A New Macropolicy Assignment

With central bankers rightly pessimistic about fighting recessions, maybe it is time to give that responsibility to politicians, while keeping central banks in charge of keeping inflation at target.

At the recent Jackson Hole conference of central bankers there seemed to be a general acceptance that central bankers just do not have the tools to effectively fight a new recession. I discussed some of the reasons here. The most familiar is the lower bound for nominal interest rates, but Anna Stansbury and Larry Summers argue that even before we get to the lower bound interest rates may be an ineffective stabilisation tool when they are very low. [1]

This is not a problem specific to this period of time. Most people agree that the natural real interest rate (the real rate at which inflation is stable) has fallen with little sign that this fall will be reversed. That means nominal interest rates are likely to remain low for decades. So its not just this recession where monetary policy is impotent, but every recession in the foreseeable future.

One response is that, as I argued in my earlier piece, central bankers should aim to develop new tools that are effective in recessions. This includes differential interest rates for borrowers and savers, and helicopter money. But for whatever reason central bankers are in no hurry to do this. Instead their current view is that fiscal policy needs to take some of the burden of fighting recessions.

Unfortunately for a variety of reasons many politicians in government have not got the message. In the Eurozone they are stuck with primitive fiscal rules that assume monetary policy can always control demand. In the US and perhaps the UK they think a fiscal stimulus is giving the rich tax breaks, which is perhaps the most ineffective way of stimulating demand.

More generally we have had decades were central banks were responsible for controlling inflation and avoiding downturns, and both politicians and the media (and to some extent economists) will require something more than one Jackson hole conference to shift this expectation. Maybe another recession might do it, but the largest recession since WWII failed to do the job. Part of the problem is that central bankers will try to fight the next recession with ineffective measures like Quantitative Easing, and this appearance of activity will fool too many into thinking they have the problem in hand.

As we saw in the last recession, the danger is not just that politicians will fail to fight a recession, but they may actually do the wrong thing. In their minds and also the minds of most media commentators, the central bank is responsible for controlling demand (and therefore fighting a recession) but politicians are responsible for controlling the deficit. This leads to a perverse response in an economic downturn if monetary policy is ineffective.

Macroeconomists call a simple division of labour between monetary and fiscal policy an assignment. What I call the conventional assignment is that interest rates control demand (and therefore inflation) and politicians control the deficit. I called this assignment conventional because it had become ingrained in the minds of economists, the media and politicians. Right now the conventional assignment is not working in terms of fighting recessions.

If central banks remain conservative in developing new tools, what we need to do is give back to politicians the responsibility for fighting economic downturns. One way of doing that is to take monetary policy away from independent central banks, and give it back to politicians. This would make politicians responsible for avoiding recessions as well as controlling inflation, and they will realise that a fiscal stimulus is a more effective means of doing this than any kind of monetary policy stimulus.

I do not want to rehearse the arguments for or against central bank independence (CBI), but simply note that the popularity of CBI comes from a suspicion that politicians are unreliable when it comes to fighting inflation. And unlike supporters of MMT I see no reason to believe that interest rates chosen by independent central bankers are not effective at moderating periods of excessive inflation.

My suggestion is instead a modified assignment. Central bankers remain responsible for controlling inflation, but politicians become responsible for fighting recessions. That is two different bodies managing the same variable - aggregate demand - but at different parts of the business cycle. Think of it like a car, with independent central bankers as the brake and politicians as the accelerator.

Cars are designed so it is difficult to push the accelerator and brake at the same time. We need something similar for this assignment: some way of coordinating between politicians and central banks so they don’t try to manage demand at the same time. The obvious coordination device is the adoption of a common belief about what the NAIRU is (or something similar to the NAIRU) and a common forecast (as actions will depend on expectations of future states of the economy).

The advantage of this asymmetric assignment is that it makes politicians responsible for tackling recessions, which in turn avoids a mistaken view that in a recession they should be controlling the deficit. In other words it is an assignment that rules out austerity. Any assignment that prevents austerity has to be worth considering.

[1] I will wait to see the paper before commenting on this idea, but there is no theoretical reason why the IS curve should be linear. What we need is some empirical evidence, but unfortunately the microfoundations hegemony means that is thin on the ground.

Explaining the last ten years

The Great Recession was larger than any previous post WWII recession. But that is not what it will be mainly remembered for. Unlike previous recessions, it appears to have led to, or coincided with, a permanent reduction in the productive potential [1] of the economy relative to previous trends. As unemployment today in the US and UK is not very different from pre-recession levels, then another way of saying the same thing is that growth in labour productivity and real wages over the last seven years has been much lower than pre-recession trends. (As employment has not yet recovered in Europe, I will focus on the US and UK here.)

