Austerity past and future

It is tempting for journalists in particular to treat arguments against fiscal consolidation (austerity) during the depth of the recession as the same as arguments against fiscal consolidation now. Of course there are connections, but there are also important differences.

Austerity during a recession

Case against

The case against austerity in the depth of the recession is that it makes the recession worse. Because interest rates have hit their lower bound, monetary policy can no longer solve the recession problem on its own, and fiscal policy needs to help. That is what the world agreed in 2009. There are two legitimate economic arguments which, if true, would override this view.

Counterargument 1

The interest rate lower bound is not a problem, because we have unconventional monetary policies like QE. This argument’s flaw is that the reliability of unconventional monetary policy (knowing how much is required to achieve a particular result) is of an order smaller than both interest rate changes and fiscal policy.

Counterargument 2

If governments continued to borrow in order to end the recession, the markets would stop buying government debt. This argument normally appeals to the Eurozone crisis as evidence, but we now know that - before OMT at least - Eurozone governments were uniquely vulnerable because the ECB would not be a sovereign lender of last resort. Other evidence suggests the markets were totally unworried about the size of UK, US or Japanese deficits.

Austerity now

Here I will focus on the UK, because planned fiscal consolidation in the UK over the next five years is greater than in other major countries. During the recession, George Osborne had a target of current balance, which excludes spending on public investment. He now has a much tougher target of a surplus on the total budget balance, which includes investment spending.

Case against

There is a specific problem with Osborne’s current fiscal charter, which is that by targeting a surplus each year from 2020 it fails the basic test of a good fiscal rule, which is that debt and deficits should be shock absorbers. But in terms of the path of fiscal policy until 2020, there are three additional problems:

1. The policy restricts public investment at just the time that public investment should be high because borrowing and labour are cheap. It is a near universal view among economists that now is the time for higher public investment.
   
   
2. It will bring debt down too fast, penalising the current working generation who have already suffered from the Great Recession
   
   
3. Continuing fiscal austerity is keeping interest rates low, which means central banks are short of reliable ammunition if another recession happens.

I discuss these arguments, and the last in particular, in today’s The Independent. The point I want to stress in this post is that of the two arguments in favour of past austerity outlined above, only one - the lower bound is not a problem - is relevant here, and then only for the third criticism above. With debt now falling the argument about a potential funding crisis is not even remotely plausible.

You could say that the market panic argument is still relevant to Osborne’s justification for reducing debt fast, which is to prepare for the next global crisis. I think one way to show the silliness of this argument is to adapt a point I made in The Independent article. Imagine a firm which had lots of promising projects it could invest in, all of which would turn a handsome profit. Banks were knocking on the door of the CEO to offer the firm interest free loans to invest in these projects. But the CEO said no, because someday - maybe in 20 years time - there might be a credit crunch and the firm might get into difficulties if it took on more debt. As a result of the firm’s ‘prudence’, its sales stop growing and its profits fell. I wonder what the firm’s shareholders would think about their CEO’s decision?

Multipliers from Eurozone periphery austerity

For macroeconomists

We often see graphs relating fiscal consolidation to output growth since the Great Recession. Despite such scatter plots being very weak evidence, they appear to show that fiscal multipliers in the periphery countries like Greece have been very large indeed. At first sight this is not difficult to explain. These countries do not have their own monetary policies, and to the extent that fiscal consolidation reduces local inflation, real interest rates will rise, which increases the fiscal multiplier.

Unfortunately the basic New Keynesian (NK) model suggests this reasoning is incorrect, as Farhi and Werning show for temporary changes in government spending. While real rates might rise in the short run following a negative government spending shock, being in a monetary union ties down the long run price level in these economies. So, other things being equal, a negative government spending shock that reduces inflation now will be followed by higher inflation (compared to the no shock case) later, as the real exchange rate self-corrects. That in turn means that fiscal consolidation in the form of temporary cuts to government spending will produce a small rise in consumption for a period after the shock. (Consumption depends on the forward sum of future real interest rates, so as time progresses lower future rates dominate this sum.)

