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.     

A crisis made in Germany

The headline in my latest article for The Independent may seem like a wild exaggeration. But if we are talking about a crisis that impacted on unemployment in the entire Eurozone (except Germany) rather than just the periphery, then I think it is reasonable. It was German policy makers that insisted that the Eurozone embark on general austerity in response to problems in the Eurozone periphery. It was the influence of the Bundesbank and others in Germany that helped the ECB raise interest rates in 2011, and delayed a QE programme until 2015. Those two things together created a second Eurozone recession.

Even if we stick to the periphery countries, the crisis outside Greece would have been a lot more manageable if the ECB’s OMT programme (which allowed the ECB to act as a sovereign lender of last resort) had been implemented in 2010 rather than 2012. It is politicians in Germany that have attempted to declare the OMT programme illegal. And none of this touches on the impact of Germany on Greece. I could also add (although it is not in the article) that if the Eurozone had adopted sensible countercyclical fiscal rules from 2000 the scale of the periphery crisis would have been reduced, and Germany had a large role in the deficit focused rules that were actually adopted.

Of course Germany did not make Greek governments behave in a profligate manner. Of course Germany did not force Irish banks into reckless lending. Their own banks may have helped facilitate both, but so did banks in other core countries like France, and in the UK for that matter. Yet German influence helped magnify the periphery crisis, and Germany was central in turning a periphery crisis into an existential event that impacted on pretty well every Eurozone country, except Germany.     

The mythical debt crisis

A constant refrain, from both the Conservative and LibDem party conferences, is how the current government saved the country from a crisis. Here is Osborne: “Four years ago, our economy was in crisis, our country was on the floor.” Or LibDem Danny Alexander: “We’ve seen the economy through its darkest hour ..” Now someone from outside the UK would immediately think Osborne and Alexander had got their counting wrong: the Great Recession was in 2009, which was five not four years ago. But of course they do not mean that little old crisis - they are talking about the Great Government Debt crisis. The only problem is that this debt crisis is as mythical as the unicorn.

The real crisis was the Great Recession. And if any politicians can claim to have saved the country from that crisis, it is Labour's Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. They introduced stimulus measures (opposed by Conservatives) that helped arrest the decline in GDP. By 2010, which is when Osborne took over, the economy was growing by nearly 2%.

But surely there was a debt crisis in 2010? Indeed there was, in other countries. Crucially, these were countries that could not print their own currencies. This became apparent when interest rates on Greek debt went through the roof. Interest rates on UK and US government debt after the recession stayed well below levels observed before the recession. UK and US governments never had any problems raising money, for the simple reason that there was never any chance they would default.

So wrong time, wrong country, but also maybe wrong people. Consumers and firms in the US and UK did feel they had borrowed too much, or wanted to save more, as a result of the financial crisis. The personal savings ratio in both countries rose substantially, and stayed high for a number of years. But people need something to save, like government debt. Which is one reason why interest rates on UK and US government debt stayed low: although the supply of that debt increased, the demand for it was increasing even faster.

So why do we not hear Labour claiming that they saved us from a crisis - at least their crisis was real! Why do claims that the current government saved us from an entirely mythical crisis generally go unchallenged? Such claims are the equivalent to the Republican Congress claiming they saved the US economy. Welcome to the strange world of mediamacro. What the media should be doing, the next time this government claims it saved us from the Great Government Debt crisis, is to borrow a phrase from Jim Royle: crisis my arse!   

Keynesian economics works: Eurozone edition

Paul Krugman is fond of saying that since the financial crisis, basic Keynesian economics has performed pretty well. Increases in government debt did not lead to rising interest rates. Increases in the monetary base (QE) did not lead to rapid inflation. But these are not the only places where Keynesian economics works. Keynesian analysis tells us almost all we need to know to understand what has happened to the Eurozone since its formation.

Some people are fond of denouncing mainstream economics because it failed to predict the financial crisis. But the nature of the Euro crisis was predicted by standard Keynesian open economy macro. The big problem with a monetary union was that countries could be hit by asymmetric shocks, and would no longer have their own monetary policy to deal with them. Many economists, myself included, said that this problem needed to be tackled by an active countercyclical fiscal policy - again standard Keynesian analysis. This advice was ignored.

