Helicopter money and fiscal policy

Both John Kay and Joerg Bibow think additional government spending on public investment is a good idea, and that helicopter money (HM) is either a distraction (Bibow) or fiscal policy by subterfuge (Kay). They are right about public investment, but wrong about HM.

We can have endless debates about whether HM is more monetary or fiscal. While attempts to distinguish between the two can sometime clarify important points (as here from Eric Lonergan) it is ultimately pointless. HM is what it is. Arguments that attempt to use definitions to then conclude that central banks should not do HM because its fiscal are equally pointless. Any HM distribution mechanism needs to be set up in agreement with governments, and existing monetary policy has fiscal consequences which governments have no control over.

Here is where Kay and Bibow are right. At this moment in time, even if a global recession is not about to happen, public investment should increase in the US, UK and Eurozone. There is absolutely no reason why that cannot be financed by issuing government debt. Furthermore, in the event of a new recession, increasing ‘shovel ready’ public investment is an excellent countercyclical tool. Indeed there would be a good case for bringing forward public investment even if monetary policy was capable of dealing with the recession on its own, because you would be investing when labour is cheap and interest rates are low.

Where Bibow is wrong is that the existence of HM in the central bank’s armory in no way compromises the points above. HM does not stop the government doing what it wants with fiscal policy. Monetary policy adapts to whatever fiscal policy plans the government has, and it can do this because it can move faster than governments.

This goes part of the way to answering Kay, but he also suggests that HM is somehow a way of getting politicians to do fiscal stimulus by calling it something else. This seems to ignore why fiscal stimulus ended. In 2010 both Osborne and Merkel argued we had to reduce government borrowing immediately because the markets demanded it.

HM is fiscal stimulus without any immediate increase in government borrowing. It therefore avoids the constraint that Osborne and Merkel said prevented further fiscal stimulus. To put it another way, they did not say that increasing government spending or cutting taxes were bad in itself, but just that they were extremely unwise because they had to be financed by adding to government debt. HM is not financed by increasing government debt.

Many argue that these concerns about debt are manufactured, and that in reality politicians on the right pushing austerity are using these concerns as a means of achieving a smaller state: what I call here deficit deceit. HM, particularly in its democratic form, calls their bluff. If we can avoid making the recession worse by maintaining public spending, financed in part by creating money while the recession persists, how can they object to that? Politicians who wanted to use deficit deceit will not like it, but that is their problem, not ours.

There is a related point in favour of HM that both Kay and Bibow miss. Independent central banks are a means of delegating macroeconomic stabilisation. Yet that delegation is crucially incomplete, because of the lower bound for nominal interest rates. While economists have generally understood that governments can in this situation come to the rescue, politicians either didn’t get the memo, or have proved that they are indeed not to be trusted with the task. HM is a much better instrument than Quantitative Easing, so why deny central banks the instrument they require to do the job they have been asked to do.

Economics reporting without any economics

Mike Berry explains in this article how the UK media began to see the increase in the deficit in 2009 as a serious problem, and sometimes as a crisis. The government were “court[ing] disaster by borrowing too much”. In terms of basic economics - the economics that anyone doing Econ101 (a first year undergraduate course) would know - there was nothing surprising or problematic about a rising deficit in a recession. It is what you expect to happen. The UK deficit hit record levels because it was a record recession. There was no evidence whatsoever that financing this deficit might be a problem: again basic Keynesian economics shows how in a recession an increase in the supply of government debt is accompanied by an increase in the private sector’s demand for financial assets. [1]

It was a case of economics reporting without any economics. It is a bit like a weather forecaster who reports the weather without any reference to the time of year. (In the Autumn they say ‘Its getting colder and colder - at this rate in nine months time all the rivers will freeze over’) Add politics and you have a dangerous mix, particularly when the partisan press has a significant influence on the non-partisan media.

I have sometimes put this down to a lack of economic knowledge among most political journalists. Of course political journalists talk about economics a lot, yet there seems to be a curious lack of interest in what those that study the subject have to say. I find the story of our ‘lost’ Brexit letter, which I summarised in this piece for The Conversation yesterday, rather scandalous: the mission to educate and inform thrown out of the window. [2]

Which I guess is one reason I started writing a blog. I say I guess because it all happened rather accidentally, so I never had any clear plan. Its success really did surprise me, and I soon realised that I had multiple audiences: many economists in the big economic institutions, but also many interested non-economists. It makes writing challenging and I know I often fail to adequately explain, but I was encouraged by whoever wrote the commentary on my blog in this knowledgeable list of the 100 top economics blogs.

