Keynes and the Macmillan committee

This book, by Peter Temin and David Vines, has just been published. As you can see from the endorsements, I liked the book. In this post I just want to focus on a particular chapter, which was Keynes’s role as part of the Macmillan committee, an episode I did not know about before. Just as the book does so well, I want to draw parallels between the past and current events.

It is the end of 1929: UK unemployment was already high as a result of going back on to the gold standard five years earlier, and Wall Street had just crashed. The new Labour government was overwhelmed, so in the British tradition it set up a committee to recommend what to do, and Keynes was a member. As Temin and Vines note, although Keynes was at the centre of economic discussion at the time, he was also outside the establishment, as a result of publishing his attack on the Versailles treaty in the Economic Consequences of the Peace.

Keynes diagnosis of why British unemployment was so high linked returning to the gold standard at an uncompetitive level and the problems of downward nominal wage adjustment. The book’s description of how the then governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, failed to see the problem is amusing - from a distance of nearly a century - but of course as the book points out this is exactly the ‘conversation’ that Germany is currently having with the rest of the Eurozone.

The obvious solution was therefore devaluation, and the book seems a little ambivalent about whether that was not much discussed because it was ‘off the table’ for political reasons, or whether Keynes and others thought that, having joined (which Keynes had opposed), Britain should stay the course. (Eurozone parallels again. Ironically Britain did devalue three months after the report was published, although as I note here, this was forced rather than a choice.) What Keynes argued for was instead increased government spending, but he failed to convince the committee that its impact on unemployment would not be crowded out. Here Temin and Vines attribute this failure not to the ability of the others to see the obvious, but to the fact that Keynes arguments did not fit with the model he was using, which was the model of the Treatise. They write: “the Macmillan Committee is of interest to us because Keynes’ presentations to it didn’t add up to a coherent view. Rather, they show Keynes thinking on his feet at a time when his ideas were in flux.” Those ideas ended up, of course, with the General Theory.

Finally, one thought of my own. When I was younger, I drew the wrong inference about the Great Depression. If only the General Theory had been written 10 years earlier, I reasoned, much of the agony of the Great Depression could have been avoided. Instead I should have focused on the gold standard. Not because this was more important as a cause of the world wide Great Depression - it well might have been - but because of what it tells you about the influences on macroeconomic policy.

Montagu Norman said to the committee “I have never been able to see myself why for the last few years it should have been impossible for industry, starting from within, to have readjusted its own position”. This was a few years after the General Strike of 1926! This was not someone lacking a coherent theory, but someone blind to the evidence and human nature, and enthralled to the ideology of the gold standard. No doubt being a central banker rather than a worker, or even an industrialist, helped this blindness. The lesson I should have drawn from the Great Depression is that a powerful ideology, in the hands of people remote from those adversely affected by it, can overcome common sense and evidence. 

Lessons of the Great Depression for the Eurozone

It is easier to consider the problems of the Eurozone by first thinking about the Eurozone as a whole, and then thinking about distribution between countries. In both cases, the Eurozone is making exactly the same mistakes that were made in the Great Depression of the 1920s/30s.

The Eurozone is currently suffering from a chronic lack of aggregate demand. The OECD estimates an output gap of nearly -3.5% in 2013. Monetary policy is either unable or unwilling to do much about this, so fiscal stimulus is required. This is the first lesson from the Great Depression that is being ignored. Instead of stimulus we have austerity imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP).

Within the Eurozone, we have a problem created by Germany undercutting pretty well every other economy in the 2000-2007 period. I am not suggesting this was a deliberate policy, but the consequences were not appreciated by any Eurozone government at the time. Some correction has occurred since 2007, but it is incomplete. The second lesson of the Great Depression and the Gold Standard is that achieving correction through deflation and trying to cut wages is both hard and unnecessarily painful.

The solution eventually arrived at in the 1920s/30s was a series of devaluations (leaving the Gold Standard). That is not possible within the Eurozone. However adjustment is much less costly if it is achieved by raising prices in the country that is too competitive, rather than reducing prices in those that are uncompetitive. In practical terms we are not talking about very much here: a period with inflation in Germany at 3%, and at a little above 1% elsewhere, should be sufficient. Instead we now have inflation in Germany of 1% and in the rest of the Eurozone only a little above zero.

