The Autumn Statement marks the return of austerity

One of the problems with instant responses is that you miss the big picture. And although everything I wrote immediately after the Autumn Statement was perfectly correct, I too failed to spell out the big picture. The big picture is that austerity has returned. (Credit to Rick for a much better call.)

Let me explain. Unlike some, I do not just define austerity as fiscal consolidation or government spending cuts. Instead I define it as fiscal consolidation that creates an output gap. That should normally only happen for three reasons:

1. you are part of a monetary union (or fixed rate regime) and the rest of the union is not doing fiscal consolidation (as much).
   
   
2. if interest rates are stuck at their lower bound.
   
   
3. If the monetary authority is incompetent.

I believe it makes sense to define austerity that way, because only then does fiscal consolidation lead to a waste of aggregate resources.

A competent central bankers’ tell (as in poker) for being at the zero lower bound is that they embark on new Quantitative Easing (QE). Central bankers know that interest rates are a much more reliable instrument than QE, so expanding QE tells us we are at the lower bound as they see it. We also know that fiscal expansion is a more reliable instrument than QE. So if central banks are doing QE, it pretty well follows that we have austerity.

Now Hammond could have changed that on Wednesday by announcing a significant fiscal stimulus relative to previous plans. He did not. The increase in public investment, as I said in my previous post and the IFS confirms, was small, as were his other measures. This, as Martin Sandbu points out (who, naturally, also called it right), was a huge missed opportunity. Don’t get misled by actually borrowing levels to judge changes in fiscal stance: most of the additional borrowing was unintentional.

As I have tried to explain on many occasions, the nature of policy pre-Brexit was different from policy in 2010 and 2011. The later was austerity as I like to define it. The former was bad in many ways, one of which was to run the risk of more austerity if we had a negative demand shock. Brexit was a negative demand shock, and so we now have austerity, and Hammond did far too little to rectify his predecessors mistake.

So why did Hammond keep his squeeze on the public sector’s current spending largely unchanged (again, see my previous post for the relevant chart)? Why not give some money to the NHS? Perhaps he too wants to pursue deficit deceit: to shrink the state. Another possible reason is that the Treasury has persuaded him that he should not ‘take any risks’ with public debt. Let me end by saying a bit about that.

Another definition of austerity beside the two already mentioned is an economic policy that focuses above all else on the need to reduce government debt levels. That is the sense of austerity being used in this BBC piece. Needless to say I very much side with Jonathan Portes rather than Michael McMahon on this. But many journalists are puzzled nevertheless: what about all that stuff about the world falling in if debt to GDP reached 90% of GDP? At what level do those who buy UK government debt start to worry about default? I will talk about that tomorrow.

Central bankers and their irrational fear

Mervyn King said

“Central banks are often accused of being obsessed with inflation. This is untrue. If they are obsessed with anything, it is with fiscal policy.”

As an academic turned central banker, King knew of what he spoke. The fear is sometimes called fiscal dominance: that they will be forced to monetise government debt in such a way that means inflation rises out of control.

I believe this fear is a key factor behind central banks’ reluctance to think seriously about helicopter money. Creating money is no longer a taboo: with Quantitative Easing huge amounts of money have been created. But this money has bought financial assets, which can subsequently be sold to mop up the money that has been created. Under helicopter money the central bank creates money to give it away. If that money needs to be mopped up after a recession is over in order to control inflation, the central bank might run out of assets to do so. A good name for this is ‘policy insolvency’. [1]

There is a simple way to deal with this problem. [2] The government commits to always providing the central bank with the assets they need to control inflation. If, after some doses of helicopter money, the central bank needs and gets refinanced in this way, then helicopter money becomes like a form of bond financed fiscal stimulus, but where the bond finance is delayed. In my view that delay may be crucial in overcoming the deficit fetishism that has proved so politically successful over the last five years, as well as giving central banks a much more effective unconventional monetary instrument than QE. [3] But central banks do not want to go there, partly because they worry about the possibility of a government that would renege on that commitment.

The fear is irrational for two reasons. First, central banks already face the possibility that they may make sufficient losses on QE that they may require refinancing by the government. The Bank of England has requested and been given a commitment to cover those losses. There is no conceptual difference between this and underwriting a helicopter drop except probabilities.

The second reason is more basic. In today’s world, where in the major economies it is now well understood that interest rates need to rise in a boom to control inflation, it is hard to imagine a government that would make its central bank impotent by refusing to provide it with assets. If such a government ever existed, it would have long before ended central bank independence because it wanted to stop it increasing interest rates with the assets it already had. Under the government of central bank nightmares, the central bank would lose its independence before it could complain that the government was reneging on an earlier commitment to underwrite helicopter money.

The fear of fiscal dominance is itself not irrational, although it seems increasingly unlikely it would happen in a modern democracy. What is irrational is thinking that allowing helicopter money in a recession would make fiscal dominance more likely to happen. [4]

I have also argued that this irrational fear has already been costly. I have described how the widespread adoption of austerity at the beginning of the recovery represents the failure to politicians to follow basic macro. Here central banks become a policy intermediary between academia and politicians: they have the knowledge of how costly austerity can be when rates are zero. But what politicians heard from senior central bankers was not these costs, but encouragement to pursue austerity. An irrational fear of budget deficits may be one explanation for central banks being economical with the truth.

Central banks overcame one big psychological barrier when they undertook Quantitative Easing. That was the first, and perhaps the more important, stage in ending their primitive fear of fiscal dominance. They now need to complete the process, so we can start having rational discussions about alternatives to QE.

[1] A central bank cannot actually become insolvent, as this post explains.

[2] No one to my knowledge has ever proposed giving the central bank the legal power to collect a poll tax.