Of course that may simply mean that the basic NK model is incorrect or incomplete. As Farhi and Werning show in the same paper, with some credit constrained consumers we can get back to positive short term consumption multipliers, and therefore output multipliers greater than one. But it occurred to me, just before I was about to discuss this paper in an advanced macro graduate class, that the basic NK model could still give us what appeared to be large multipliers without such additions.

What we had in periphery countries was not just a government spending shock. In Ireland and Greece at least, that spending shock was preceded by a government debt shock. Either the government admitted to borrowing more than the official data suggested, or it had to bail out the banks. We can think of at least two types of response to a pure government debt shock. It could lead to a short sharp contraction in spending, in which case the analysis of Farhi and Werning would apply. Alternatively the government accepts that its debt will be permanently higher, and it only plans to cut spending or raise taxes to pay the interest on that additional debt.

In the latter case, assume that a significant proportion of that extra debt was owned overseas. We would have a permanent transfer from domestic to overseas citizens, and that would require a permanent depreciation in the real exchange rate. An increase in competitiveness is needed to make up for the permanently lower level of domestic demand that these transfers would produce. That in itself produces a terms of trade loss that impacts on consumption. But in addition in a monetary union, that depreciation would have to come about through a period of lower inflation, which would lead to a period in which real interest rates were higher. That in turn would decrease consumption, with the peak effect when the debt shock happened.

This is probably already written down somewhere, but it does explain why you could get apparently large multipliers in Greece and Ireland even if the simple NK model was broadly correct. What we had was a combination of a negative government spending shock and a positive government debt shock, and the latter could have led to significant falls in consumption. For these economies at least, true government spending multipliers may not be as large as they appear.

There I go again, choosing my economics to get the answer I want. Oh, wait ….

The 'strong case' critically examined

Perhaps it was too unconventional setting out an argument (against independent central banks, ICBs) that I did not agree with, even though I made it abundantly clear that was what I was doing. It was too much for one blogger, who reacted by deciding that I did agree with the argument, and sent a series of tweets that are best forgotten. But my reason for doing it was also clear enough from the final paragraph. The problem it addresses is real enough, and the problem appears to be linked to the creation of ICBs.

The deficit obsession that governments have shown since 2010 has helped produce a recovery that has been far too slow, even in the US. It would be nice if we could treat that obsession as some kind of aberration, never to be repeated, but unfortunately that looks way too optimistic. The Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) raises an acute problem for what I call the consensus assignment (leaving macroeconomic stabilisation to an independent, inflation targeting central bank), but add in austerity and you get major macroeconomic costs. ICBs appear to rule out the one policy (money financed fiscal expansion) that could combat both the ZLB and deficit obsession. I wanted to put that point as strongly as I could. Miles Kimball does something similar here, although without the fiscal policy perspective

Of course many macroeconomists do see the problem, but the solutions they propose are often just workarounds. Things like Quantitative Easing, or NGDP targets, or a higher inflation target. [1] None completely remove the basic difficulty created by the ZLB. (One proposal that does is negative interest rates coupled with eliminating paper money, which I will come back to.) As a result, these workarounds mean that in response to a sharp enough recession, we would still regret no longer having the possibility of undertaking a money financed fiscal stimulus.

I also think there is a grain of truth in the argument that ICBs created an environment where deficit obsession became easier. Take the UK for example. In the 2000s the organisation that came to dominate budget analysis was the IFS. They are excellent on both the microeconomics of particular budget measures and their costing. Before the Great Recession that meant that all the IFS needed was a macro forecast (of which there are many) and they had all they required to provide excellent budget analysis. The IFS did not have strong macro policy expertise, and sometimes this shows, but as long as the consensus assignment worked that did not matter.

One of the those working at the IFS during this Labour government period was Rupert Harrison. In 2006 he became chief of staff to George Osborne. He helped introduce, perhaps reflecting his IFS experience, two important and positive policy innovations: setting up the OBR (with some minor assistance from a certain UK academic), and a form of fiscal rule (a five year deficit target) which allowed debt to be a shock absorber. But he also appeared to bring the received wisdom on the consensus assignment untroubled by the ZLB, which meant that Osborne could give a speech in 2009 outlining the macroeconomic basis of his strategy in which the ZLB was not mentioned.

This is an example of a more general point, which Robert in comments reminded me I could have made to strengthen the strong argument still further. With ICBs, macroeconomic expertise can move from finance ministries to central banks, leaving finance ministries unprepared for what they may need to do in a major recession.

