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!   

More asymmetries: Is Keynesian economics left wing?

In the textbooks it is suggested that Keynesian economics is what happens when ‘prices are sticky’. Sticky prices sound like prices failing to equate supply and demand, which in turn sounds like markets not working. Hence whether you believe in Keynesian theory depends on whether you think markets work, so it obviously maps to a left/right political perspective.

Reality is rather different. Suppose we start from a position where firms are selling all they wish. Aggregate demand equals aggregate supply. If then aggregate demand for goods falls, perhaps because consumers or firms are trying to rebuild their balance sheets after a financial crisis, producers of these goods will start to reduce output, and lay off workers. The idea that they would ignore the fall in demand and just carry on producing the same amount is ludicrous. So output appears to be influenced by aggregate demand at least in the short run, which is at the heart of what most economists think of as Keynesian theory.

So where do sticky prices come in? Here we have to go back to the textbooks, and to an imaginary world where the monetary authority fixes the money supply. Firms, in an effort to stimulate demand for their goods, cut prices. Lower prices mean people do not need to hold so much money to buy goods. However if the nominal money supply is fixed, interest rates will fall to encourage people to hold more money. The textbooks encourage us to think of a market for money, with interest rates as the price that equates supply and demand. Lower interest rates provide an incentive to consumers and firms to increase demand, which in turn raises output.

Now suppose that firms carry on cutting prices as long as they are selling less than they would like. The process just described will continue, with interest rates getting lower and aggregate demand rising in response. The process stops when firms stop cutting prices, which means aggregate demand has increased back to its original level. Suppose further that prices adjusted very quickly. This mechanism would work very quickly, so we would only observe aggregate demand being below supply for very short periods. If prices were extremely flexible, we could ignore aggregate demand altogether in thinking about output. Hence aggregate demand matters only if ‘prices are sticky’.

Note that this correction mechanism is quite complex, and some way from the simple microeconomic world of the market for a single good. But we need to move back to the real world again. Monetary authorities do not fix the money supply; they fix short term interest rates. So they are directly in charge of the correction mechanism that is at the heart of this story. If central banks had some way of knowing what aggregate supply was, and also had perfect knowledge of aggregate demand and how interest rates influenced it, they could make sure aggregate demand equalled supply without any need for prices to change at all. Equally, if prices were very flexible but the monetary authority always moved nominal rates in such a way as to fail to stimulate aggregate demand, aggregate demand and therefore output would not return back to equal aggregate supply. Demand would still matter, even with flexible prices.

Once you see things as they are in the real world, rather than as they are portrayed in the textbooks, the importance of aggregate demand (and therefore of Keynesian theory) is all about how good monetary policy is, and not about sticky prices. If monetary policy was perfect, then Keynesian theory would only be used by central banks in order to be perfect, and everyone else could ignore it. Of course for many good reasons monetary policy is not perfect, and so Keynesian theory matters.

We could re-establish the link between Keynesian theory and price flexibility by assuming the monetary authority follows a rule which would make policy perfect if and only if prices moved very fast, but the key point remains. The importance or otherwise of Keynesian theory depends on monetary policy. It is not about market failure. Keynesian economics is not left wing, but it is about how the economy actually works, which is why all monetary policymakers use it.

It is also common sense, which is why I’m often perplexed by those who dispute Keynesian ideas. Now maybe they are confused by the strange world portrayed in textbooks, but even if they think it is all about ‘sticky prices’, the evidence that prices are slow to adjust is overwhelming, so it is hard to dispute Keynesian theory on those grounds. Yet a whole revolution in macroeconomic theory was based around a movement that wanted to overthrow Keynesian ideas, and build models where this correction mechanism I described happened automatically. The people who built these models did not describe them as assuming monetary policy worked perfectly: instead they said it was all about assuming markets worked. As a description this was at best opaque and at worst a deliberate deception.

So why is there this desire to deny the importance of Keynesian theory coming from the political right? Perhaps it is precisely because monetary policy is necessary to ensure aggregate demand is neither excessive nor deficient. Monetary policy is state intervention: by setting a market price, an arm of the state ensures the macroeconomy works. When this particular procedure fails to work, in a liquidity trap for example, state intervention of another kind is required (fiscal policy). While these statements are self-evident to many mainstream economists, to someone of a neoliberal or ordoliberal persuasion they are discomforting. At the macroeconomic level, things only work well because of state intervention. This was so discomforting that New Classical economists attempted to create an alternative theory of business cycles where booms and recessions were nothing to be concerned about, but just the optimal response of agents to exogenous shocks.