What those using Keynesian analysis did not predict was the shock that would reveal all this: that the financial markets would make the mistake of assuming country specific risk on government borrowing had disappeared once the Euro was formed, which helped lead to a substantial and rapid fall in interest rates in the periphery. But once that happened, Keynesian economics tells the rest of the story. This large monetary stimulus led to excess demand in the periphery relative to the core. This in turn raised periphery inflation relative to the core, leading to a steady deterioration in competitiveness.

This boom in the periphery was not offset by fiscal contraction. Instead the public finances looked good, because that is what a boom does, and the focus of the Stability and Growth Pact on deficits meant that there was no pressure on politicians to tighten fiscal policy. Eventually the decline in competitiveness would bring the boom to an end, but a standard feature of quantitative Keynesian analysis is that this corrective process can take some time, if it is fighting against powerful expansionary forces.

So Keynesian economics said this would end in tears, and it did. The precise nature of the tears is to some extent a detail. (If you think the Eurozone crisis was all about fiscal profligacy rather than private sector excess, you are sadly misinformed.) Of course Keynesian economics could not have predicted the perverse reaction to the crisis when it came: austerity in the core as well as the periphery. It could not have predicted it because it was so obviously stupid given a Keynesian framework. But when general austerity came, from 2010 onwards, the implications of Keynesian analysis were clear. Sure enough in 2012 we had the second Eurozone recession, helped along by some perverse monetary policy decisions.

Paul Krugman also tends to note how most of those who bet against Keynesian predictions on interest rates and inflation after 2009 have yet to concede they were wrong, and Keynesian analysis was right. The bad news from the Eurozone is that this kind of denial can go on for fifteen years (and counting)! But there is a reason why we teach Keynesian economics - it works.   

Crisis, what crisis? Arrogance and self-satisfaction among macroeconomists

                My recent post on economics teaching has clearly upset a number of bloggers. There I argued that the recent crisis has not led to a fundamental rethink of macroeconomics. Mainstream macroeconomics has not decided that the Great Recession implies that some chunk of what we used to teach is clearly wrong and should be jettisoned as a result. To some that seems self-satisfied, arrogant and profoundly wrong. I’ve already mentioned one example, but here is David Ruccio, who asks in contradiction “What I want to know is, which part of that theory doesn’t need to be reexamined in light of the events of the past few years?”

                He then gives some examples. The first is a bit annoying. He says “where is the history of the theories and debates that have taken place in macroeconomics since at least the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory?” It’s annoying because I ended my post making exactly this point, and arguing that some account of this history of macroeconomic thought should be brought into the teaching of the macroeconomics core. But the issue I want to focus on here is why I don’t think the financial crisis requires a fundamental rethink of macroeconomics, despite articles in the media (e.g. here) suggesting is should.

                Let me be absolutely clear that I am not saying that macroeconomics has nothing to learn from the financial crisis. What I am suggesting is that when those lessons have been learnt, the basics of the macroeconomics we teach will still be there. For example, it may be that we need to endogenise the difference between the interest rate set by monetary policy and the interest rate actually paid by firms and consumers, relating it to asset prices that move with the cycle. But if that is the case, this will build on our current theories of the business cycle. Concepts like aggregate demand, and within the mainstream, the natural rate, will not disappear. We clearly need to take default risk more seriously, and this may lead to more use of models with multiple equilibria (as suggested by Chatelain and Ralf, for example). However, this must surely use the intertemporal optimising framework that is the heart of modern macro.

                Why do I want to say this? Because what we already have in macro remains important, valid and useful. What I see happening today is a struggle between those who want to use what we have, and those that want to deny its applicability to the current crisis. What we already have was used (imperfectly, of course) when the financial crisis hit, and analysis clearly suggests this helped mitigate the recession. Since 2010 these positive responses have been reversed, with policymakers around the world using ideas that contradict basic macro theory, like expansionary austerity. In addition, monetary policy makers appear to be misunderstanding ideas that are part of that theory, like credibility. In this context, saying that macro is all wrong and we need to start again is not helpful.