But this grain of truth runs up against a real difficulty, which is the major flaw in the ‘strong argument’ I set out in the earlier post. To see the flaw ask the following question: in the absence of ICBs, would our deficit obsessed governments actually have undertaken a money financed fiscal stimulus? To answer that you have to ask why they are deficit obsessed. If it is out of ignorance (my Swabian syndrome), then another piece of macro nonsense that ranks alongside deficit obsession is the evil of printing money in any circumstances. I suspect a patient suffering Swabian syndrome would also be subject to this fallacy. If the reason is strategic (the desire for a smaller state) the answer is obviously no. We would simply be told it could not be done because it would open the inflation floodgates.

Following my grain of truth idea you might counter that without ICBs the knowledge within or outside government that these excuses were without foundation would be greater, and so governments could not get away with them so easily. But you would still have plenty of economists from the financial sector telling you that not only did you need to reduce debt rapidly to appease the markets, but also that any government printing money would scare the markets even more. Indeed, would governments alone have had the courage to undertake the scale of QE that we have seen ICBs undertake?

As for the argument that macroeconomic expertise gets concentrated in central banks, surely the answer here is to allow that expertise into the public domain by making central banks more open, and to directly combat the forces that make some central bank leaders routinely argue for austerity when they can no longer effectively combat deflation.

The basic flaw with my strong argument against ICBs is that the ultimate problem (in terms of not ending recessions quickly) lies with governments. There would be no problem if governments could only wait until the recession was over (and interest rates were safely above the ZLB) before tackling their deficit, but the recession was not over in 2010. Given this failure by governments, it seems odd to then suggest that the solution to this problem is to give governments back some of the power they have lost. Or to put the same point another way, imagine the Republican Congress in charge of US monetary policy.

But if abolishing ICBs is not the answer to the very real problem I set out, does that mean we have to be satisfied with the workarounds? One possibility that a few economists like Miles Kimball have argued for is to effectively abolish paper money as we know it, so central banks can set negative interest rates. Another possibility is that the government (in its saner moments) gives ICBs the power to undertake helicopter money. Both are complete solutions to the ZLB problem rather than workarounds. Both can be accused of endangering the value of money. But note also that both proposals gain strength from the existence of ICBs: governments are highly unlikely to ever have the courage to set negative rates, and ICBs stop the flight times of helicopters being linked to elections.

      

These are big (important and complex) issues. There should be no taboos that mean certain issues cannot be raised in polite company. I still think blog posts are the best medium we have to discuss these issues, hopefully free from distractions like partisan politics.  

   

[1] Please do not misunderstand what I mean by workarounds. The workaround may be still be useful in its own right (I have argued that monetary policy should be guided by the level of NGDP), but it does not completely remove the problem of the ZLB.

 

The strong case against independent central banks

I personally think giving central banks the power to decide when to change interest rates (independent central banks, or ICBs) is a sensible form of delegation, provided it is done right. I know a number of the people who read this blog disagree. Sometimes, however, arguments against ICBs seem to me pretty weak. This is a shame, because there is I believe quite a strong case against ICBs. Let me set it out here.

In the post war decades there was a consensus, at least in the US and UK, that achieving an adequate level of aggregate demand and controlling inflation were key priorities for governments. That meant governments had to be familiar with Keynesian economics, and a Keynesian framework was familiar and largely accepted in public discourse. Here I am using Keynesian in its wide sense, such that Milton Friedman was also a Keynesian (he used a Keynesian theoretical model).

A story some people tell is that this all fell apart in the 1970s with stagflation. In the sense I have defined it, that is wrong. The Keynesian framework had to be modified to deal with those events for sure, but it was modified successfully. Attempts by New Classical economists to supplant Keynesian thinking in policy circles failed, as I note here.

The more important change was the end of Bretton Woods and the move to floating exchange rates. That was critical in allowing the focus of demand management to shift away from fiscal policy to monetary policy. The moment that happened, it allowed the case for delegation to be made. Academics talked about time inconsistency and inflation bias, but the more persuasive arguments were also simpler. Anyone who had worked in finance ministries knew that politicians were often tempted and sometime succumbed to using monetary policy for political rather than economic ends, and the crude evidence that delegation reduced inflation seemed strong.