[3] A key feature of deficit fetishism is a concern about deficits in the short term. Politicians seem happy to take measures that cut deficits in the short term even if debt becomes higher in the longer term. Indeed the analysis presented by DeLong and Summers argues that hysteresis forces would not have to be that large before austerity would raise long run debt to GDP levels. We also know that deficit fetishism is specific to increases in debt caused by recessions: over the longer run if anything deficit bias implies rising rather than falling levels of government debt. So any form of fiscal stimulus that avoided an increase in debt in the short run but not in the long run would avoid deficit fetishism. That is what a money financed fiscal stimulus aka helicopter money aka People’s QE could do.

[4] Why am I confident that a government could not be so obsessed with its debt that it might renege on an underwriting pledge? It is because deficit fetishism is only politically attractive in a recession when individuals are themselves cutting back on their borrowing, and therefore feel the government should do the same. This will not apply when the recovery has taken place and inflation is in danger of exceeding its target.

Haldane on alternatives to QE, and what he missed out

Andrew Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, gave a typically well researched and thoughtful talk recently. The main subject matter was the problem of the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB): why we may hit it much more often than we would like, and why QE is not a great instrument for dealing with it. To quote:

“QE’s effectiveness as a monetary instrument seems likely to be highly state-contingent, and hence uncertain, at least relative to interest rates. This uncertainty is not just the result of the more limited evidence base on QE than on interest rates. Rather, it is an intrinsic feature of the transmission mechanism of QE.”

In the past I have emphasised the point about lack of evidence simply because it is obvious. But as Haldane’s discussion shows, the problems are more basic than that. Some people argue that we can always get the result we want with enough QE. Yet if the central bank and the public never know how effective any amount of QE will be, then lags make it a poor instrument. It is refreshing to see a senior member of the Bank finally acknowledge its limitations.

Haldane considers two alternative ways of dealing with, or avoiding, the ZLB: a higher inflation target and getting rid of cash so that negative interest rates of whatever size become possible. The first is obviously welfare reducing, but as Eric Lonergan argues the second is likely to be as well. (See also Tony Yates.) But what is really strange about Haldane’s analysis is what is missing from his discussion.

One omission is a discussion of the possibility that targeting something other than inflation might help. The other omission is any discussion of helicopter money. There are some basic contradictions in the Bank of England’s views on helicopter money, but because central bankers tend to talk to each other I suspect they remain concealed. One argument is that helicopter money will somehow reduce confidence in the currency, but then the Bank seems happy to research getting rid of cash and imposing negative rates on money as if this is all about technicalities. [Postscript - meant to link to John Cochrane's discussion, and here is a reply by Miles Kimball.] I should have referenced  Another argument is that helicopter money will threaten the Bank’s independence because it will have to rely on government to (if necessary) recapitalise it, when at the same time the Bank has already obtained an underwriting guarantee for losses on QE. Also strange is the argument that independence will be threatened once the Bank does a 'helicopter drop' because governments will want the money for themselves, as if politicians had not noticed the amount of money being created under QE. After all Jeremy Corbyn's proposal was a response to the reality of QE, not the possibility of helicopter money.

The really ironic argument is that helicopter money is too like fiscal policy, and that there should be democratic control over fiscal policy. This is what central bankers mean when they talk about blurring the lines between monetary and fiscal policy. The argument is ironic because I am sure that if you actually asked most people which they would prefer - being charged to hold money, 4% average inflation, or occasionally getting a cheque from the Bank - the answer would be emphatic. So we rule out helicopter money because its undemocratic, but we rule out a discussion of helicopter money because ordinary people might like the idea.

There is also an element of hypocrisy. It is sometimes argued that helicopter money is unnecessary because it has a very similar impact to conventional fiscal policy. This is true, but it deliberately ignores the fact that governments around the world have gone for fiscal contraction because of worries about the immediate prospects for debt. It is not as if the possibility of helicopter money restricts the abilities of governments in any way. If governments undertake fiscal stimulus in a recession such that helicopter money is no longer necessary, it will not happen.

So it is good that some people at the Bank are thinking about alternatives to QE, which is a lousy instrument with unfortunate, and potentially permanent, distributional consequences. It is a shame that the Bank is not even acknowledging that there is a straightforward and cost free solution to this problem. My last two posts have involved defending central bank independence, but with independence comes a responsibility not to exclude discussion of particular policy options simply because they break some kind of taboo.      

Corbyn, QE and financial interests

Although this uses UK events as a spur, the point about QE is universal

Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn has shown some flexibility on his idea of People’s QE. That is perhaps a good sign for the future (if he wins), in terms of responding to informed criticism. As I have written before, the original proposal took two perfectly good ideas (we can do better than current QE, and the need for a National Investment Bank) and combined them in an unfortunate way. I was annoyed that this proposal had been made public with so little consultation, and that as a result it might discredit both of the two good ideas. Perhaps more optimistically it will instead spark a debate on each individually.

Here I want to talk about Quantitative Easing (QE). The basic idea behind QE is that by buying long term assets at a time when their price is high (interest rates are low) to make their price even higher (interest rates even lower) in the short term, and selling them back later when asset prices are lower (and interest rates higher), you could stimulate additional demand. At first sight it seems not too dissimilar to a central bank’s normal activities in changing short rates. There are however two major differences. The first, which in principle does not matter too much, is that the amount of money you create to ensure short term interest rates fall is modest. The amount of money you have to create to have any significant impact on long rates is much greater.

The second more important point is predictability. The central bank can have a large and fairly predictable influence on short term rates in the market. The impact of any amount of QE on long rates is much more uncertain, both in theory and in practice. Worse still, because its impact depends on certain institutionally specific market segmentation, or some very time specific signalling, and may also be quite non-linear, there is no reason to believe that any knowledge gained this time round will still be relevant the next time the instrument is used. In short, it is a lousy instrument.

