Political economy assignments

Suppose you have two objectives for monetary policy: financial sector stability and real economy stability. You have two main instruments: interest rates and macroprudential policy (things like changing the capital requirements of banks, or making it less easy to get a mortgage; often called macropru for short). Should you assign one instrument to one objective (often called an assignment), or try and achieve both goals with both instruments?

As Tony Yates points out, assignments are rarely optimal from a purely macro point of view. Even if, say, interest rates are less effective at achieving financial stability than macropru, you would still want interest rates to contribute something to that objective. An exception is when one instrument completely dominates the other: then assignment is optimal. An example of this exception in a certain class of model is monetary over fiscal policy as means to achieve real stabilisation, as discussed here and here (less technical discussion here). But this type of result is unusual, and even when you get a result like this for a certain class of models it is not hard to add real world complications that remove the result.

If assignment in the case of real and financial stabilisation is not optimal, does this imply that those setting interest rates should take financial stability into account? It is important to understand what we are talking about here. We are not talking about how financial conditions might influence what interest rates need to be to achieve real stabilisation, which is the kind of issue discussed in this post by Bianca De Paoli for example. Nor is it talking about allowing for risk as I discussed here. Instead it would be saying that institutions like the US Fed should have a triple mandate when setting interest rates, where the third mandate was financial stability. Interest rates could be changed if financial stability was a concern, even if this had no implications for inflation or output. Equivalently, interest rates could move to help financial stability even if this took output and inflation away from target.

However we already have assignments that are clearly suboptimal from a purely macro perspective. Fiscal policy is assigned to the control of government debt, and reducing debt is certainly not a monetary policy objective. But in standard models this assignment is clearly suboptimal: when debt is high, reducing interest rates can be quite effective in reducing debt (particularly if government debt is mostly short term), and undesirable knock on effects on output and inflation can be countered by fiscal policy. Yet the mainstream consensus is that monetary policy should not be used to reduce debt.

The reason for this suboptimal assignment is most probably because of political economy concerns. Or to put it another way policy is mainly concerned about knowingly sub-optimal decisions. Reducing interest rates to reduce debt sounds too much like fiscal dominance. There is a fear that if there is no institutional assignment, politicians will depart from optimal policy and by keeping rates too low to reduce debt they will allow excessive inflation.

Can such political economy concerns be applied to financial stability and monetary policy, particularly as the same actor - an independent central bank - is in charge of both? My instinct is that it can, because central bankers are heavily influenced by pressures from the financial sector. As a result, there is a danger that if interest rates are set with both objectives in mind, central bankers will depart from optimal policy and, for example, needlessly raise interest rates before the real economy requires them to rise. The recent experience of Sweden is a clear example where this happened. For this reason I rather like the UK institutional set-up, with a separate MPC and FPC and a clear assignment for each.

Spain, and how the Eurozone has to get real about countercyclical policy

Matthew Klein has a good account of how Spain’s macroeconomic fortunes are improving, but only from a very bad place. I’m not that knowledgeable about the Spanish economy, so I cannot add any detail. However I do want to pick up on one point, which he and others (including Martin Wolf - see below) have made, which I think is wrong and misleading.

Before I do that, I just want to make a general point about the current recovery. At its heart it is export led, which is exactly what you would expect. Just as this post which compares Greece to Ireland shows, the Eurozone does have a natural correction mechanism when a country becomes hopelessly uncompetitive as a result of a temporary domestic boom (whatever its cause). The mechanism is a recession and what economists call ‘internal devaluation’: falling wages and prices. The problem with this correction mechanism is that, on its own, it is slow and painful, particularly when Eurozone inflation is so low.

So the key question is what could Spain have done to avoid having such a painful period of correction. The cause of the problem was the excess private sector borrowing of the pre-crisis period, and the associated capital inflows. This was part of an unsustainable property boom that led to a large current account deficit and rising inflation. (I liked the point that Matthew Klein made about how export orientated firms have recently increased their borrowing. Extra borrowing is not bad if the investment is sound.) What could Spain have done to cool things down? As Matthew Klein points out, Spain already had some sensible macroprudential monetary policies, and it seems likely that more of the same would not have been enough.