So my argument is that Keynesian theory is not left wing, because it is not about market failure - it is just about how the macroeconomy works. On the other hand anti-Keynesian views are often politically motivated, because the pivotal role the state plays in managing the macroeconomy does not fit the ideology. Is this asymmetry odd? I do not think so - just think about the debate over climate change. Now of course it is true that there are a small minority of scientists who do not believe in manmade climate change and who are not politically motivated to do so, and I’m sure the same is true for Keynesian theory. But to claim that the majority of anti-Keynesian views were innocent of ideological preference would be like – well like trying to pretend that monetary policy has no role in stabilising the business cycle.

There are of course many differences between climate change denial and anti-Keynesian positions. One is the extent to which the antagonism has infiltrated the subject itself. Another is the extent to which the mainstream wants to deny this influence. I do wonder if the unreal view of monetary policy that remains in the textbooks does so in part so as to not offend a particular ideological position. I do know that macroeconomics is often taught as if this ideological influence was non-existent, or at least not important to the development of the discipline. I think doing good social science involves recognising ideological influence, rather than pretending it does not exist.

  

Eurozone Asymmetries

Suppose a large Eurozone country – let’s call it France - decided that it needs to substantially increase its minimum wage in order to reduce poverty. The increase is sufficiently large that it leads to a sustained increase in average French wage inflation, which in turn decreases the competitiveness of France relative to the rest of the Eurozone. France cannot be permanently uncompetitive, so the obvious consequence would be that France has to endure a subsequent period in which its relative inflation was below the Eurozone average.

However this would require a period where French unemployment was above its natural rate. French politicians declare that this would be politically unacceptable to French voters. Instead they suggest French inflation should remain at 2%, and the remainder of the Eurozone should increase their inflation rate to 4% for a time (giving an average Eurozone inflation rate of over 3%) to ensure France regains competitiveness. Now this would not normally be possible, because the ECB’s inflation target is 2%. However the influence of France on the ECB is such that the ECB fails to raise interest rates in time to prevent 3% average inflation, and subsequently keeps interest rates low because they repeatedly forecast inflation falling back down to 2% in due course.

The rest of the Eurozone would understandably be upset at having to endure 4% inflation. Some countries might suggest that perhaps, in the absence of ECB action, they could tighten fiscal policy to get their inflation below 4%. However France refuses to countenance changes to agreed fiscal targets, and instead suggests that what is really required is for other countries to adopt a similar increase in the minimum wage to the one originally undertaken in France. The French head of the ECB gives a speech where he intimates that the ECB might be prepared to raise interest rates a little bit in exchange for other countries introducing this ‘structural reform’ to their minimum wage levels. The French government also hints that it might be prepared to allow very limited fiscal contraction outside of France, but only if this took the form of tax increases rather than public expenditure cuts.

Your reaction to this little imaginary story is that it couldn’t possibly happen because other Eurozone countries would not permit it to happen. My suggestion is that Germany rather than France is doing exactly this at the moment, except that in their case it started with a period where German wage inflation was below the Eurozone average (for reasons discussed by Dustmann et al here). [1] German control of the ECB might not be as complete and simple as I imagined French influence in the story above, but it has the advantage that interest rates have hit the zero lower bound, and the threat that anything unconventional could be declared illegal. And in this real world story I too wonder why other Eurozone countries allow Germany to get away with it.

[1] In fact what Germany is doing is worse, because inflation asymmetries and debt deflation mean that the output costs of achieving zero inflation outside Germany to regain non-German competitiveness are far greater than the costs associated with 4% inflation in my story. 

Has Cameron blown the austerity cover?

What I had expected to happen was that the Conservatives would keep to the line that spending had to be reduced because debt and the deficit were too high. The need for austerity because you have borrowed too much was a simple message that everyone understood, even if it didn’t make much sense when applied to a government during a recession. There would be appropriate nudges and winks that, once elected, this tough fiscal line might be modified to make room for tax cuts, but the official line would be ‘debt implies austerity’.

Those who are better informed about the macroeconomics, whether on the right or left, have always understood that this was cover for a desire to shrink the size of the state. However this perspective hardly ever saw the light of day in the media. It is tempting to lapse into conspiracy mode at this point - to believe that the rules of mediamacro are whatever suits a particular set of interests. I suspect this is too simple. For myths to work well they have to be based on half-truths, and they have to obey some internal logic.

So when John Snow berated Ed Miliband for forgetting to talk about the deficit, I think he actually believed that the deficit was this all important constraint that was driving austerity. People understand that when they borrow too much, hard times have to follow. That cornerstone can support many other beliefs. The bank manager who says you must reduce your spending is not popular, but you know he is being responsible. I suspect a great deal of the advantage that the Conservatives enjoy in terms of economic competence in the polls simply comes from this idea (and associating Labour with creating the debt problem). It is difficult to see where else it comes from, with deficit targets missed and stagnant real wages and productivity.