I have posted charts showing this for the UK many times, so here is something similar for the US. It plots the log of real GDP (green) against the CBO’s (Congressional Budget Office) estimate of potential output (yellow). Unlike the UK, potential growth in the US does not appear constant from 1955, but the CBO has potential output growth between 3 to 3.5% in most years between 1970 and the early 2000s. The break created by the Great Recession is clear: potential growth fell to as low as 1% immediately after the recession, is currently running at 1.5%, and the CBO hopes it will recover to 2% by 2020.

US Actual (green) and Potential (yellow, source CBO) Output, logged. Source: FRED.

There seem to be two ways of thinking about this decline in potential output growth. One is that the slowdown in productivity growth was happening anyway, and has nothing to do with the global financial crisis and recession. This seems unlikely to be the major story. For the UK we have to rewrite the immediate pre-recession years as boom periods (a large positive output gap), even though most indicators suggests they were not. A global synchronised slowdown in productivity growth seems improbable, as some countries are at the technological frontier and others are catching up. As Ball notes, “in the countries hit hardest by the recession, the growth rate of potential output is much lower today than it was before 2008.” However the coincidence story is the one that both the OECD and IMF assume when they calculate output gaps or cyclically adjusted budget deficits. The CBO numbers for the US shown above adopt the coincidence theory to some extent, reducing potential growth from 3.5% in 2002 to 2.0% by the end of 2007.

If we stick to the more plausible idea that this is all somehow the result of the financial crisis and recession, we can again split explanations into two types: those that focus on the financial crisis and argue that crises of this type (rather than other types of recession) impact on potential output, and those that look at the impact of the recession itself. The distinction is important in understanding the impact of austerity. If the length and depth of the recession has permanently hit potential output, as Fatas and Summers suggest, then the cost of austerity is much greater than we could have imagined.

Looking at previous financial crises in individual countries, as Nick Oulton has done for example, does suggest a permanent hit to potential, but I have noted before that this result leans heavily on experience in Latin American countries, and Sweden’s recovery from its 1990 crisis suggests a more optimistic story. Estimates based on OECD countries alone suggest more modest impacts on potential output, of around only 2%.

What about the impact of the recession itself? Here it is helpful to go through the textbook story of how a large negative demand shock should impact the global economy. Lower demand lowers output and employment. Workers cut wages, and firms follow with price cuts. The fall in inflation leads the central bank to cut real interest rates, which restores demand, employment and output to its pre-recession trend.

We know why this time was different: monetary policy hit the zero lower bound (ZLB) and fiscal policy in 2010 went in the wrong direction. Yet employment has recovered to a considerable extent (although less so in the US than the UK). A recovery in employment but not output (relative to pre-recession trends) means by definition a decline in labour productivity growth. How could this happen?

The table below shows the rate of growth of real and nominal wages in the UK and US in pre and post recession periods.

US	2002-7	2008-15
Annual wage growth (1)	3.8%	2.1%
Annual price growth (2)	2.5%	1.5%
Difference	1.3%	0.6%
UK
Annual wage growth	4.5%	1.7%
Annual price growth	2.8%	2.1%
Difference	1.7%	-0.4%

1. Compensation per employee, source OECD Economic Outlook
2. GDP deflator, source OECD Economic Outlook

Nominal wage growth followed the textbook story. But price inflation did not fall to match, implying steadily falling real wages, particularly in the UK. This could just reflect the decline in productivity, which occurred either coincidentally or as a result of the financial crisis and recession.

The financial crisis could have reduced productivity growth if a ‘broken’ financial sector had stopped financing high productivity investment projects, or kept inefficient firms going through ‘pretend and extend’ lending. The recession could have reduced productivity growth by reducing investment, and therefore embodied [2] technical progress. Perhaps this loss of embodied technical progress occurs in all recessions, but we do not notice it because recoveries are quick and complete.

However the causality could be the other way around. Falling real wages led firms to switch production techniques such that they employed more labour per unit of capital. Workers priced themselves into jobs. The big question then becomes why did firms let this happen? Why did firms not take advantage of lower wage increases to reduce their own prices, and choose instead to raise their profit margins?

One story involves a secular increase in firms’ profit margins (Paul Krugman’s robber barons idea), either because of a reduction in goods market competition (profit margins are sometimes called the degree of monopoly), or a rise in rent seeking as Bob Solow suggests (HT DeLong). [3] However it is not obvious why this should be connected to the recession. If it is not, it is like the coincident and exogenous productivity decline. We will not get back to the earlier productivity growth path without reversing whatever caused this secular rise in profit margins.