Which brings us of course to fiscal policy, and it is here that so many commentators go wrong. They say, correctly, that Spain’s problem was never a profligate government. They say, correctly, that the actual budget was in surplus from 2005-2007. Of course the relevant number is the underlying (cyclical adjusted) balance, and the IMF now thinks that shows a persistent although small deficit. But as Martin Wolf points out, again correctly, the IMF in 2008 thought very differently. As I have said many times in the case of the UK, ex post numbers for pre-crisis cyclically adjusted deficits can be very dodgy because of the depth and persistence of this recession.

The mistake everyone here makes is to judge the appropriate fiscal policy by the size of the deficit. That is like saying that a bigger fiscal stimulus in the US in 2009 was impossible because the deficit was already very large. For an individual country in a currency union the deficit is not the appropriate metric to judge short term fiscal policy. Unless there are very good reasons for believing the economy is too competitive, the appropriate metric is national inflation relative to the Eurozone average. From 2001 to 2007 the GDP deflator (the price of domestically produced goods) for the Eurozone as a whole increased at an average rate of just over 2%. In Spain it increased at an average rate of nearly 4%. 2% excess inflation over 7 years implies a 15% loss in competitiveness. So forget the actual budget deficit or any cyclically corrected version, fiscal policy was just not tight enough.

I have been told so many times that for Spain to have a tighter fiscal policy before the crisis was ‘politically impossible’. If that really is true, then Spain has little to complain about when it comes to the subsequent recession. If you cannot do any better, you have to leave the natural correction mechanism to do its slow and painful work. But I suspect what is ‘politically impossible’ is in part a reflection of the Eurozone’s flawed Stability and Growth pact itself, which focused entirely on deficits.

It seems more than likely that the existing monetary but not fiscal/political union is here to stay for some time. Many in Europe’s political elite plan to move quickly to greater union (see Andrew Watt here), but there are serious obstacles in their path. The current system can be made to work better, and strong countercyclical fiscal policy is an obvious part of that. Combining this with medium term deficit reduction is technically trivial. Just how many years and recessions does it take before what is obvious textbook macroeconomics can become politically acceptable?

In praise of macroeconomists (or at least one of them)

This is a title that is sure to spur some angry comments. Didn’t the financial crisis prove that mainstream macroeconomics was hopelessly flawed, that the ‘Great Moderation’ (fifteen or so years of relatively stable inflation and output) that preceded the crisis was a sham, or worse still a cause of the crisis, and basing policy on lots of maths and rational expectations has been totally discredited?

One of the architects of that macroeconomic mainstream is Lars Svensson. He wrote a number of key papers on inflation targeting using lots of maths and rational expectations. Probably for that reason, he was a member of Sweden’s equivalent of the Monetary Policy Committee from 2007 to 2013. By the middle of 2009 Swedish short term interest rates were, like most other places, close to their ‘zero lower bound’ - in this case 0.25%. But in mid 2010 they began to rise again, reaching 2% at the end of 2011. The primary motivation for this continuing rise in rates was a concern that Swedish consumers were taking on too much debt.

Svensson fiercely and publicly opposed these increases, and eventually left the central bank in frustration. He argued that there was still plenty of slack in the economy, and raising rates would be deflationary, so that inflation would fall well below the central bank’s target of 2%. By the end of 2012 inflation had indeed fallen to zero, and since then monthly inflation has more often been negative than positive. It was -0.4% in September. This week the Swedish central bank lowered their interest rate to zero.

OK, so one eminent macroeconomist got a forecast right. Plenty of others get their forecasts wrong. Why the big deal? Suppose you took the statement in my first paragraph seriously. The Great Moderation was about central banks having an explicit forward looking target for inflation, and varying interest rates with the aim of trying to achieve it. So if the success of that policy was a sham or worse, and had been exposed by the financial crisis, a central bank should not worry too much if they abandon it. They should certainly not worry if they deviate from it because of concerns about the financial health of the economy. Which is exactly what the Swedish central bank did.

Now Sweden has negative inflation, and interest rates have come right back to zero. Deviating from what mainstream macroeconomists in general advocate (and what one in particular recommended) has proved a costly mistake. (Svensson estimates it has cost 60,000 jobs.) So maybe the story with the financial crisis is a little more nuanced. Perhaps good monetary policy, aided by the analysis of mainstream New-Keynesian theory, did help bring about the pre-crisis moderation in inflation and output variability. The Achilles heel was that monetary policy lost traction when nominal rates hit zero, but a number of mainstream macroeconomists had discussed the implications of that possibility before it happened in 2009. In the UK at least (and also elsewhere), it was politicians and central bank governors that did not take the consequences of this possibility seriously enough. The financial crisis suggests that what was missing was better financial regulation (including macroprudential monetary policy tools), rather than a need to rewrite how we set interest rates.