Now that Cameron has promised large tax cuts, does this blow away the cover? Nice if it happened, but unlikely. The Conservative line that only they were prepared to take the debt problem seriously still works. For every person who, as a result of the promised tax cuts, begins to question whether the size of the deficit really was such a major problem, there will be many more that continue to believe it is and will scold the Conservatives for not being responsible enough (but still vote for them).

As a result, I do not think it will change how voters see the past. Looking to the future, on the other hand, it is will be very difficult for Osborne to argue that his future austerity is a painful necessity, and the plans of others dangerously profligate. The retort ‘how come there is room for large tax cuts’ is too strong. If they have any sense Labour will turn the tables. Whereas they have costed all their new commitments, Cameron’s tax cuts are to be paid for by yet unspecified spending cuts (the ‘magic asterisk’). The political danger of the magic asterisk is that it is left to the voter’s imagination to fill them in. If Labour are clever (which may be a big if) they will make appropriate suggestions depending on the audience. Furthermore, interviewers with any self respect will press the Conservatives to outline exactly where ‘the money will come from’ to pay for the tax cuts.

It also lets Labour free of all those questions about the commitments they do have, and whether the country can really afford them. The choice becomes should we spend money on the NHS or on tax cuts, and that I think is ground Labour should be happy to fight on. (There is also the danger that these tax cuts, which mainly benefit the better off, will be viewed in the same way as the cut in the 50p rate.) It is also a more honest debate. Hopefully Labour will spell out exactly how they will achieve their fiscal targets, so that the contrast between their fully costed plans and the Conservative’s uncosted plans will be crystal clear. Add to this the uncertainty created by the proposed EU referendum (see Roger Liddle here reinforcing some of my own thoughts), and perhaps the Conservatives will no longer be seen as the safer pair of hands. (For an example of this train of thought, see these remarks about UK credit ratings.)

For these reasons, I do not think that announcing large tax breaks was always part of the Conservative’s plan. Of course offering tax cuts will gain some votes, but it puts at risk one of their main political assets, which is the perception of future economic responsibility. This in turn may suggest that the Conservatives are far from confident about winning in 2015, as the polls so far have not shown the hoped for pre-election drift to the governing party. Whatever happens, watching how mediamacro develops just got more interesting.   

Disagreements between nations

My recent posts on the Eurozone and German attitudes have attracted a lot of hostile comments, and generated a lively debate. Sometimes I feel the debate is skating on the thin ice of national stereotypes, and occasionally the ice breaks. Some people just plunge straight in! For more debate on the desirability or otherwise of fiscal union, which I hope does not fall into that trap, there is an interesting discussion of various proposals by Yanis Varoufakis and James Galbraith at OpenDemocracy, plus two responses from myself and Frances Coppola.

Another clash between nations is described in Ed Conway’s account of the Bretton Woods summit that created the IMF, World Bank and the post-war international macroeconomic framework that lasted until 1971. I must admit my preconceptions about the impossibility of making macroeconomics fun to read about have been thoroughly shattered over the last year. First there was Tim Harford’s guide to macroeconomics that I talked about here, and now a book about a three week conference discussing macroeconomic institutions and exchange rate regimes that manages to be a great read. Admittedly this particular conference had as it central characters two intriguing individuals: Keynes I knew about of course (although I felt I learnt a lot more here), but Harry Dexter White, the maybe spy, I did not. If you think I’m biased because I’m a macroeconomist, read Peter Preston’s review here.

There are numerous little surprises. I had not realised how, perhaps because of the war, economists were often central in international negotiations. James Meade writes at one point: “Ten years ago at Oxford I should never have dreamed that an economist could live in such a heaven of practical application of real economic analysis!”. Though the detail is fascinating, I was left wondering just how important the conference really was. Although it created both the IMF and World Bank, neither was actually that important in the decade that followed the war, and their eventual roles were rather different from that intended by the Bretton Woods agreement. I also wonder just how much the prosperity and stability of the Bretton Woods era was caused by that agreement.

What I think will surprise many is just how inconceivable an era of floating exchange rates was to those taking part in that conference, Keynes included. Of course the debate over fixed versus floating will never end: some might argue that the demise of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s sowed the seeds of subsequent financial instability, but the current troubles of the Eurozone also remind us of the dangers of fixing exchange rates. One clear impression I got from the book is that when exchange rates are fixed, the creditor nation (or nations) call the shots. This was evident in the asymmetric influence of White versus Keynes in their various negotiations, and it helped me understand more clearly just why the influence of Germany is so strong within the Eurozone right now.

Why uncosted tax cuts are apparently a problem for Labour

Just a short addition to today’s post. I had assumed that the Conservatives’ macroeconomic pitch for the next election was going to be based on prudence and ‘responsibility’. Only we will achieve a budget surplus by 2020, because only we recognise how dangerously high the current level of government debt is. We will achieve this, because unlike the other parties we do not go around making unfunded spending commitments. Of course the Conservatives would plan targeted tax breaks for the (very) well off, like the one on pensions announced earlier this week and well described by the Economist here, but these would be sufficiently specialised that they would not dent the public image.