                I also think there is a danger in the idea that the financial crisis might have been avoided if only we had better technical tools at our disposal. (I should add that this is not a mistake most heterodox economists would make.) A couple of years ago I was at a small workshop organised by the Bank of England and ESRC, that got together mostly scientists rather than economists to look at alternative techniques of modelling, such as networks. One question is whether finance and macro could learn anything from these other disciplines. I’m sure the answer is yes, and I found the event fascinating, but I made the following observation at the end. The financial crisis itself is not a deeply mysterious event. Look now at the data on leverage that we had at the time, but too few people looked at before the crisis, and the immediate reaction has to be that this cannot go on. So the interesting question for me is how those that did look at this data managed to convince themselves that, to use the title from Reinhart and Rogoff’s book, this time was different.

                One answer was that they were convinced by economic theory that turned out to be wrong. But it was not traditional macro theory – it was theories from financial economics. And I’m sure many financial economists would argue that those theories were misapplied. Like confusing new techniques for handling idiosyncratic risk with the problem of systemic risk, for example. Believing that evidence of arbitrage also meant that fundamentals were correctly perceived. In retrospect, we can see why those ideas were wrong using the economics toolkit we already have. So why was that not recognised at the time? I think the key to answering this does not lie in any exciting new technique from physics or elsewhere, but in political science.

To understand why regulators and others missed the crisis, I think we need to recognise the political environment at the time, which includes the influence of the financial sector itself. And I fear that the academic sector was not exactly innocent in this either. A simplistic take on economic theory (mostly micro theory rather than macro) became an excuse for rent seeking. The really big question of the day is not what is wrong with macro, but why has the financial sector grown so rapidly over the last decade or so. Did innovation and deregulation in that sector add to social welfare, or make it easier for that sector to extract surplus from the rest of the economy? And why are there so few economists trying to answer that question?


Postscript. As Richard Portes points out to me, the last sentence is a little unfair: see here and here, for example

                

The Euro: an alternative moral tale

                Part of the austerity mindset that I talked about in the context of the Irish referendum is the belief that transfers from creditors to debtors are unfair (HT MT) because they result from the feckless behaviour of the debtor. There is a clear parallel with the attitude to benefit recipients within a society, which Chris Dillow talks about here. I do not want to get into the economics or politics of attitudes of this kind, but just claim that they are important in influencing policy, a position I think David Glasner supports here. Instead I want to confront this mindset with an alternative moral tale. Let’s talk about the Core countries and the Periphery, because I want to look at why they became creditors and debtors.

                When the Euro was formed, its fiscal architecture was embodied in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). This architecture was the construction of the Core, not the Periphery. In political terms, it was the price that the low inflation countries of the Core laid down for their participation in the Euro. That fiscal architecture was all about containing deficits, and said nothing about using fiscal policy to control domestic demand. To many economists, this was something of a surprise. Much of the academic work leading up to the formation of the Euro had stressed the crucial role that countercyclical policy could play in reducing the consequences of asymmetric shocks in a monetary union. The SGP effectively ignored that work.

                Why? Perhaps because in the debate on the wisdom of setting up the Euro, the problem of asymmetric shocks (or asymmetric adjustment to common shocks) was the key argument used by the anti-Euro camp. So it was easier to deny that the problem would arise, rather than talk about how it might be reduced. However I suspect countercyclical fiscal policy was also ignored because many in the Core just did not believe in the kind of Keynesian world in which the policy worked. In that sense, we were seeing the forerunner to a belief in expansionary austerity. To put this in simple terms, the view was that any demand and competitiveness imbalances would be quickly self-correcting, as uncompetitive countries would lose exports, output would fall and inflation would decline. The Keynesian view that this self-correction might be slow, costly and painful, and that fiscal policy could reduce those costs and pain, was discounted.