That allowed the creation of what I have called the consensus assignment. Demand management should be exclusively assigned to monetary policy, operated by ICBs pursuing inflation targets, and fiscal policy should focus on avoiding deficit bias. The Great Moderation appeared to vindicate this consensus.

However the consensus assignment had an Achilles Heel. It was not the global financial crisis (which was a failure of financial regulation) but the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) for nominal interest rates. Although many macroeconomists were concerned about this, their concern was muted because fiscal action always remained as a backup. To most of them, the idea that governments would not use that backup was inconceivable: after all, Keynesian economics was familiar to anyone who had done Econ 101.

That turned out to be naive. What governments and the media remembered was that they had delegated the job of looking after the economy to the central bank, and that instead the focus of governments should be on the deficit. Macroeconomists should have seen the warning signs in 2000 with the creation of the Euro. There monetary policy was taken away from individual union governments, but still the Stability and Growth Pact was all about reducing deficits with no hint at any countercyclical role. When economists told politicians in 2009 that they needed to undertake fiscal stimulus to counteract the recession, to many it just felt wrong. To others growing deficits presented an opportunity to win elections and cut public spending.

Macroeconomists were also naive about central banks. They might have assumed that once interest rates hit the ZLB, these institutions would immediately and very publicly turn to governments and say we have done all we can and now it is your turn. But for various reasons they did not. Central banks had helped create the consensus assignment, and had become too attached to it to admit it had an Achilles Heel. In addition some economists had become so entranced by the power of Achilles that they tried to deny his vulnerability.

From 2010, as austerity began, the damage caused by ICBs became clear. One ICB, the ECB, refused to back its own governments and allowed a Greek debt financing crisis to become a Eurozone crisis. The subsequent obsession with austerity happened in part because governments no longer saw managing demand as their prime responsibility, and the agent they had contracted out that responsibility to failed to admit it could no longer do the job. But it was worse than that.

Economists knew that the government could always get the economy out of a demand deficient recession, even if it had a short term concern about debt. The fail safe tool to do this was a money financed fiscal expansion. This fiscal stimulus paid for by the creation of money was why the Great Depression could never happen again. But the existence of ICBs made money financed fiscal expansions impossible when you had debt obsessed governments, because neither the government nor the central bank could create money for governments to spend or give away. Central banks were happy to create money, but refused to destroy the government debt they bought with it, and so debt obsessed governments embarked on fiscal consolidation in the middle of a huge recession.

The slow and painful recovery from the Great Recession was the result. Economists did not get the economics wrong. Money financed fiscal expansion does get you out of a recession with no immediate increase in debt. But by encouraging the creation of ICBs, economists had helped create both the obsession with austerity and an institutional arrangement that made a recession busting policy impossible to enact.

I have tried to put the argument as strongly as I can. I think it is an argument that can be challenged, but that will only happen if macroeconomists first admit the problem it exposes.

Cameron’s chickens

As many have written, although Donald Trump is despised by the Republican party establishment, he is an unintended and unfortunate creation of that party. They built up a system where you needed money to enter politics, because they controlled the money. (It is to Sanders’ credit, and the popular will behind his campaign, that he has overcome this hurdle.) But that allowed someone very rich to highjack the system. The Republicans have exploited prejudice to win votes, which allowed someone to throw away the dog whistle and openly attack those from other religions. [1] And so on. In these ways, Trump represents the Republican’s chickens coming home to roost. As Matt Taibbi writes (sorry about ad in link), Trump is a rather good con man and so for him the US political system is an easy mark.

Will the EU referendum be the moment David Cameron’s chickens come home? Although economic arguments are central, and the case for staying is strong and the case for leaving weak, how much will voters without any economics background be able to come to that conclusion? Most newspapers will push the weak arguments, or more generally just try and muddy the waters as they do all the time on climate change. The visual media’s natural format is to set this up as a two-sided debate, and if the leave campaign can find enough credible advocates to put the economic case for leaving the main outcome might be confusion. [2]

In contrast, to many voters the other key issue - immigration - looks clear cut. For the large section of the UK electorate that place migration among their top concerns the logic of the Leave campaign’s claim that we will finally ‘control our borders’ will seem obvious. This will be constantly reinforced by news about refugees and fears about terrorism. Here the Conservative government’s focus on the costs of migration (and the pretense that UK benefits are a big draw) may come home to roost. Many in the Conservative Party truly believe large scale migration is a threat to the country, but I suspect Cameron and others running the party are not among them. Until now ‘cracking down on immigration’ has been a useful ruse for the Conservatives to win votes, but for the Remain campaign it has become a huge liability.