That should mean that everyone is looking around for a better way of doing things when short rates hit their lower bound. Fiscal stimulus is the obvious candidate, but we know the political problems there. If you want to be kind, you can say that they illustrate the difficulties of apparently delegating stabilisation policy to a central bank, and then telling politicians that just when stabilisation is most needed they have to do it themselves. For that reason helicopter money is not just fiscal stimulus by the back door (and if the central bank is always underwritten by the fiscal authority, that could be all it is), but a means of giving the central bank the tools to do its job effectively whatever the size and sign of shock.

In the absence of an appropriate government fiscal policy, I find the logic for helicopter money compelling and the arguments against it pretty weak. But just as with fiscal policy, just because something makes good macroeconomic sense does not mean it will happen. I have always been reluctant to pay too much attention to the distributional impact of monetary policy, because it seemed like one of those occasions when even well meaning attention to distribution can mess up good policy. Yet in terms of the political economy of replacing QE, perhaps we should.

It is more likely than not that QE will lead to central bank losses. By this I mean that the central bank will have less money than if they had not undertaken the policy: whether they actually have to be recapitalised by the government is not the key issue here. After all, they are buying high, and selling low. That is integral to the policy. Who gains from these losses. Where does the money permanently created because of these losses go? To the financial sector, and the owners of financial assets (who are selling to the central bank high, and buying back low). In that sense, likely losses on QE will involve a transfer from the public to the financial sector.

If QE was the only means of stabilising the economy in a liquidity trap, because fiscal policy was out of bounds for political reasons, then so be it. The social benefits would far outweigh any distributional costs, even if the latter could not be undone elsewhere. But if QE is a highly ineffective instrument, and there are better instruments available, you have to ask in whose interest is it that we stick with QE?      

People's QE and Corbyn’s QE

Politicians can be adept at co-opting attractive sounding terms to their own cause, even when they distort their meaning while doing so. Osborne announced what was in reality a partial but large increase in the minimum wage, but he called it a ‘living wage’. This was especially devious, as calculations of the actual living wage take into account the tax credits that Osborne was at the same time cutting.

Is Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Peoples QE’ an example of the same thing? It is certainly true that the way that some macroeconomists, including myself, have used the term is different from Corbyn’s idea. For us Peoples QE is just another term for helicopter money. Helicopter money was a term first used by that well known radical Milton Friedman. It involves the central bank creating money, and distributing it directly to the people by some means. It is a sure fire way [1] for the central bank to boost demand: what economists sometimes call a money financed fiscal stimulus.

The idea has been recently revived, most prominently in the UK by Adair Turner, because of the failure of conventional monetary policy (changing interest rates) to bring a quick end to the Great Recession, which in turn is because governments were undertaking fiscal austerity (a bond financed fiscal contraction) rather than fiscal stimulus. In contrast central banks in Japan, the US and UK, and now the Eurozone, have been creating money to buy financial assets (mainly government debt), which is called Quantitative Easing (QE). Hence the term People’s QE for helicopter money: instead of the central bank creating money to buy assets, it creates money and gives it to the people.

The genesis of Corbyn’s QE seems rather different. Corbyn adviser Richard Murphy had previously suggested what he called a Green Infrastructure QE, which is that a “new [QE] programme should buy the new debt that will be issued in the form of bonds by the Green Investment Bank to fund sustainable energy, local authorities to pay for new houses, NHS trusts to build new hospitals and education authorities to build schools.” This in turn is related to two ideas: first a near universal view among macroeconomists that public sector investment in infrastructure should be rising not falling when interest rates are low and labour is cheap, and second that a National Investment Bank (NIB) might be useful in helping to encourage private sector investment. (See, for example, the recommendations of the LSE growth commission.)

The main difference between helicopter money and Corbyn’s QE therefore seems to be where the money created by the central bank goes: to individuals in the form of a cheque from the central bank, or to financing investment projects. I think that is wrong, and to see why we need to ask an obvious question: what is this policy innovation designed to achieve. I think it is here that confusion has arisen.

As I noted above, the idea behind helicopter money is to provide a tool for the central bank to use when interest rate changes are no longer possible or effective. With an independent central bank, that means that they, not the government, get to decide when helicopter money happens. In contrast, if your goal is to increase either public or private investment (or both) for a prolonged period, then its timing and amount should be something the government decides. While QE is hopefully going to be something that is unusual and rare, the goal of an investment bank is generally thought to be more long term, and not something that only happens in severe recessions.

For that reason, Corbyn’s QE looks like one of those ideas that is superficially attractive because it seems to kill two birds with one stone, but on reflection turns out to be a bad idea. If we want to keep an independent central bank we do not want the government putting the bank under pressure to do QE because the government wants more investment, and if that does not happen we do not want the central bank deciding whether extra investment happens. Indeed some of those who dislike the idea of helicopter money have already been using Corbyn’s QE to say ‘I told you helicopter money was a slippery slope that would lead to the end of central bank independence’.

However I think it is unfair and unproductive to leave it there. Suppose that a NIB is created, not on the back of QE but using more conventional forms of finance. (If the government wants to encourage it, just directly subsidise that finance with conventional borrowing. Don’t be put off doing so by deficit fetishism.) Suppose we also like the concept of helicopter money - not for now, but for the next time interest rates hit their lower bound and the central bank wants more stimulus. In those circumstances, it might well make sense for helicopter money to be used not only to send cheques to individuals, but also to bring forward investment financed by the NIB, or public sector investment financed directly by the state. If those investment projects could get off the ground quickly, and crucially would not have happened for some time otherwise, then what I have elsewhere described as ‘democratic helicopter money’ would make sense. [2] This is because investment that also boosts the supply side is likely to be a far more effective form of stimulus than cheques posted to individuals.

So one day, this form of Corbyn’s QE could happen. But we need to get the idea of helicopter money, and the need for public investment and a National Investment Bank, accepted in their own right first. Putting the two ideas together right now is misconceived, and is in danger of discrediting two potentially good ideas.