                Much the same can be said about monetary policy and the ECB. This was designed by the Core. The ECB was independent of government, but also explicitly prevented from acting as a lender of last resort to governments.

                After the Euro was formed, interest rates came down substantially in the Periphery. There was a substantial amount of lending by the Core private sector to the Periphery private sector. This led to inevitable overheating in these periphery countries relative to the core. At this point the Core, and the bureaucratic apparatus that was essentially under the Core’s control, should have been sounding alarm bells. But instead they continued to follow the flawed fiscal architecture. In the case of Spain, as is well known, the budget deficit looked OK according to these fiscal rules, so the overheating there was allowed to continue. As a result, we got a housing and construction bubble. The aftermath of this is what countries like Ireland and Spain are dealing with now.

                So, the basic problem was one of excessive private sector borrowing in the Periphery, partly financed by excessive lending by the Core. The Core countries had set up a fiscal architecture that effectively ignored this kind of problem, and they did nothing to address their mistake in subsequent years.

                So who is to blame? Consider a parallel with the sub-prime crisis. Do we hold the low income households who took out mortgages they could not afford responsible for the financial crisis that ensued? Do we blame them for the Great Recession? Do we pity the poor financial institutions that lost money lending to these irresponsible people? I hope not. Instead we ask, how can the financial system have allowed this to happen? What was wrong with the architecture of regulation, and who was responsible for this?

                I think we should have the same response to the Euro crisis. What was wrong with the fiscal and banking architecture that allowed housing bubbles and the like in the Periphery, and who was responsible for this architecture?

                But in the case of the Euro, it gets worse. Even after the crisis, the Core countries continued with their anti-Keynesian mindset. As the immediate manifestation of the crisis was unwillingness by markets to lend to Periphery governments, then it was assumed the problem must be excessive borrowing by Periphery governments. Never mind that the problem in Ireland was in large part because the government bailed out its banking sector (and therefore lenders to that sector, some of whom were of course from the Core), and the problem in Spain was that it might be forced to do the same. (On Spain, read this from Yanis Varoufakis.) So the Core countries imposed sharp fiscal austerity on the Periphery, as the price for ‘rescuing’ these countries. It was conveniently forgotten that the reason these countries governments found it difficult or impossible to fund their deficits was because the common currency denied them their own central bank, and that the ECB had been designed by the Core such that it could not explicitly play that role. The terms of the rescue were hardly generous, because it was argued these governments needed to learn their lesson.

                It then got even worse. The austerity inflicted on Greece led the electorate there to believe that there was no hope down this path, and so the terms of their particular rescue needed to be renegotiated. Impossible, responded the Core. If you try to do that, you will have to leave the Euro. The damage that response has done to the operation of the Euro is immense, and entirely predictable. The gains from the ‘permanent’ abolition of exchange rate risk – gains that were central to the economic rationale for the Euro – are being unraveled.

                From this perspective, the actions of the Core from before the Euro was formed until the present day have been misguided and irresponsible. They risk destroying the Euro. It would not be the first time that the actions of a creditor had caused needless destruction. Bear this in mind when you next read about how the terms of Greece’s rescue cannot possibly be changed because of the message this would send to other Periphery countries. If the Euro is to survive, the Core has to stop thinking like the aggrieved party, and instead must recognise that it designed the system that, quite simply, created this crisis.

                

Monetary policy and Financial Stability

               Here are some initial thoughts reading Michael Woodford’s new NBER paper. The paper addresses the following question. Should our current monetary policy framework, which involves ‘flexible inflation targeting’ (more on what this means below), be modified in an attempt to avoid a financial crisis of the type experienced in 2008? We can put the same question in a more specific way – should the Fed or Bank of England have raised interest rates by more in the years before the crisis in an effort to avoid the build up of excess leverage, even if movements in output and inflation indicated otherwise? The paper suggests the answer to both questions is yes. Although the paper contains plenty of maths, it is reasonably reader friendly, so I hope reading this will encourage you to read it.