That is one of Cameron’s chickens that may come home to roost. Another is his deal. From what I have seen so far, Cameron will not try and counter migration concerns by arguing the benefits of migration, because it runs counter to what he has previously said. For the same reason he will not emphasise that to maintain preferential trade agreements after leaving we would probably have to accept free movement. Instead he will argue that his deal will make all the difference, and in this case he will not impress. His deal will make no tangible difference to migration flows, and for once the right wing press will go with the evidence.

Nor can Cameron expect that much help from other party leaders. Andrew Rawnsley and Polly Toynbee give some of the reasons, but one they do not mention is what happened immediately after the Scottish referendum. Labour, and Gordon Brown in particular, came to Cameron's rescue when it became clear in the final days of the referendum that he could lose Scotland. The thanks they got was a speech from the steps of Downing Street the next day proposing English votes for English laws. In that case it was in Labour’s self-interest (in terms of being able to win an election) to be Cameron’s chicken, but the political arithmetic is far less clear this time.

The EU referendum is therefore another test of how much economic expertise can influence public opinion. As regular readers will know, we have been here before, and not just on austerity. The overwhelming evidence was that independence would initially leave Scottish people worse off, but for many this evidence was successfully counteracted by the SNP’s wishful thinking projections. From recent experience, therefore, I am not too optimistic that the economic evidence will prevail. [3] For a Prime Minister who has preferred the economics of the Swabian housewife to anything taught in universities, this too is a chicken come home to roost.

[1] Tactics those supporting the Conservative candidate for London mayor seem happy to employ, as Mehdi Hasan notes.

[2] In terms of the economics, you have first to guess what type of trade arrangements would be made if the UK left, and then quantify the impact of the reduction in trade that would result. Like most economics this is not a precise science, but the only question is what the size of the income loss will be. Yet the many alternatives if the UK left adds to any confusion.

Patrick Minford, on the other hand, argues that increased regulation and market interference will lead to large output falls if we stay in. Patrick is a very good and inventive macroeconomist who I learnt a great deal from, but his conclusions have always followed his political views. In this case his numbers depend on very dubious assumptions about how staying in the EU will raise future ‘costs’.

[3] For the record, as some will ask, I will be voting Remain. Apart from the economic arguments, in my own experience interventions from Brussels have more often been positive than negative. I also have an instinctive feeling that in today’s globalised world the UK should be part of Europe, for the reasons John Harris gives for example.

Understanding the austerity obsession

It has often been argued, loosely following Keynes, that economists should be like doctors

Martin Wolf writes “The austerity obsession, even [sic] when borrowing costs are so low, is lunatic”. The IMF, the OECD and pretty much the whole of informed opinion agree. Yet those subject to this austerity obsession are in charge of levels of public investment in the the US, Germany and the UK. One interesting question that arises is whether they are all suffering from the same disease?

The diagnosis in the case of the Republican party in the US is reasonably clear. Judging from the remaining presidential candidates and the actions of Congress the main economic goal is to cut taxes, particularly for the very rich. That requires, sooner or later, less public spending. What about evidence that more public investment would help everyone in the economy, including the rich? The problem is that this group suffers from the delusion that the only way to help the economy is to tax the rich less and starve the beast that is the state. It is a clear case of the patient being infected by the neoliberal ideology virus.

The condition of the ruling class in Germany, however, is much more difficult to diagnose. Some local doctors have labelled it the Swabian syndrome: a belief that the economy is just like a household, and the imperative is to balance the books. This seems like a case of labelling rather than explaining a disease. There may be an allergy involved: an aversion to Keynesian economics, and anything that sounds vaguely Keynesian. But the microeconomic case for additional public investment in Germany is also strong: although German roads are not in such a bad state of repair as those in the US, the German public capital stock has been shrinking for over a decade. One possibility is that Swabian syndrome is being encouraged by an ageing population that worry about their pensions. It will be interesting to see how this is influenced by recent injections of the refugee vaccine.