[1] Unless you believe in complete Ricardian Equivalence

[2] When I put forward the idea of ‘democratic helicopter money’ here to Tim Harford, Tim responded that he thought it was probably the most radical and politically infeasible idea of those he had canvassed. If Corbyn wins, I will have pleasure in reminding him of that!  

The Ethics of Helicopter Money

 A lot of the discussion of helicopter money is about macroeconomic mechanisms, which is of course fair enough and - for me at least - interesting. But helicopter money, because it is quite like fiscal policy, also raises ethical issues, and these are taken up in a recent post by Jeremy Stangroom. It is this and related issues that I want to talk about here.

To avoid distractions, let’s focus on a specific type of helicopter money (HM). The state sets up a distribution mechanism (the flight path of the helicopter, if you like) which the central bank is mandated to use if interest rates are in danger of hitting the zero lower bound, and it judges that without using this mechanism it will probably undershoot its inflation target. If at some later date the central bank finds that it is danger of becoming ‘policy insolvent’, the government agrees to recapitalise it. Thus there is no question of abandoning the inflation target in the distant future: HM is being used to avoid undershooting the inflation target in the near future.

This policy is close to being identical to a reverse poll tax. The key difference is that, unlike an actual government cash transfer that is debt financed and therefore appears to be almost surely matched by some tax increase or equivalent later, with HM the future tax increase may or may not happen, depending on whether the central bank does or does not need recapitalising.

The other key difference between HM and a reverse poll tax is that HM is initiated by the central bank. This encounters a form of the ‘no taxation without representation’ argument: redistributions should be made by the democratically elected government. However in the case of HM, the distribution mechanism is set up and endorsed by the government. Many distribution mechanisms are possible, and which is used is the government's choice. The only qualification is that the mechanism has to have a powerful, immediate and reasonably predictable impact on aggregate demand. (Paying for infrastructure investment could only be on this list of potential uses for HM if the investment could be immediate, and not just substituting for investment the government would have undertaken anyway.)

Thus HM is still government sanctioned. In addition the circumstances in which HM would be used are limited and precisely described, and the agent making these decisions - the central bank - should be accountable to the government. Of course many government agencies already make decisions that have huge impacts on particular individuals: in the case of the UK, NICE for example.

An additional argument that I together with Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan have made is that conventional monetary policy also involves redistributions between savers and borrowers. Here Jeremy Stangroom makes a good point: savers and borrowers undertook their debt contracts knowing that interest rates could well rise or fall. In contrast, no one has contracted for helicopter money.

However I think there is an additional point to be made here. Savers and borrowers generally take out nominal debt contracts, and so they will be affected by movements in inflation. They may well undertake these debt contracts in the expectation that inflation will average the central bank’s inflation target. HM money is a way for the central bank to ensure this expectation is fulfilled.

I also think it is always important to discuss HM in comparative terms, and in particular thinking about it as an alternative to QE. Indeed I think this should become mandatory in discussing HM: after all most people who propose it do so because they think it does the same job QE is meant to do but better. To the extent that the central bank makes a loss on QE (and if QE is temporary they really could make a loss, which is why the Bank of England got the government to cover these losses), it involves given newly created money away. In this case the beneficiaries are those who sold their government debt to the central bank and then subsequently bought it back at a profit. It is not clear that most people would regard those profits gifted by an arm of the state as a just desert. [1]

I think at the end of the day the ethical issue does all come down to the extent that the government can delegate decisions which have distributional impacts on the population. After all, the relevant budget constraint from the private sector’s point of view is the consolidated public sector which includes the central bank. Newly created money has to go to someone. Absent QE the profits the central bank makes are returned to the government. With QE, there is a good chance that the central bank may be transferring this money to the financial sector. With HM, money goes to the public. HM has not been called ‘QE for the people’ for no reason. Arguably the state provides too much support to the financial sector as it is, even without QE.

[1] QE is not about buying assets to make a profit. The central bank buys existing government debt when it is expensive, because QE only happens when actual and expected short rates are low, and then sells it back to the market when short rates are higher (QE is expected to be unwound after short rates rise). This saves the government money on interest payments but also involves a capital loss.  

Helicopter money and the government of central bank nightmares

If Quantitative Easing (QE), why not helicopter money? We know helicopter money is much more effective at stimulating demand. Helicopter money is a form of what economists call money financed fiscal stimulus (MFFS). In their current formulation independent central banks (ICB) rule out MFFS, because the institution that can do the stimulus (the government) is not allowed to cooperate on this with the institution that creates money (the ICB). In a world where governments - through ignorance or design - obsess about deficits when they should not, it turns out that MFFS or helicopter money is all we have left to prevent large negative demand shocks leading to deep and prolonged recessions. So why is it taboo? 

One reason why it is taboo among central banks is that they want an asset that they can later sell when the economy recovers. QE gives them that asset, but helicopter money does not. The nightmare (as ever with ICBs) is not the current position of deficient demand, but a potential future of excess inflation that they are unable to control.

Here it is perhaps easiest to talk about monetary policy as putting money into the system when inflation is too low or taking it out when inflation is too high. QE creates money when interest rates are at their Zero Lower Bound (ZLB), but that money can be taken out of the system later if need be by selling the assets that QE buys. Helicopter money also puts money into the system at the ZLB, in a much more effective way than QE, but it cannot be put into reverse by central banks alone. The central bank cannot demand we pay helicopter money back. [4] 

If the government cooperates, this is no problem. The government just ‘recapitalises’ the central bank, by either raising taxes or selling more of its own debt. Economists call this ‘fiscal backing’ for the central bank. In either case, the government is taking money out of the system on the central bank’s behalf. So the nightmare that makes helicopter money taboo is that the government refuses to do this. [1]

What kind of government would this be? Inflation is rising, and the institution tasked with bringing it back under control makes a request that can be satisfied fairly painlessly by the government issuing some more debt. A government that refuses to do this is saying very publicly that it no longer cares about high inflation: it prefers an environment of low interest rates and high inflation and it is prepared to cripple its central bank to achieve this.

