Should central bankers stick to talking about monetary policy?

Few disagree that the recent remarks on corporate governance and investment made by Andy Haldane (Chief Economist at the Bank of England) are interesting, and that if they start a debate on short-termism that would be a good thing. As Will Hutton notes, Hillary Clinton has been saying similar things in the US. The problem Tony Yates has (and which Duncan Weldon, the interviewer, alluded to in his follow-up question) is that this is not obviously part of the monetary policy remit.

Haldane gave an answer to that, which Tony correctly points out is somewhat strained. Perhaps I could illustrate the same issue by going down a better route that Haldane could have used. He could say that the causes of low UK productivity growth are clearly under his remit, and one factor in this that few dispute is low investment. If he was then asked by an interviewer what might be the fundamental cause of this low investment, Tony would argue that his reply should be that he couldn’t really comment, because some of those reasons might be too political.

I have in the past said very similar things to Tony when talking about the ECB, and their frequent advice to policymakers on fiscal rectitude and structural reforms. My main complaint is that the advice is wrong, and I puzzle over “how the ECB can continue to encourage governments to take fiscal or other actions that their own models tell them will reduce output and inflation at a time when the ECB is failing so miserably to control both.” But I have also said that in situations where fiscal actions have no impact on the ability of monetary policy to do its job (which is not the case at the moment), comments on fiscal policy are “crossing a line which it is very dangerous to cross”.

However I am beginning to have second thoughts about my own and Tony’s views on this. First, it all seems a bit British in tone. Tony worked at the Bank, and I have been involved with both the Bank and Treasury on and off, so we are both steeped in a British culture of secrecy. I do not think either of us are suggesting that senior Bank officials should never give advice to politicians, so what are the virtues of keeping this private? In trying to analyse how policy was made in 2010, it is useful to have a pretty good idea of what advice the Bank’s governor gave politicians because of what he said in public, rather than having to guess. (Of course private advice to politicians is never truly private, but this hardly helps, because with secrecy it allows politicians to hint that advice of a particular kind was given when it might not have been.)

The issues of MPC external member selection that Tony worries about are real enough, but perhaps that illustrates problems with the selection process. My guess is that the Treasury would be inhibited about choosing an MPC member who had previously been strongly critical of the government on other issues anyway. As I said my main complaint about the ECB is the nature and context of the advice they give, and at least by making it public we know about this problem.

It is often said that central bankers need to keep quiet about policy matters that are not within their remit as part of an implicit quid pro quo with politicians, so that politicians will refrain from making public their views about monetary policy. Putting aside the fact that the ECB never got this memo, I wonder whether this is just a fiction so that politicians can inhibit central bankers from saying things politicians might find awkward (like fiscal austerity is making our life difficult). In a country like the UK with a well established independent central bank, it is not that clear what the central bank is getting out of this quid pro quo. And if it stops someone with the wide ranging vision of Haldane from raising issues just because they could be deemed political, you have to wonder whether this mutual public inhibition serves the social good.

Why do central banks use New Keynesian models?

And more on whether price setting is microfounded in RBC models. For macroeconomists.

Why do central banks like using the New Keynesian (NK) model? Stephen Williamson says: “I work for one of these institutions, and I have a hard time answering that question, so it's not clear why Simon wants David [Levine] to answer it. Simon posed the question, so I think he should answer it.” The answer is very simple: the model helps these banks do their job of setting an appropriate interest rate. (I suspect because the answer is very simple this is really a setup for another post Stephen wants to write, but as I always find what Stephen writes interesting I have no problem with that.)

What is a NK model? It is a RBC model plus a microfounded model of price setting, and a nominal interest rate set by the central bank. Every NK model has its inner RBC model. You could reasonably say that these NK models were designed to help tell the central bank what interest rate to set. In the simplest case, this involves setting a nominal rate that achieves, or moves towards, the level of real interest rates that is assumed to occur in the inner RBC model: the natural real rate. These models do not tell us how and why the central bank can set the nominal short rate, and those are interesting questions which occasionally might be important. As Stephen points out, NK models tell us very little about money. Most of the time, however, I think interest rate setters can get by without worrying about these how and why questions.