I was wrong, as Cameron revealed today with commitments to large tax cuts mainly for middle and high income earners by 2020 whatever. These commitments are totally unfunded, in the sense that we are not told how they would be paid for (except that it will not be by additional borrowing). So the pretence that government spending had to be cut to get debt down has gone - we now have lower government spending (which, given existing commitments, has to mean additional money from the working poor and disabled) in order to cut taxes.

I mentioned last week the drubbing the supposedly left leaning Channel 4 news gave Ed Miliband because he forgot to mention the deficit. As anticipated, John Snow’s interview with Cameron was an altogether more friendly affair. But today their economics editor Paul Mason, whose journalism can be very good, was forced to acknowledge that this unfunded tax give away broke from the recent tradition where particular fiscal pledges were fully costed. But no fear, even Mr. Mason lives in mediamacro land. His final thought on this unfunded tax pledge - it puts Labour in a very difficult position!?! Unbelievable.

  

How many UK elections can a nasty party win?

This last month I wrote my most widely read post in this blog’s nearly three years existence. Over 20,000 read this on Scottish independence. Yet I wrote that post with some regret, because I was acting as the typical economist killjoy. I had a lot of sympathy behind much of the support for the Yes campaign, which was to avoid being governed by a fairly extreme right wing party. I hope no one ever writes that the No vote was a victory for David Cameron’s Conservatives, because that would be a truly Orwellian distortion of reality. One of the most telling contrasts for me was Gordon Brown’s impassioned speech for the union compared to Cameron’s opportunistic attempt to appease his own MPs the morning after the result.

A post I have no regrets writing is this about Theresa May’s one time concern about the Conservative party being seen as the ‘nasty party’. Everything in the months since I wrote it, including the current party conference, confirms that this image no longer worries the leadership. The puzzle I raised in that post is why as late as 2010 Cameron was still keen to foster the idea of a more compassionate conservatism. What has changed so completely in just four years?

One answer is UKIP. Yet trying to prevent losses to another party of the right should not alter the traditional logic that a party needs to occupy the centre to win an election. Another answer is the recession, which has perhaps led to a hardening of attitudes among the electorate as a whole. The hypothesis is that in a recession people are more inclined to believe those on welfare are scroungers, and that immigrants steal their jobs. This hardening should reverse as the economy recovers, but we also know that real wages are still likely to be lower in 2015 compared to 2010.

That was where I ended that previous post. I wrote “although nastiness might accord with voter sentiments today, at some point in the future voters in more generous times will have no problem forgetting this, and just remembering the Conservatives as the nasty party.” But in writing this I might have been both unfair to the British electorate and to the strategy of the Conservative party.

To see why, take a temporary detour from welfare to macro. Chris Dillow rightly questioned the “groupthink bubble” that sees George Osborne’s stewardship of the economy as the Conservative’s strongest card. Yet those in the bubble could respond that they were simply reflecting what the public appear to be saying in the polls. The problem here is establishing cause and effect. What I call mediamacro believes that the last Labour government seriously mismanaged the public finances, when in reality its sins were relatively minor. Mediamacro thinks that the deficit somehow helped cause the recession, whereas in reality the causality goes the other way. Mediamacro thinks that the deficit is the most important problem of today, and largely ignores the stagnation of productivity. Mediamacro celebrates the 2013 recovery as vindicating austerity, which is an argument only the most politically committed academic economist would endorse.

So why do those answering polls think the Conservatives are more competent at managing the economy? It can hardly be because of their own experience, with real wages falling since 2010 compared to steady increases before then. While they might think that Labour allowed excessive leverage by UK banks which helped cause the recession, they are unlikely to also believe that the Conservatives were urging much greater caution at the time! Or could it be that their answers about competence are influenced by what mediamacro itself believes?

If there is this huge disconnect between reality and media portrayal for the macroeconomy, could the same thing be happening with attitudes to welfare? There is no doubt that the representation of disability in the print media has changed substantially over the last decade or so. Television has, after a lag, followed this trend. There is scant evidence that this reflects any significant change in the degree of benefit fraud. It could reflect a ‘hardening of attitudes’ as a result of the recession, but causality could also run the other way. Do people vastly overestimate the amount of benefit fraud because they want to do so, or because of the information they get through the media? Is this overestimation a reflection of a recession induced hardening of attitudes, or a cause of it?

This is crucial to answering the question posed in the title to this post. If squeezing the poor and disabled is a policy that reflects a recession induced change in public attitudes, then the party that follows this change may be vulnerable when the recession ends (although perhaps not before 2015). If it reflects misinformation provided by the media, then the relevant question is whether this misinformation might continue well beyond the economic recovery. If it does, the Conservative party may have a much more durable election strategy.