Now imagine a government with these preferences, and now put it in a world where the ICB does not need recapitalising and is selling assets and raising interest rates to do its job. Are we really meant to believe that such a government would ignore its preferences and let the central bank get on with it? Of course it would not - it would take away the central bank’s independence by forcing it to stop raising interest rates.

In other words, a government that would refuse to recapitalise an ICB is also a government that would have no hesitation in ending central bank independence. Holding assets is no protection for an ICB against this government of its nightmares. [2] 

The reason we have independent central banks is not to stop us becoming like Zimbabwe. It is to stop governments taking small risks with inflation for short term political gain. Like the occasion I was told that the Chancellor (at the time) knew full well that interest rates needed to rise now to reduce inflation, but there was no way that would happen until after the party conference. But this kind of government is not the kind that would deliberately sabotage its own central bank by refusing a request for recapitalisation.

Tony Yates writes of helicopter money: “Once government gets a taste for it, how could it resist not helping itself to more?” This is a statement about a government of nightmares that goes on a spending spree using money created by the central bank, and not about real governments in advanced economies. The idea that a perfectly sober government becomes a drunkard the moment it sees its central bank undertaking helicopter money is absurd. If ever we are unlucky enough to have a government that is a drunkard, an ICB with some assets to sell will not be enough to stop it raising inflation.

So this nightmare that makes helicopter money taboo is as unrealistic as most nightmares. The really strange thing is that ICBs have already had to confront this nightmare. It is more than possible that when central banks sell back their QE assets, they will make a loss, and so will be faced with exactly the same problem as with helicopter money. [3] A central banker knows better than not to worry about something because it might not happen. So the nightmare has already been faced down. It therefore seems doubly strange that the taboo about helicopter money remains.

[1] It is sometimes suggested that if the central bank runs out of assets, it can create its own, by issuing central bank debt. This would be effective if the nightmare government was unlikely to last, and a new government would later emerge that would recapitalise the bank. However it seems problematic as a solution for a permanently uncooperative government where inflation is too high, because the only way the central bank can pay the interest of the assets it issues is by creating more money. Corsetti and Dedola treat reserves as an alternative to debt issued by governments, but here the idea seems to be to rule out default as an option.

[2] An independent judiciary could protect an ICB. However it would be equally possible to write into law the duty of a government to ensure an ICB can do its job.

[3] The Bank of England obtained an almost complete indemnity from the government for QE losses, but other central banks have not (see Willem Buiter here).

[4] The central bank could just loan the helicopter money. But in practice this amounts to the same thing: a government that will not back its central bank will tell people not to repay the loan.  

When central bank losses matter

This is a post about why the taboo against helicopter money or money financed fiscal stimulus is irrational once we have Quantitative Easing, but might nevertheless be in the interest of some groups.

Many macroeconomists have argued that we shouldn’t think about central banks in the same way as private banks. A central bank can never be insolvent, at least as long as people use the currency it issues. It can cover losses by creating more money. All that matters, from a macroeconomic point of view, is whether it has the ability to do its job, which is to control inflation. 

I do not want to talk about controlling inflation here. Instead I want to talk about these losses, and in particular who gains when these losses are made. Macroeconomists tend to focus on the controlling inflation point, so let me avoid that by imagining a really simple world. There is a constant price level target, and base money velocity (nominal GDP/money) is constant in the long run, so base money must return to some constant value in the long run to meet the target. In the short run velocity is not constant and we can have recessions due to demand deficiency in the usual way.

Think about Quantitative Easing (QE). [4] The central bank creates money to buy government debt in the market at a time when that debt is expensive, because it only does QE when interest rates are low. [1] Suppose it just so happened that all this government debt that the central bank buys comes from pension funds. These funds sell their debt, take the money and keep it as money. After some time, the economy recovers, interest rates rise and the price of this government debt falls. The central bank no longer needs the debt, and it wants to reduce the money stock to get to the price level target, so it sells the debt back to the market, or more specifically to the same pension funds it bought it from. As the price of these assets has fallen, the central bank makes a loss. The pension funds gets back the debt they originally sold, but they have some money left. They have gained.

Good for them you might say - why should I care? Well the central bank is concerned that it has not got all its money back (it made a loss), and to control inflation it needs to take more money out of the system. It asks the government to recapitalise it, which the government does by raising taxes. What has in effect happened is that money has passed from the taxpayer to the pension fund.

My purpose in pointing this out is not to make some distributional point. Instead it is to note that QE in this case involves the central bank giving money away to pension funds. So why is this considered kosher, but the central bank giving the same amount of money (its loss on QE) directly to the public is considered deeply problematic? [2] Why would it be thought completely wrong for the central bank to voluntarily give the same amount of money to the government so that they could help stimulate the economy by some fiscal means (a money financed fiscal stimulus)? [3]

If you think that my assumption about price level targets and constant long run velocity was somehow critical here, imagine the case where to meet its inflation target the money newly created in the long run (the loss on QE) did not need to be taken out of the system. The pension funds gain but no one seems to lose. But if the expansion of money had been via a helicopter, then every citizen would gain instead. So why is acceptable to create new money and give it to pension funds (through losses on QE), but not create money to give to ordinary people or the government? The former is called monetary policy and is OK for a central bank to do, but the latter is called fiscal policy and this the central bank cannot do.

Why does this matter, apart from the distributional point? Because as a means of stimulating the economy in the short run the effectiveness of QE is highly uncertain compared to the effectiveness of direct transfers to citizens or public works. We seem to be stuck with an ineffective form of stimulus, because something more effective is taboo, or goes by a different name. To repeat it in a simple but more provocative way: a central bank giving money to people or governments is out of the question, but a central bank giving money to parts of the financial sector is just fine. That is a very convenient taboo for some.  