Why not just use the restricted RBC version of the NK model? Because the central bank sets a nominal rate, so it needs an estimate of what expected inflation is. It could get that from surveys, but it also wants to know how expected inflation will change if it changes its nominal rate. I think a central banker might also add that they are supposed to be achieving an inflation target, so having a model that examines the response of inflation to the rest of the economy and nominal interest rate changes seems like an important thing to do.

The reason why I expect people like David Levine to at least acknowledge the question I have just answered is also simple. David Levine claimed that Keynesian economics is nonsense, and had been shown to be nonsense since the New Classical revolution. With views like that, I would at least expect some acknowledgement that central banks appear to think differently. For him, like Stephen, that must be a puzzle. He may not be able to answer that puzzle, but it is good practice to note the puzzles that your worldview throws up.

Stephen also seems to miss my point about the lack of any microfounded model of price setting in the RBC model. The key variable is the real interest rate, and as he points out the difference between perfect competition and monopolistic competition is not critical here. In a monetary economy the real interest rate is set by both price setters in the goods market and the central bank. The RBC model contains neither. To say that the RBC model assumes that agents set the appropriate market clearing prices describes an outcome, but not the mechanism by which it is achieved.

That may be fine - a perfectly acceptable simplification - if when we do think how price setters and the central bank interact, that is the outcome we generally converge towards. NK models suggest that most of the time that is true. This in turn means that the microfoundations of price setting in RBC models applied to a monetary economy rest on NK foundations. The RBC model assumes the real interest rate clears the goods market, and the NK model shows us why in a monetary economy that can happen (and occasionally why it does not). 

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.

Does the Dutch central bank employ any macroeconomists?

Did you think that the policy of fighting recession by increasing austerity was now intellectually bankrupt? No one seems to have told the Dutch central bank. (Hence the deliberately provocative title of this post.) The latest forecast by the Bank says

• The economy will shrink by 0.8% this year, followed by growth of 0.5% next, “accelerating” to 1.1% in 2015
• The unemployment rate will rise sharply, reaching a peak point at 7.2% of the labour force midway through 2014.
• The budget deficit will increase from 3.5% this year to 3.9% next.

What should the government do about this? The central bank says “"The forecast course of the factual and structural deficit in 2014 does not meet the recommendations given in May by the European Commission to correct the excessive budget deficit in the Netherlands. Extra consolidation measures are therefore necessary."

Unfortunately the central bank is being entirely predictable in continuing to urge austerity as the economy weakens. In earlier posts (here and here), I noted how the central bank’s advice was rather different from the Dutch CPB (Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis), which clearly does employ macroeconomists. What is just so depressing is that the central bank seems oblivious to the increasingly overwhelming evidence that austerity during a recession is the complete opposite of what you should be doing in a country without its own monetary policy. Unlike some other Eurozone countries, there is no market pressure forcing policymakers’ hands in the Netherlands.

If you think this is excessively rude, please read my own checklist on the subject. I am not disdainful of those in 2010 who thought austerity was necessary because either a debt crisis was around the corner, or economic recovery had been assured, and have subsequently done what Keynes suggested should be done when the evidence becomes clearer. I think they were wrong back then, and said so, but it was an understandable mistake, and even the best economists make mistakes. But I’m afraid to continue in 2013 to advocate a course of action which anyone can see is doing immense harm to so many people is just inexcusable. If you understand this, and are a macroeconomist working for this or another European central bank with similar views, then you have my sympathy. If you work for one of these banks and think I’m being too harsh, please tell me why in comments. But more importantly, let’s hope that Dutch politicians treat this advice, along with the recommendations of the Commission, with the contempt it deserves.