Another, in some ways more optimistic, story involves different degrees of nominal rigidity: nominal wages are less sticky than nominal prices. As a result nominal wages led prices in reacting to the recession, but now prices are ‘catching up’ and profit margins will fall back. That would fit nicely with inflation continuing below target for some time, and real wages and productivity recovering. It is an optimistic story, because an additional demand stimulus would increase wage but not price inflation, and we would see rapid growth in labour productivity as firms reversed their earlier labour for capital substitution.

Unfortunately recent data suggests this is not happening. Instead core inflation is now above target in the US and rising to target in the UK.    

So is there some other way that a large recession in itself can cause a large reduction in potential output? Macroeconomists group such explanations under a general heading called ‘hysteresis mechanisms’: mechanisms whereby recent history can have permanent effects. Ball summarises the three main types of mechanism that economists have identified: “it appears that recessions sharply reduce capital accumulation, have long-term effects on employment (largely through lower labour force participation), and may slow the growth of total factor productivity.” If technical progress is embodied, we can link the first and last. That will be the subject of a later post.  

[1] For those not familiar with the term, a traditional way of thinking about potential output is that it is what output and incomes could have been if we had avoided booms and recessions, or equivalently if we had avoided domestically induced variations in inflation. Potential output can increase either because the labour force increases, or because labour productivity increases due to either technical progress and investment.

[2] Embodied technical progress is greater labour productivity brought about through new machinery i.e. it needs investment for it to happen.

[3] Postscript (just): Here is Martin Sandbu on the same issue   

Confidence as a political device

Some technical references but the key point does not need them

This is a contribution to the discussion about models started by Krugman, DeLong and Summers, and in particular to the use of confidence. (Martin Sandbu has an excellent summary, although as you will see I think he is missing something.) The idea that confidence can on occasion be important, and that it can be modelled, is not (in my view) in dispute. For example the very existence of banks depends on confidence (that depositors can withdraw their money when they wish), and when that confidence disappears you get a bank run.

But the leap from the statement that ‘in some circumstances confidence matters’ to ‘we should worry about bond market confidence in an economy with its own central bank in the middle of a depression’ is a huge one, and I think Tony Yates and others are in danger of making that leap without justification. Yes, there are circumstances when it may be optimal for a country with its own central bank to default, and Corsetti and Dedola (in a paper I discussed here) show how that can lead to multiple equilibria.

But just as Krugman wanted to emulate Woody Allen, I want to as well but this time pull Dani Rodrik from behind the sign. In his excellent new book (which I have almost finished reading) Rodrik talks about the fact that in economics there are usually many models, and the key question is their applicability. So you have to ask, for the US and UK in 2009, was there the slightest chance that either government wanted to default? The question is not would they be forced to default, because with their own central bank they would not be, but would they choose to default. And the answer has to be a categorical no. Why would they, with interest rates so low and debt easy to sell.

The argument goes that if the market suddenly gets spooked and stops buying debt, printing money will cause inflation, and in those circumstances the government might choose to default. But we were in the midst of the biggest recession since the 1930s. Any money creation would have had no immediate impact on inflation. Of course their central banks had just begun printing lots of money as part of Quantitative Easing, and even 5 years later where is the inflation! So once again there would be no chance that the government would choose to default: the Corsetti and Dedola paper is not applicable. (Robert makes a similar point about the Blanchard paper. I will not deal with the exchange rate collapse idea because Paul already has. A technical aside: Martin raises a point about UK banks overseas currency activity, which I will try to get back to in a later post.)

Ah, but what if the market remains spooked for so long that eventually inflation rises. The markets stop buying US or UK debt because they think that the government will choose to default, and even after 5 or 10 years and still no default the markets continue to think that, even though they are desperate for safe assets!? In Corsetti and Dedola agents are rational, so we have left that paper way behind. We have entered, I’m afraid, the land of pure make believe.

So there is no applicable model that could justify the confidence effects that might have made us cautious in 2009 about issuing more debt. There are models about an acute shortage of safe assets on the other hand, which seem to be ignored by those arguing against fiscal stimulus. Nor is there the slightest bit of evidence that the markets were ever even thinking about being spooked in this way.

Martin makes the point that just because something has not yet been formally modelled does not mean it does not happen. Of course, and indeed if he means by model a fully microfounded DSGE model I have made this point many times myself. But you can also use the term model in a much more general sense, as a set of mutually consistent arguments. It is in that sense that I mean no applicable model.

Now to the additional point I really wanted to make. When people invoke the idea of confidence, other people (particularly economists) should be automatically suspicious. The reason is that it frequently allows those who represent the group whose confidence is being invoked to further their own self interest. The financial markets are represented by City or Wall Street economists, and you invariably see market confidence being invoked to support a policy position they have some economic or political interest in. Bond market economists never saw a fiscal consolidation they did not like, so the saying goes, so of course market confidence is used to argue against fiscal expansion. Employers drum up the importance of maintaining their confidence whenever taxes on profits (or high incomes) are involved. As I argue in this paper, there is a generic reason why financial market economists play up the importance of market confidence, so they can act as high priests. (Did these same economists go on about the dangers of rising leverage when confidence really mattered, before the global financial crisis?)