I am certainly not claiming that mainstream macroeconomics is without fault, as regular readers will know (e.g.) However it is important to recognise the achievements of macroeconomics as well as its faults. If we fail to do that, then central banks can start doing foolish things, with large costs in terms of the welfare of its country’s citizens. And while it might appear unseemly to occasionally blow one’s own profession’s trumpet, I suspect no one else is going to. 

Why macroeconomists, not bankers, should set interest rates

More thoughts on the idea that interest rates ought to rise because of the possibility that the financial sector is taking excessive risks: what I called in this earlier post the BIS case, after the Bank of International Settlements, the international club for central bankers. I know Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Mark Thoma, Tony Yates and many others have already weighed in here, but - being macroeconomists - they were perhaps too modest to draw this lesson.

To most macroeconomists, the theory of monetary policy is pretty straightforward. Interest rates should be set at a level which closes the output gap, which can be defined as the level of output and unemployment that will keep underlying inflation constant. We can call this real interest rate the Wicksellian natural rate. The difficulty is not in the concept, but in the practice of putting numbers to this concept when inflation is noisy, the output gap is hard to estimate, there are lags in the system etc etc.

But, respond those putting the BIS case, wasn’t that what monetary policymakers thought they were doing in 2007, and look what happened next. Monetary policy cannot afford to ignore the financial sector, and the risk of excessive lending and bubbles that subsequently blow up the economy. There are signs, they say, that what happened in 2007/8 may be happening again now, so we need to raise rates to prevent another crash, even though there is still a negative output gap and inflation is below target.

Which might seem plausible, until you notice what is going on here. The implication is that a financial crisis only happens because interest rates are set at the wrong level. The Great Recession was all the fault of the Fed, who kept interest rates too low after the 2001 recession. The gradual deregulation of the financial sector in the decades before? - not an issue. The widespread misselling of subprime mortgages? - these things happen. All the other examples of misselling and fraud? - boys will be boys. An industry that profits from a massive implicit public subsidy? - we see no subsidy. Classifying subprime products as AAA? Massive increases in bank leverage in the 00s? - all the result of keeping interest rates too low.

When those putting the BIS case tell you that macroprudential controls (a.k.a. financial regulations) are ‘untested’ and ‘uncertain in their impact’, what they are really saying is that the financial system cannot be regulated to make it safe when interest rates are low. There is no evidence for that proposition, and a lot of history that says otherwise. We do not have to accept a deregulated financial sector which has the power at any moment to derail the real economy. But of course most working in the financial sector hate regulation. They have an interest in perpetuating different stories about the Great Recession. If you spend too much time around bankers, there is a danger that you come to believe these self-serving stories.

But, you might say, what harm would a modest increase in interest rates do? Again, basic macroeconomics, which I have not seen anyone putting the BIS case address. Raising rates implies in current circumstances a larger negative output gap, which will reduce inflation further below its target. As happened in Sweden, and accurately predicted by macroeconomist Lars Svensson. Two things could then happen. First, interest rates come back down again (in Sweden’s case by outvoting the governor for the first time since it gained its independence in 1999), but the cost of lost resources and higher unemployment created in the meantime can never be redeemed. Second, interest rates stay high for long enough that the public will conclude that the inflation target has in reality been revised down, and we risk converging to a deflationary steady state (technical discussion here), or in non-technical terms a Japan-like lost decade or more of low output and deflation.

To see clearly why this makes no sense, consider the symmetric case. Suppose someone argued, when inflation was above target, that we should not raise rates, but instead allow the output gap to be positive. I suspect those currently making the BIS case would scream disaster – it is the 1970s all over again. So why is that wrong but doing the same thing in reverse OK? In fact it is worse than that. If long run expected inflation rises, a central bank can always signal its true inflation target by sharply raising rates. In the opposite case it may not be able to, because of the Zero Lower Bound.

I like to praise the current UK government when I can. In setting up a Financial Policy Committee that is separate from the Monetary Policy Committee they did exactly the right thing. This formalises an assignment: macro prudential policy to control financial sector excess, and interest rates to control demand and inflation. Most macroeconomists know this makes sense. But the financial sector has a pecuniary interest in pretending otherwise. Those that get too close to that sector should be kept well away from setting interest rates.