But the people who most need to read economics blogs are I suspect one group that fail to do so: political journalists who talk about economics all the time, and the people who write and research economic news. It is not who appears on Newsnight debates that concerns me, but the unwritten assumptions of those who decide what is news, and write news bulletins. It was these people who decided that the growing deficit in 2009 was ‘courting disaster’, and made the tragedy of austerity possible.

[1] One comment I often get when I say this is that a good part of that deficit has proved to be structural. But if that is the case it is because a large part of the fall in GDP relative to trend following the recession seems to have been permanent. That means you do need to worry about the deficit at some point (after the recession is over), but your immediate focus should be on why GDP has departed from previous trends.

[2] In case you are unconvinced of this: the economic cost of Brexit is critical for most voters, the Remain campaign says this cost will be large but Leave dispute this, and who knows most about the basis and validity of the large cost claim?        

A General Theory of Austerity

“If we cannot puncture some of the mythology around austerity … then we are doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes”

Barack Obama, New York Times, April 2016

I have just completed a working paper based on my talk to the Royal Irish Academy at the end of last year. (Yes, I know, that was six months ago - it’s all the media training I have to do :-)) It has the title of this post: in part an allusion to Keynes who had been here before, but also because its scope is ambitious. The first part of the paper tries to explain why austerity is nearly always unnecessary, and the second part tries to understand why the austerity mistake happened.

I start by making a distinction which helps a great deal. It is between fiscal consolidation, which is a policy decision, and austerity, which is an outcome where that fiscal consolidation leads to an increase in aggregate unemployment. If you understand why monetary policy can normally stop fiscal consolidation leading to austerity, but cannot when interest rates are stuck near zero, then you are a long way to understanding why austerity was a mistake. Fiscal consolidation in 2010 was around 3 years too early. A section of the paper is devoted to showing that the idea that markets prevented such a delay in consolidation is a complete myth.

I say that austerity is nearly always unnecessary because (given the title) I also cover the case of an individual monetary union member that has an unusually (relative to the rest of the union) large government debt problem. Here some austerity is required, but not for the reason you might think. It has nothing to do with markets: the Eurozone crisis from 2010 to 2012 was a result of mistakes by the ECB. If a union member’s government debt is not sustainable, there needs to be some form of default (Greece). If it is sustainable, then the central bank should back that government, as the ECB ended up doing with OMT in 2012. The reason some austerity is necessary is that to support financing this unusually high debt, the union member needs a real depreciation, and in a monetary union that has to occur via lower wages and prices relative to other union members.

None of this theory is at all new: hence the allusion to Keynes in the title. That makes the question of why policy makers made the mistake all the more pertinent. One set of arguments point to an unfortunate conjunction of events: austerity as an accident if you like. Basically Greece happened at a time when German orthodoxy was dominant. I argue that this explanation cannot play more than a minor role: mainly because it does not explain what happened in the US and UK, but also because it requires us to believe that macroeconomics in Germany is very special and that it had the power to completely dominate policy makers not only in Germany but the rest of the Eurozone.

The set of arguments that I think have more force, and which make up the general theory of the title, reflect political opportunism on the political right which is dominated by a ‘small state’ ideology. It is opportunism because it chose to ignore the (long understood) macroeconomics, and instead appeal to arguments based on equating governments to households, at a time when many households were in the process of reducing debt or saving more. But this explanation raises another question in turn: how was the economics known since Keynes lost to simplistic household analogies.

This question can be put another way. Why was this opportunism so evident in this recession, but not in earlier economic downturns? There are a number of reasons for this, which I also discuss here, but one that I think is important in Europe is the spread of central bank independence, coupled with a phobia that European central bank governors have about fiscal dominance. In the UK, for example, the Bank of England played a key role in 2010 in convincing policymakers and the media that we needed immediate and aggressive fiscal consolidation. Keynesian demand management has been entrusted to institutions whose leaders (but not those who work for them) threw away the manual. But as Ben Bernanke showed, it does not have to be this way. [1]

If my analysis is right, it means that we cannot be complacent that when the next liquidity trap recession hits the austerity mistake will not be made again. Indeed it may be even more likely to happen, as austerity has in many cases been successful in reducing the size of the state. My paper does not explore how to avoid future austerity, but it hopefully lays the groundwork for that discussion.

[1] Here is Bernanke is October 2010 saying “indeed, premature fiscal tightening could put the recovery at risk”, although no doubt he could have said it louder.

Brexit, immigration and £100

With so many heavyweights, from Barack Obama to Mark Carney, saying that we will be worse off with Brexit, why are the polls still neck and neck? There seem to me two reasonable explanations: that the tabloid media have a strong influence, and that immigration is a big issue among voters. But perhaps the two are connected, for reasons that will become clear.