Relative unit labour costs (2000=100): source, OECD Economic Outlook May 2014

At this point a sort of moral indignation overcomes economic logic in the debate. Many Germans say why should we suffer 3% inflation to help put right irresponsible policy elsewhere? This is illogical, because it sees inflation below the Eurozone average as a virtue rather than a sin. A country within a monetary union obtaining inflation below the average (as Germany did in the early 2000s) is not a sign of virtue but a sign of a problem, just as it is for other union members to exceed the average.

A country cannot undercut its competitors forever. Any country experiencing below average Eurozone inflation should expect that this will be followed at some point by above average inflation. If the Eurozone could achieve average 2% inflation over the next few years that would mean 3% inflation in Germany - that is part of the Euro contract. To the extent that German policymakers attempt to renege on this contract by either preventing the ECB using unconventional means to achieve its target, or insisting on maintaining the deflationary SGP, then they become directly responsible for the misery that the Eurozone is currently going through.

I have not mentioned at any point levels of debt or structural reforms. Both are distractions for the current problem of inadequate demand and below target inflation. They are relevant only in that they allow policymakers to distract attention from the basic issues. Two of the major lessons of the Great Depression are to use fiscal stimulus to get out of a liquidity trap, and that it is far too painful to insist that uncompetitive countries should bear all the costs of readjustment. The Eurozone has failed to learn either lesson.

  

Austerity, France and Memories

Just a day after ECB President Draghi acknowledges the problems caused by European fiscal consolidation, President Hollande of France effectively sacks his economy minister for speaking out against austerity. There was a key difference of course: Draghi was careful to say that “we are operating within a set of fiscal rules – the Stability and Growth Pact – which acts as an anchor for confidence and that would be self-defeating to break.” In contrast French economy minister Montebourg apparently called for a “major change” in economic policy away from austerity, and complained about “the most extreme orthodoxy of the German right”.

Whatever the politics of what just happened in France, the economic logic is with Montebourg rather than Draghi and Hollande. Once you acknowledge that fiscal consolidation is a problem, you have also to agree that the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) is also a problem, because that is what is driving fiscal austerity in the Eurozone. The best that Draghi could do to disguise this fact is talk about an “anchor for confidence”, to which the response has to be confidence in what? He must know full well that it was his own OMT that ended the 2010-12 crisis, not the enhanced SGP.

Writing for the Washington Post recently, Matt O’Brien asks didn’t you guys learn anything from the 1930s? That the left in particular appears to ignore these lessons seems strange. In the UK part of the folklore of the left is the fate of Ramsay MacDonald. He led the Labour government from 1929, which eventually fell apart in 1931 over the issue of whether unemployment benefits should be cut in an effort to get loans to stay on the Gold Standard. The UK abandoned the Gold Standard immediately afterwards, but Ramsay MacDonald continued as Prime Minister of a national government, and has been tagged a ‘traitor’ by many on the left ever since.

Not that France needs to look to the UK to see the disastrous and futile attempts to use austerity to stabilise the economy in a depression. By at least one account, the villain in the French case was the Banque de France, which in the 1920s used every means at its disposal to argue the case for deflation in order to return to the Gold Standard at its pre-war parity, and it was instrumental in helping to bring down the left wing Cartel government. When it did rejoin the Gold Standard in 1928, the subsequent imports of gold helped exert a powerful deflationary force on the global economy.

So why has the European left in general, and the French left in particular, not learnt the lessons of the 1920s and 1930s? Why do most mainstream left parties in Europe appear to accept the need to follow the SGP straightjacket as unemployment continues to climb? Perhaps part of the answer lies in more recent memories. After many years in the political wilderness, François Mitterrand was elected President in 1981, and his government became the first left-wing government in 23 years. In the UK and US high inflation was being met with tight monetary policy, but he and his government took a different course, using fiscal measures to support demand, and hoping that productivity improvements that followed would tame inflation. Although the demand stimulus did help France avoid the sharp recession suffered by its neighbours, inflation remained high in 1981 (not helped by increases in minimum wages and other measures that raised costs) and rose in 1982, at a time when inflation elsewhere was falling. The sharp deterioration in the trade balance that followed led to pressure on the Franc, and the government’s fiscal measures were reversed. Economic policy changed course.