[1] Suppose this is government debt issued many years ago, when interest rates were 5%. So debt with a nominal value of £100 pays 5% interest. If interest rates are now 2.5%, then this debt is more valuable than its nominal value - indeed someone would pay you something near £200 for it if it had a long maturity. However if interest rates go back to 5%, the value of the debt would fall back to £100.

[2] Assume Ricardian Equivalence does not hold, so giving money away now is expansionary even though that money has to eventually come back when the central bank is recapitalised.

[3] If the money financed fiscal stimulus was in the form of additional but temporary government spending, and when the central bank was recapitalised the Treasury paid for this by temporarily reducing government spending, we get what I call a ‘pure’ money financed spending stimulus. I know of no theory which says that would not be expansionary. 

[4] If you want to be topical, you could think about creating money to buy foreign currency instead.

What does the end of the Swiss Peg tell us about central banks?

A lot of the discussion in blogs about the end of the Swiss exchange rate peg has focused on whether the original peg, which started in September 2011, was a good idea in the first place. [1] This post asks a rather different question, which has wider relevance.

First some facts, which you can skip if you have already read some of those posts. The safe haven status of the Swiss Franc meant that during the Eurozone crisis people wanted to buy the Swiss currency, and the resulting appreciation was in danger of driving some Swiss producers out of business. [2] The chart below plots competitiveness, measured as relative consumer prices, in Switzerland and in the UK. [4]

      

The appreciation problem in 2011 was real and the exchange rate cap fixed that, but to prevent the exchange rate appreciating beyond the 1.2 Swiss Francs (CHF) per Euro mark the central bank had to create lots of money to buy Euros. You can think of it as Quantitative Easing (QE) that buys foreign currency rather than domestic government debt. [3]

The interesting question is why the central bank ended the cap. Perhaps the cap was always meant to be a transitional measure, to allow firms time to adjust to a loss in competitiveness. (Here is the official explanation.) This is not that convincing. If the central bank was worried that its producers were becoming too competitive, it could have changed the cap from, say, 1.2 CHF per Euro to 1.1 CHF per Euro. Removing the cap completely would only make sense if you thought your safe haven status had reached some kind of equilibrium, and with the Greek elections and other things currently happening that seems unlikely. Even if you did think this, caution might suggest testing the market with a more appropriate cap and seeing how much defending you had to do.

As a result of ending the peg, the Swiss Franc has appreciated substantially, from 1.2 CHF per Euro to around 1 CHF per Euro, even though the central bank has lowered the interest rate on sight deposit account balances that exceed a threshold to −0.75%. There seem to be two alternative interpretations.

The first is that the central bank simply made a serious mistake. For some, the mistake was to impose the cap in the first place. If you do not take that view, and assuming the market’s immediate move is not a very temporary overreaction, the large appreciation partly undoes the benefits of the original peg. Either way, a major mistake has been made at some point. This can be added to what is now a seriously long list of recent major central bank mistakes: see in particular Sweden and the Eurozone. Does the fact that central banks in the UK and US seem rather less error prone have something to do with the greater influence of economists (inside and outside) on those banks? [5]

The second interpretation is that the open ended money creation that the policy implied just became too much for the central bank. In theory the central bank could go on creating money and buying Euros forever. As long as the exchange rate peg was reasonable this policy could be consistent with its inflation target (the target is ‘below 2%’, while actual inflation is currently negative). If it ever decided it was not and there was too much Swiss money around, the policy could be reversed by selling Euros. The central bank might make a loss when this was done, but economists generally dismiss this as a non-problem (a central bank is not like a commercial bank), just as they dismiss the same problem with conventional QE. But perhaps central banks do not see things this way (HT MT), because they worry about the political consequences of such losses. If this is the case, then this is something that economists need to respond to in one way or another.  

[1] The discussion in the media, as often with mediamacro, is obsessed with the markets. The Guardian had a link entitled “Swiss franc - what the economists say”. What you got were 6 City economists, who wrote the kind of thing City economists write. Now I’m sure the Guardian will say they needed something fast, and academics - even academic bloggers - are unreliable in that respect. But please label this properly: you are getting the reactions of City economists, whose primary concern is what this all means for the markets, and not what it means for ordinary people.

[2] Economists have a theory, Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP), which says that short term capital flows like this should not influence exchange rates, because the market will keep rates close to fundamentals. It does not work too well, partly I suspect because the market has little idea what the fundamentals are, and partly because no one in the market is prepared to take bets that last years rather than days.

[3] Switzerland has a really large current account surplus, which since 1997 has averaged 10% of GDP. The reason for this surplus is complex, but it suggests that there is scope for a gradual real exchange rate appreciation over time.

[4] Source: OECD Economic Outlook. The level is arbitrary, at 2010=100. A rise is an appreciation, which means a loss of competitiveness. The average level of this measure of Swiss competitiveness was around 96.5 from 1998 to 2004.

[5] However the suggestion by Tony Yates that every blogger should be given a job at the SNB seems to be going too far.

On the monetary offset argument

A number of us are highly critical of moving to austerity so early in the recovery from the Great Recession. Market Monetarists (MM) argue that this criticism is unfounded, because monetary policy can offset the impact of austerity on demand. Not when interest rates are at the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB), the critics of austerity respond. The ZLB is not a problem, MM reply.

I want to make a couple of observations. First, MM often imagine that they invented this offset argument. However it forms a key part of the austerity critics’ original objection. If the impact of fiscal consolidation on output is always the same, then the reasons for postponing deficit reduction until the recession is over become significantly weaker. [1] The whole point is to postpone deficit reduction until when the ZLB constraint no longer bites. At that point, monetary policy can offset the demand impact of fiscal consolidation, whereas at the ZLB it cannot (according to the austerity critics). Monetary offset is built into the austerity critics’ main case.