It is a well known result that worries about immigration tend to be greatest in areas where there is little immigration. In areas where there are a high proportion of migrants, like London, UKIP do rather poorly. For most, immigration is not a problem that is facing them directly, but rather an issue they feel is facing the country.

For some this concern about immigration is cultural, but for others it is economic. But if it is economic, on what is this concern based? All too often I come across arguments that make simple economic errors. Like more migrants put greater pressure on public services. Study after study suggest exactly the opposite: because migrants tend to be young adults who work, they pay more in taxes and take less advantage of public services or benefits than the average non-migrant. To his great credit, when Jonathan Portes (from the non-aligned research institute NIESR) was confronted in this Newsnight debate by nonsense from someone from the Centre for Policy Studies (right wing think tank, rated D for funding openness), he did not attempt to win the argument by quoting statistics or academic studies, but by trying to show why what he was saying made common sense once you explain it.

Sometimes it is simply false correlations: austerity has put pressure on public services and the recession and productivity slowdown has held back real wages, but both have happened at a time of high immigration. For a very good and simple explanation of the facts about recent EU immigration, see this LSE analysis. (For those that can access it, here is a similar take from Gemma Tetlow at the FT.) The only area where there might be some negative effect from migration is on the wages of unskilled labour, but even where a negative impact is found it seems to be small as the chart in this post shows. As Portes suggests, this negative impact could be wiped out by positive effects from higher growth and better public finances. 

In some sense what we have is very similar to the austerity problem, with the combination of simplistic ideas and non-causal association. It feels right that governments should tighten their belts when households are doing the same, and the ‘clearing up the mess’ idea is reinforced because the deficit went up when Labour was in power. With both austerity and immigration we have a visual media that normally makes no attempt to ‘educate and inform’, and a tabloid media that actively reinforces these mistakes. (If I open the MailOnline as I write this, here is the top story.) We have a governing party that does the same, and in the past an opposition that was reluctant to say that immigration benefits the economy as a whole. [1]

So the referendum debate amounts to economics versus immigration. But here is a revealing bit of information from the YouGov analysis cited earlier.

“We recently conducted an experiment in which we asked people to imagine how they would vote if they knew Brexit would make them just £100 worse off per year. This instantly changed a neck-and-neck result to a 12 point victory for ‘Remain’. The effect is even stronger among undecided voters, who flip 18 points from veering towards ‘Leave’ to veering strongly towards ‘Remain’ in this scenario.”

It is of course a classic technique economists use to quantify how strongly people feel about an issue, and it suggests the immigration concern is not worth that much to many people. Given that the economic assessments of the costs of Brexit are of the order of at least 10 times £100 a year, the economic argument is key. Which is why it is worrying that the BBC seem to ignore the consensus among academic economists, as expressed in the letter from the 196 (who cannot be accused of being part of the establishment) but instead find time to publish a 'fact check' that is, to put it politely, misleading.

[1] Labour’s line should be (and occasionally is) to note that recent immigration from the EU has benefited the economy, but not every part of the economy, and government needs to be active in spreading the benefits.

Media, Economics and Brexit

Martin Sandbu at the FT says “It is now fair to say that the debate on the economics has been won by the Remain side.” He was of course talking about what the Bank of England said yesterday, rather than the 196 economists who signed our letter, but together they present an important test for the non-partisan media. The extreme difference between the amount of coverage the Bank got (blanket) and our letter got (practically zero) tells us something important about how media coverage works: the Bank is after all just a collection of economists. [1] (The list of those who signed our letter can be obtained from here.)

The media will not, of course, go as far as Martin and say the economic argument has been won. But what they can say is that all the leading economic institutions and the overwhelming majority of academic economists think that Brexit will involve significant short term and long term costs. That is now a statement of fact, which readers of some very non-partisan tabloids may not be aware of. My guess would be that there are at least 25 academic economists who think Brexit will involve significant costs compared to each one who thinks it will bring benefits. As I said here, that is as close to unanimity among economists as you will ever get. As it is a fact, saying that it appears to be so in no way breaches impartiality.

They could go further. The main response of the Leave campaign has been to say all economic forecasts are hopeless. They are no doubt referring to unconditional macro forecasts of the ‘what will growth be next year’ type. However the assessments made by all these economists and economic institutions are not unconditional forecasts, but conditional forecasts: what difference will Brexit make. They are much more reliable than unconditional forecasts. (This point can be got across with simple analogies: a doctor will tell you that being overweight increases the chance of a heart attack, but not when you will have one.)

