments if necessary.” Belatedly, on November 25th, the OECD became a lone official voice calling for more urgent steps.“

To those who say that QE, as operated by the BoE or Fed, would have limited effectiveness in the Eurozone, I have a lot of sympathy. However there is a relatively simple way of making QE much more effective and predictable, and that is for central banks to create money not to buy financial assets but to transfer directly to citizens, which Friedman called helicopter money. John Muellbauer calls this QE for the people. Conventional QE involves buying a large amount of assets with potential losses for the central bank (if the asset price falls) but uncertain effects on demand. Helicopter money involves small transfers with a certain loss to the central bank but much more predictable positive demand effects. [1]

As an institutional innovation, helicopter money has two major drawbacks in countries with their own central bank. [2] First, why innovate when you can implement exactly the same policy through existing means: in macroeconomic terms helicopter money is equivalent to QE plus tax cuts when you have inflation targeting. Second, a fiscal stimulus in the form of temporary additional government spending is likely to be more predictable in its impact than transfers or tax cuts, because you eliminate the uncertainty caused by how much of the transfer or tax cut will be spent.

But if countercyclical fiscal policy is effectively illegal in the Eurozone, these objections do not apply. QE for the people may have additional legal merits within the Eurozone. The ECB is constrained to some (uncertain) extent in its ability to buy government debt. But, as John Muellbauer suggests, mailing a cheque to every EZ citizen using electoral registers would seem to circumvent these legal difficulties.

One objection to the ECB embarking on ‘QE for the people’ is that it goes well beyond the remit of a central bank. [3] Yet the ECB appears to have no qualms on that score: besides routine references for the need for fiscal consolidation and ‘structural reform’, the letter discussed by Paul De Grauwe here shows the ECB requiring detailed changes to labour market regulations and institutions in Spain. So you have to ask why is it OK for the central bank to override the democratic process in this way, but giving money directly to the people is somehow beyond the pale.

If you think that mailing a cheque to every voter in the Eurozone as a solution to continuing recession sounds too good to be true, then you have just rediscovered why recessions caused by demand deficiency when inflation is below target are such a scandalous waste. It is a problem that can be easily solved, with lots of winners and no losers. The only reason that this is not obvious to more people is that we have created an institutional divorce between monetary and fiscal policy that obscures that truth. It was a divorce that did a reasonable job in steering the economy in normal times, and it might discourage fiscal profligacy when demand is strong, but since 2010 it has led to a scandalous paralysis in the Eurozone.  

  

[1] These losses are notional only, as the central bank is not in the business of making money. They matter only if they compromise the ability of the central bank to do its job of controlling inflation in the future. There are various ways that danger can be avoided, but my point here is that costs to the central bank can arise with any form of QE.

[2] Central banks routinely pass the profits they make (through seigniorage) to governments. So the innovation is that the central bank rather than the government decides how to disperse this money.  

[3] Another objection is that, because the ECB is free to define its own targets, changing the monetary policy framework to target the level of nominal GDP would be a better innovation. I agree this would be a useful innovation. I would argue that it would be better still to allow countercyclical fiscal policy, because only this can deal with country specific shocks. But if, for whatever reason, these changes are ruled out, then a helicopter drop should be implemented. If you are a market monetarist, think of it as an insurance policy.