Second, if you are a fiscal policy maker, and you want to take the MM argument seriously, you have to believe two things. First, that monetary policy is capable of offsetting the impact of austerity as much now as later. Second, that this is actually what monetary policy makers will do. If you believe the first, but are not sure about the second, then fiscal consolidation now is a mistake. Sure, you can blame monetary policy makers for not offsetting when they could, but if you knew this might happen then you hold some responsibility.

This second point exposes how weak the MM argument is at the ZLB. They have to argue not only that unconventional monetary policy could offset fiscal contraction at the ZLB, but also that it will. We see immediately that the issue of NGDP targeting is beside the point. Central banks at the moment are inflation targeting, and are likely to continue to do so, so enacting fiscal contraction in the hope that they might change is highly irresponsible.

So the MM argument that the ZLB does not matter has to rely on Quantitative Easing (QE). But here there is a basic problem that MM has never to my knowledge answered. Just how much QE do you do to offset any fiscal contraction? We have no real idea, because we have so little experience. Lags between policy actions and reactions are such that we cannot just say whatever it takes, because we might have lost a lot of output (or created a lot of inflation) before policy makers get it right. In reality, policy makers are likely to be cautious, so almost certainly they will not offset enough, even presuming that QE is capable of offsetting completely. So once again, being realistic about what we know and what monetary policy makers will do, fiscal contraction at the ZLB is irresponsible. (I have talked about this in more detail before.)

These are abstract arguments, but they can be applied to two real examples. First the Eurozone. Here we currently have no QE. We should have QE - indeed I have argued we should think about having helicopter money, but to presume that these things would happen just when they are required would be highly unrealistic. It would also be silly to assume that the ZLB was never going to bite when the new fiscal regime was put together following the crisis. So fiscal contraction in the Eurozone is a major problem and highly irresponsible whichever way you look at it. 

In the UK it is often argued that 2010 austerity was not a problem, because given the rapid inflation that happened in 2011, if austerity had not happened, the MPC would have raised interest rates. However that is an argument made with hindsight [2]. It has no bearing on whether austerity was a good policy choice when it was enacted in 2010. In 2010 inflation was not expected to rise to 5%, so the coalition had no reason to believe that the ZLB constraint would cease to bite in 2011 (assuming that it did). Instead to justify 2010 austerity we have to assume that, if the 2010 forecast proved over optimistic (which it did), QE would have been applied to the required degree to get the economy back on track. Given the uncertainties noted above, that would have been a foolish assumption to make. So 2010 austerity was a costly policy choice which reflects badly on those who made it.

So to conclude, the monetary policy offset argument is not a problem for critics of austerity at the ZLB but a key part of their argument. To believe that monetary offset will continue to apply to the same extent at the ZLB, you have to make quite unrealistic assumptions about what policy makers are capable of doing with Quantitative Easing, and also about what they will actually do.

[1] Convexity of the social welfare function would still be an argument to wait until the recession was over, although to set against that is the point that if the long run desired position involves some level of debt, the longer you leave deficit correction the more adjustment you have to make. This post discusses an IMF exercise which plays around with such things, but ignores the key ZLB argument.

[2] Even with hindsight I would argue it has little purchase, as the period during which 3 members of the MPC voted for higher rates lasted only 4 months in 2011. There is also an issue about whether the inflation caused by the VAT increase was really seen through by policy makers.     

Fighting the last war

It is often said that generals fight the last war that they have won, even when those tactics are no longer appropriate to the war they are fighting today. The same point has been made about macroeconomic policy: policymakers cannot avoid thinking about the dangers of rising inflation, and in doing so they handicap efforts to fully recover from the Great Recession.

Another military idea is the benefit of using overwhelming force. In the case of inflation we have two legacies of the last war that are designed to prevent inflation reaching the heights of the late 1970s: inflation targets and in many countries independent central banks. Do we need both, or is just one sufficient? I think this question is relevant to the debate over helicopter money (financing deficits by printing money rather than selling debt).

Why are helicopter drops taboo in policy circles? Why is it illegal in the Eurozone? The answer is a fear that if you allow governments access to the printing presses, high inflation will surely follow at some point. Many of those who worry about helicopter money are fairly relaxed about Quantitative Easing (QE), which involves much more money creation than would be involved in a helicopter drop. (Of course some are not relaxed, and (still) think that QE is about to produce rapid inflation - I will ignore that group here.) The key reason they are more relaxed is that central banks are in control of QE, whereas governments would initiate money financing of deficits. [1]

Take the recent interchange between Tony Yates and myself on helicopter money (TY, SWL, TY), and consider the following hypothetical. The economy needs a fiscal stimulus, but for some irrational reason the government will not allow debt to rise. It therefore instructs the central bank to create money to fund a fiscal stimulus (i.e. a helicopter drop). However it also tells the central bank that this action should not compromise its inflation target (which is currently being undershot), and the central bank agrees that the helicopter drop will not compromise its ability to stop inflation exceeding the target, but instead it will help inflation rise to meet that target.

Tony’s problem with this is in the instruction. In these particular circumstances the actions are not a problem, and will do some good (given the government’s irrational fear of debt). However we have crossed a barrier - the government is telling the central bank what to so. The fact that in my hypothetical example the inflation target remains is not enough: he writes “the inflation target in the UK is a very fragile thing”. He goes on: “So I don’t view the inflation target as a cast iron protection against helicopter drops undermining monetary and fiscal policy.  There’s a good reason why monetary financing is outlawed by the Treaty of Rome.  Allowing yourself tightly regulated helicopter drops is not time-consistent.  Once government gets a taste for it, how could it resist not helping itself to more?”