               First, what is flexible inflation targeting? Both inflation and the output gap influence welfare, so policy is always about getting the right balance between them. In a simple set-up, when a ‘cost push’ shock (like an increase in VAT) raises inflation for a given output gap, then creating a negative output gap so as to moderate the rise in inflation is sensible. The optimal policy can be expressed as a relationship (a ‘target criterion’) between deviations in the price level from some target value (the ‘price gap’) and the output gap. In the case of the cost-push shock, policy ensures that the output gap gradually narrows as the price level gradually convergences back to its original level. This is not quite the same as ‘hitting the inflation target in two years’, which is sometimes how the Bank of England describes its policy. It is, however, how most economists would describe optimal policy (assuming the central bank has the credibility to commit).

               This ignores credit risk. In an earlier paper, Curdia and Woodford (2009) introduced a credit friction distortion (CFD) variable, which is related to the risk premium between lending rates to risky individuals/firms compared to the return on safe assets. This variable matters, because it can influence how consumption (demand) evolves, and it can influence the (New Keynesian) Phillips curve. It also influences social welfare itself. In the original paper CFD is treated as exogenous. Here it is allowed to take two values: a crisis value, and a normal value, but crucially the chance that it will move to the crisis value depends on leverage, which in turn depends on the output gap. It is this last link that is crucial. Without it a financial crisis would just be treated like any other shock: monetary policy would respond to it, but the relationship between prices and the output gap after the shock would remain the one described above.

               If leverage depends on output, this is no longer the case. The relationship between the output gap and the price gap now depends on what Woodford calls the ‘marginal crisis risk’. If the risk of a damaging financial crisis is particularly high, then it is optimal to reduce output in an effort to reduce leverage even if prices are at their target. In a way this is just commonsense when you have only one instrument (monetary policy) and many targets. Without this link, optimal policy was a matter of getting the right balance between output and inflation, and the maths tells you the form that balance takes. Add a third target (the chance of a crisis) that can be influenced by monetary policy, and that has to be balanced against the other two.

               What the maths tells you is the following. Suppose the optimal policy when a financial crisis is endogenous is expressed in the form of a modified price target like the one I have just described. Suppose also that policy did tighten to head off the possibility of a crisis, and this led to lower output and inflation than would otherwise have occurred. To quote Woodford: “Under the criterion proposed above, any departure of the price level from its long-run target path that is justified by an assessment of variations in the projected marginal crisis risk will subsequently have to be reversed.” In other words, a fear that central banks would constantly undershoot the inflation target because they were cautious about financial conditions does not follow under this policy, because in this case prices would move further and further away from their target path, and this would not be optimal.

               None of this reduces the desirability of finding other ‘macro-prudential’ financial instruments that could also mitigate the chances of a financial crisis. The better those instruments are, the less need there is to modify standard monetary policy to take account of that risk.

What this analysis suggests is that the possibility of a financial crisis leads to a modification of optimal monetary policy as we now understand it, but not its complete overthrow. Woodford argues that flexible inflation targeting has served us well. To quote:

“Despite a serious disruption of the world financial system, that some have compared in magnitude to that suffered in the 1930s, this time none of the major economies fell into deflationary spirals. And despite large swings in oil prices, the effects on the dynamics of wages and prices this time have been modest. These comparatively benign outcomes are surely due in large part to the fact that inflation expectations in most of the major economies have remained quite well anchored in the face of these substantial disturbances. And it is arguable that the credibility with regard to control of the rate of inflation that the leading central banks have achieved over the past twenty years deserves a great deal of the credit for this stability.”

On that I have to agree.

               I would like to make one final, somewhat tangential, observation. This paper seems to be a clear example of what I have called elsewhere (see this post and the paper referenced at its end) a ‘pragmatic microfoundations’ approach. Woodford’s endogenisation of the impact of policy on leverage and crisis is ad hoc (he describes it as ‘reduced form’), and he stresses repeatedly the need to do further work on modelling these links in a more structural manner. Nevertheless it would seem to me strange to dismiss what he does as ‘not proper macroeconomics’, as a microfoundations purist might do.