To a macroeconomist, this story is very different from today, where Eurozone inflation is 0.4% and French inflation 0.5%. However, the political story of the early 1980s associates fiscal stimulus and demand expansion with ‘socialist policies’, and their failure and abandonment is associated with Mitterrand staying in power until 1995. When the markets again turned on fiscal excess in Greece in 2010, perhaps many on the left thought they would once again have to subjugate their political instincts to market pressure and undertake fiscal consolidation. Unfortunately it was not the 1980s, but events over 50 years earlier, that represented the better historical parallel.

The Liquidity Trap and Macro Textbooks

Over the last eleven days something unusual has happened – I have not only failed to post a blog of my own, but I have not even read anyone else’s posts. Instead I have taken advantage of a sabbatical term to take a break [1] in Umbria, during a time of year when it is still cool enough to walk, but not too cold in the Piano Grande. Before I left I did write a couple of things that I thought I might quickly post while away, but with the help of the Italians’ penchant for starting dinner late and eating four (or more) courses that idea somehow got lost.  

So I’m spending part of today catching up, and reminding myself why Paul Krugman and Martin Wolf are such great writers. (For example, from the former, a masterful analysis of the decent into worldwide austerity, and from the latter, a perfect short account of why when it comes to government debt the Eurozone really is different.) What I want to pick up on here is this Krugman post, where he questions the description in a Nick Crafts piece of higher inflation as a way out of the liquidity trap as being ‘textbook’. (See also Ryan Avent.)

So is raising inflation expectations to avoid the liquidity trap textbook or not? Let’s take the 2000 edition of the best selling undergraduate macro textbook. Here ‘liquidity trap’ does not appear in the index. There is a page on Japan in the 1990s, and in that there is one paragraph on how expanding the money supply, even if it was not able to lower interest rates, could by raising inflation expectations and therefore reducing real interest rates stimulate demand. One paragraph among 500+ pages is not enough to make something ‘textbook’, so it seems as if Paul Krugman has a point.

Yet how can this be? It is not one of those cases where textbooks struggle to catch up with recent events, because the Great Depression was a clear example of the liquidity trap at work. How can perhaps the major macroeconomic event of the 20^th century, which arguably gave rise to the discipline itself, have so little influence on how monetary policy is discussed? Yet it is possible to argue that the discussion is there, in an oblique form. A standard way of analysing the Great Depression within the context of IS-LM, which this popular textbook takes, is to contrast the ‘spending hypothesis’ with the ‘money hypothesis’: was the depression an inevitable result of a negative shock to the IS curve, or as Freidman argued could better monetary policy have prevented this shock hitting output?

A standard objection to the money hypothesis is that nominal interest rates did (after a time) fall to their lower bound. The counterargument – which the textbook also suggests - is that, if the money supply had not contracted, long run neutrality would imply that eventually inflation would have to have been higher, and therefore real interest rates on average would be lower. So in one way the story about how higher inflation could avoid a slump is there.

What is missing is the link with inflation targeting. Because textbooks focus on the fiction of money supply targeting when giving their basic account of how monetary policy works, and then mention inflation targeting as a kind of add-on without relating it to the basic model, they fail to point out how a fixed inflation target cuts off this inflation expectations route to recovery. Quantitative Easing (QE) does not change this, because without higher inflation targets any increase in the money supply will not be allowed to be sustained enough to raise inflation. In this way inflation targeting institutionalises the failure of monetary policy that Friedman complained about in the 1930s. Where most of our textbooks fail is in making this clear.    

[1] Sometimes known as holidays, these are things that we Europeans are forced to take many more of than Americans, leading to great frustration and misery (or maybe not).