I think it is possible to take two quite different views to Tony on this. The first is that, in most OECD economies today where macroeconomic understanding is better and information more available, inflation targets are more than sufficient to prevent us experiencing the inflation rates of the 1970s again. The hypothetical to think about here is a government that has direct control over the inflation target, but asks the central bank to vary interest rates to achieve that target. Of course we do need to imagine this - it is the UK set-up. Would such a government happily raise the inflation target in order to finance a bit more spending? Such a move would be highly unpopular, because most people think higher inflation means lower real wages. In the UK no political party has even hinted that raising the inflation target might be a good idea, despite obvious fiscal incentives to do so. Suppose a government pretended repeated money creation would not breach the inflation target, even when the central bank advised otherwise. Would that government survive when inflation took off?

A second view is that we have the story of the 1960s and 1970s all wrong. We did not get high inflation in advanced economies because governments wanted to monetise their own profligacy. There were, after all, independent central banks in the US and Germany. Inflation occurred because of the combination of a number of specific factors: trade union pressure in the face of shocks that tended to reduce real wages, underestimation of the natural rate (and a poor understanding of how monetary policy should work), and placing too great a priority on achieving full employment. The latter might have been a legacy of the 1930s: policymakers were also fighting the last war, except in the 1970s the last war was about unemployment, not inflation.

I think both views are probably correct. As a result, I’m much more relaxed about money financing of deficits in the current situation. However in one crucial respect I do agree with those who say we have no need for helicopter money today, because there is no reason for governments to have a fear of rising debt if their central bank can undertake QE. However irrational fear of rising debt in a recession has similar characteristics to fighting the last war: deficit bias is a problem, but a recession is not the time to worry about it. I think this is why I am not persuaded by this article by Ken Rogoff: yes, in the grand scheme of things we should worry about inflation and debt, but right now we are worrying about them too much and therefore failing to deal with more pressing concerns.

[1] Some people imagine the central bank could itself initiate a helicopter drop, independently of government. That is simply not possible given current institutional arrangements, but as I noted in my earlier post (point 7) I think it is interesting to explore institutional changes that give the central bank some role in countercyclical fiscal policy. A simpler confusion is that helicopter money involves giving money to everyone, while tax cuts just go to taxpayers. Helicopter money is really about financing a fiscal stimulus of any kind using money: the form of that fiscal stimulus is a separate matter.

Unconventional Monetary Policy versus fiscal policy

In a previous post I explained why, in a very simple setting, it was best to use lower interest rates to stimulate demand, but that both tax cuts and increases in government consumption could do this job as well, with welfare costs that were minor compared to the cost of inadequate demand. So, to use a bit of jargon, cutting interest rates is first best, but if that first best was not available because nominal rates had hit zero then fiscal policy should be used. If there was a financial constraint on the size of the stimulus, government spending was generally more effective than tax cuts.

What about unconventional monetary policy? There are two main kinds: forward commitment to above target inflation (and a positive output gap) in the future, and printing money to buy various kinds of assets (QE). In each case I want to compare the welfare costs of these policies with the costs of using fiscal policy. However there is also the issue of uncertainty of impact: we need to know how much of a policy measure to apply: this uncertainty issue was not critical in the previous post because we have a lot of evidence about the impact of conventional monetary and fiscal policy. I will consider each type of unconventional monetary policy in turn.

One way of stimulating demand when interest rates are stuck at zero is to promise a combination of higher than ideal inflation and higher than ideal output in the future. (This can be done either explicitly or implicitly by using some form of target in the nominal level of something like nominal GDP. For those not familiar with how this works, see here.) The cost of this policy is clear: higher than ideal future inflation and output. Once again, these costs can be worth it because of the severity of the current recession, which is why nominal rates are stuck at zero. Whether these costs are greater or less than the cost of changing government spending is debatable: a paper by Werning that I discussed here suggests optimal policy may involve both.

One issue that arises with this particular policy is the problem of time inconsistency. The central bank may promise to raise inflation above target in the future to help reduce the recession today, but once the recession is over will it keep to its promise? Will the public let it? If people think it might not then the policy will be less potent, which increases the uncertainty associated with the policy’s effectiveness. This is one reason why it may be useful to hardwire the policy by means of some nominal target. [1]

The other unconventional monetary policy is QE: printing money to buy assets. Now it could be that this policy is doing nothing more than signal forward commitment to lower interest rates in the future, which moves us back to the previous discussion. Suppose it is more than that. I think a largely unresolved problem is how distortionary this policy is.

For example, in one of the most popular models that has explored the effectiveness of QE by Mark Gertler and Peter Karadi, the central bank makes loans or buys government debt. In doing this it reduces a risk premium, which is welfare improving. This raises the obvious question of why QE is not permanent. The authors get around this problem by assuming that the central bank is less efficient than private banks in knowing which assets to buy. However I’m not sure whether anyone, including the authors, has any idea what these efficiency costs might be.

Perhaps these distortions are quite small. However this discussion illustrates a more serious problem with QE, which is that we still have no clear idea of its effectiveness, or indeed whether effects are linear, and what the best markets to operate in are. Announcements about QE clearly influence the market, but that could be because it is acting as a signalling device, as Michael Woodford has argued. Jim Hamilton is also sceptical. This strongly suggests that the uncertainty associated with the impact of QE is far greater than any uncertainty associated with either conventional monetary policy or fiscal policy.

Thinking about it this way, I cannot see why some people insist that unconventional monetary policy is always preferable to fiscal policy. In a comment on a recent Nick Rowe post, Scott Sumner writes “My views is that once the central bank owns the entire stock of global assets, come back to me and we can talk about fiscal stimulus.” What this effectively means is that it is better for one arm of the state (the central bank) to create huge amounts of money to buy up large quantities of assets than to let another arm of the state (the Treasury) advance consumers rather less money to spend or save as they like. This preference just seems rather strange, but maybe Lenin would have approved! 

[1] If a temporary increase in government spending is in fact believed to be permanent, its effectiveness at stimulating the economy largely disappears, but this is not a problem of time inconsistency. Another difference is that governments are increasing and decreasing spending all the time, whereas it is much more unusual for an advanced economy central bank to deliberately create a boom.