So trying to discount the near universal assessment of economists by referring to macro forecasts either represents dangerous ignorance or deliberate obfuscation. But for those with little knowledge of these things, it is a deception that could work. Pointing out the difference does not breach impartiality, but informs the debate.

Brexit in the UK, and Trump in the US, represents a critical challenge to the ‘shape of the earth: views differ’ style of reporting. ‘Balance’ should never involve ignoring facts that are awkward for one side, or not challenging statements that are false. How many journalists (particularly political journalists) recognise this may determine two critical elections for both the UK and the whole world.

[1] Of course letters are not random samples, but it is not often you get letters from 170+ academic economists. The letter is important because academic economists are hardly part of the establishment, and indeed academics are usually able to say what they think without fear of any consequences.

Economists say no to Brexit

Today the Times has published a letter about Brexit. It is short and sweet.

Focusing entirely on the economics, we consider that it would be a major mistake for the UK to leave the European Union.

Leaving would entail significant long-term costs. The size of these costs would depend on the amount of control the UK chooses to exercise over such matters as free movement of labour, and the associated penalty it would pay in terms of access to the single market. The numbers calculated by the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance, the OECD and the Treasury describe a plausible range for the scale of these costs.

The uncertainty over precisely what kind of relationship the UK would find itself in with the EU and the rest of the world would also weigh heavily for many years. In addition, there is a sizeable risk of a short-term shock to confidence if we were to see a Leave vote on June 23rd. The Bank of England has signalled this concern clearly, and we share it.

The simplicity of the letter was deliberate, as it was designed to show the extent of the consensus among economists on this issue. In a relatively short space of time Tony Yates, Paul Levine and I got 196 signatories, most of whom are UK academic economists. (The letter was originally intended just to focus on academic economists, but others wanted to sign.)

Why bother? After all doesn’t everyone already know that nearly all economists think Brexit would have significant costs? Only yesterday NIESR published their own estimates of costs, nicely summarised by Martin Sandbu. There are two important points here. First, a large section of the print media is committed to Brexit. Second, the BBC has pledged to be balanced, which means always matching stories about the economic cost with those who believe it will be a benefit.

Some may have noticed the disparity in the standing of those anti and pro Brexit, but equally others may have used attempts at balance to say to themselves that economists are always disagreeing and therefore dismiss warnings about costs. There are two reasons why you will never get unanimity from economists: it is a science about people and therefore inherently uncertain, and the views of a few economists are influenced by their politics. There is the joke that if you put 10 economists in a room you get 11 opinions. Which means that when all but a handful agree about something, you can be pretty sure the theory and evidence are strongly pointing in one direction.

There is therefore a huge disparity between the overwhelming majority of economists that say we would be worse off with Brexit and the handful that say otherwise. That is as near to unanimity among economists as you will ever get.

Scientists and media training

Suppose a scientist finds that a product being used by some industry to help enhance their products is in fact dangerous. Their research is peer reviewed by other scientists, who find no fault. Imagine there are no regulatory bodies that the scientist can pass this information to. She contacts politicians and civil servants, but the government is too close to the industry and the opposition are too busy on other things.

She contacts the media. Most journalists do not have time to understand what she has done, check that other scientists agree with the results and write it up, while others know that because the industry advertises with their paper any story will be spiked. She gets invited on to one TV programme, where she finds herself pitted against an industry representative practiced at PR who dismisses what she has done. Nothing happens as a result.

How do we stop this kind of thing happening? Do we suggest that the scientist gets some media training so she can debate better on TV, or hires a PR company so that more journalists take notice of what she has done? Or do we lambaste journalists for not doing their job properly, imagining we are still in a bygone era where journalists had time to investigate?

In this particular example most countries have chosen a better model, where they set up regulatory bodies staffed with other scientists that have the job of assessing research of this kind, bodies which governments find it difficult to ignore. But what happens if, for whatever reason, these institutions do not exist?

In the space of two years the UK has had three referendums/elections in which economic issues have been key. In the Scottish independence referendum and Brexit the view of the overwhelming majority of economists have been clear [1], but in the media this view was/is typically ‘balanced’ by an opposing view. In the UK election the views of macroeconomists on austerity were more diffuse, but a clear majority did not think austerity had a positive effect on the economy. The media largely ignored this view.

I naturally think there is something wrong here, and I also doubt that the answer is to give macroeconomists more media training. We need a debate about what the right answer is. [2]

[1] In the Scottish referendum the clear view was that there would be large short term fiscal costs arising from independence.

[2] My thanks to the organisers of this event for starting this debate, and in particular to members of the audience whose questions this post is a better answer to!