The general lesson I would draw is this. If the economics point towards a conclusion, and people argue against it based on ‘confidence’, you should be very, very suspicious. You should ask where is the model (or at least a mutually consistent set of arguments), and where is the evidence that this model or set of arguments is applicable to this case? Policy makers who go with confidence based arguments that fail these tests because it accords with their instincts are, perhaps knowingly, following the political agenda of someone else.     

The last 7 years are an argument against inflation targeting

The big controversy since the Great Recession began has been about fiscal policy: government spending, taxes and the budget deficit. In contrast monetary policy has not hit the headlines so much. This is understandable: while fiscal policy has oscillated from fiscal stimulus in 2009 to fiscal austerity in 2010, once the recession became clear (to some earlier than others) monetary policy in the UK, US and Japan appears to have been unambiguously expansionary, with interest rates staying at historical lows. The ECB is the exception, raising rates just before a second Eurozone recession.

Look a little closer however and we find something rather more worrying. Most people who base their view on economics rather than politics would regard the recovery from the Great Recession as disappointing. We have got particularly good reasons to be disappointed in the UK, but many economists think the US and Japan could also have done better at reducing unemployment more rapidly. More worrying still, the recession and the slow recovery may have caused permanent damage. (See Antonio Fatás here on his work with Larry Summers.) In the UK in particular we appear to have permanently lost a massive 15% of income during the recession. That kind of loss over a 7 year period is totally unprecedented in peacetime.

There are well known mechanisms by which short term output losses could lead to a permanent reduction in output capacity, known collectively by economists as hysteresis mechanisms. They include deskilling of the unemployed, less capital and less capital embodied technical progress. Just how permanent they are varies by type, but they all involve real costs in terms of lost output. One that worries me a lot is how expectations about trend output get downgraded, which can become self-fulfilling for quite some time.

The people whose job it is to make sure recessions are short-lived and these kinds of mechanisms do not take hold are in central banks. Yet if you ask monetary policy makers what they think about the last 7 years, they will not hang their heads in shame. They will not say it has been a disaster, but what more could we do? They will not say that, with interest rates near zero, they were powerless to do much, because unconventional policies like Quantitative Easing were poor instruments and government fiscal policy was moving in the wrong direction. Instead they will probably say that overall the last 7 years have not been too bad. This very different view seems both odd and worrying.

The reason however is straightforward. Monetary policy makers either regard their primary target as inflation, or are explicitly told that inflation should be their primary target. While below target now, inflation was above target in 2011 and 2012, so on balance maybe the record is not too bad. So looking at what they were asked to do, monetary policy makers feel little remorse.

In the UK we can put this in a rather startling way. Imagine someone in 2011 discovered a magical new policy instrument that was guaranteed to stimulate the economy, and gifted it to the Bank of England. In all probability they would not have used it. For four months in 2011 three members of the MPC voted to raise rates. We were just two MPC members away from following the ECB’s disastrous course. Just because we avoided that calamity by a whisker does not mean we should pretend it didn’t happen.

This all comes down to what economists have called the divine coincidence. This is the idea that you do not need to target both output and inflation. Ensuring that inflation is on target in a considered way (by for example looking at inflation two years ahead) will stabilise output as well. While the US central bank has a dual mandate (essentially both inflation and output), central banks that were made independent later (like the Bank of England) have inflation as their primary target. One of the main reasons for this was a growing belief before the Great Recession that the divine coincidence would hold. Target forecast inflation and output will look after itself.

The idea of the divine coincidence has not had a good recession! As I explained in one of my better posts, if the divine coincidence worked a central bank in a parallel universe that targeted the output gap rather than inflation should feel exactly the same way about the last 7 years as our inflation targeters. Yet as I explained there and above they would instead feel ashamed and frustrated. We know there are good empirical reasons why the divine coincidence might break down when inflation is low: resistance to nominal wage cuts will mean that monetary policy makers targeting inflation in a recession will overreact to positive inflation shocks like oil price increases and underreact to below target inflation. Add hysteresis, and you can get lasting damage.

So one lesson of the last 7 years must be that relying on the divine coincidence is a mistake. A primary goal of the central bank is to end recessions quickly, and giving it a single primary target of inflation can detract from that. One obvious improvement is to give the central bank a dual mandate, although the best way to specify that is not clear. Another possibility is to combine output and inflation into a single target, and yet another is to raise the inflation target to a level where the divine coincidence might still hold. Luckily for me I have thought quite a bit about these questions already, but in the next few months I may need to come off any fences that remain.