The nature of the illness in Germany is therefore more of a mystery than in the US. Unfortunately as contacts between German officials and those in the rest of Europe are frequent, we have seen numerous cases of this disease - whatever it is - spreading elsewhere, and in one particular case (Greece) the patient remains in a critical condition. The disease also produces complications after accidents: here Finland - currently in intensive care - is a case in point.

The Conservative Party in the UK also seem to have the symptoms associated with Swabian syndrome. As with Germany, the outbreak reached a peak around 2010/11. For a time it was thought that UK cases might be in decline, but last year saw a renewed outbreak. There are some, however, who argue that in reality the party are feigning the symptoms as a means of winning elections, while still others claim that tests have revealed clear traces of the ideology virus.

What has become clear is that the traditional way of treating the austerity obsession, which involves occasional counselling with well trained economists, is having little effect. We also now know that the financial crisis shock treatment only makes the neoliberal virus more virulent. Extended therapy is the only known cure for this virus. As for Swabian syndrome, our best hope may be that the public gradually develop an immunity to the disease as its consequences become clear.  

Two related confusions about helicopter money

Confusions about helicopter money is something of a generic title (although Martin Sandbu is thankfully not confused). Because a discussion of helicopter money (HM) cannot normally be found in the textbooks (which have only just caught up with central bank independence), the scope for misunderstanding is huge. Here I want to talk about two related confusions. The first is about whether HM would lead to an increase or decrease in nominal interest rates, as discussed in a recent interchange between Tony Yates and Paul Krugman. The second is whether HM is in competition with the use of fiscal policy to get us out of recessions.  

On HM money and nominal interest rates, there is of course the standard and very basic point that in a market you cannot control both quantity and price, still less move them in opposing directions. So if we want to think about a market for money, you cannot raise the supply of money and raise its price - the nominal interest rate - at the same time.

But this observation ignores what else is going on when you have HM. HM is a large fiscal expansion. Please none of this ‘but if Ricardian Equivalence (RE) holds’: we are talking real world policy here not doing thought experiments, and we have all the evidence we need that RE does not hold (for reasons that are not difficult to understand). Let's also not fall into the trap of doing IS-LM. We are in a world of inflation targeting, and anything that raises demand (as a fiscal expansion will) will tend to raise inflation, and so the monetary authorities will tend to raise nominal interest rates. Any temptation to say ‘yes but in the short run’ becomes dubious because of expectations effects. 

So it is really quite simple. Either the nominal interest rate lower bound constraint continues to bite, which means helicopter money will leave nominal interest rates unchanged (but the economy better off), or there is no constraint (or that constraint is removed), in which case rates will rise (sooner) with HM.

The second confusion is that helicopter money in some way precludes undertaking countercyclical fiscal policy. It does not. Right now, for example, governments could and should announce large increases in public sector investment (where I am using investment in the economist’s sense to include investment in human capital, rather than in a national accounts sense). This would negate any immediate need for HM. Monetary policy adapts to fiscal policy.

When people ask me which we should have, helicopters or fiscal expansion, I'm tempted to say I would love to have the choice! If I did have that choice, right now I would take additional public investment over a helicopter drop, because the micro case for investment is in many cases (and countries) very strong, interest rates are low and investment improves the supply as well as the demand side. In any future severe recession where the interest rate lower bound was likely to be hit [1] I would also advise bringing forward public investment. However I do not see this as a competition (countercyclical fiscal action vs HM) for two reasons.

First, one lesson of the Great Recession is that we cannot rely on governments to do the right thing with fiscal actions, so HM is an insurance policy in that sense. If governments do spend more or tax less as we approach the ZLB, that insurance policy may not be needed. [2] Second, even if governments do the right thing, either lack of good projects [3] or information delays may mean they do not do enough, and so the very quick action that central banks could take with HM could be a useful complement. To put it another way, helicopter money is best seen as an alternative to QE rather than as an alternative to fiscal action.

[1] Because of implementation lags, a fiscal response to an impending deep recession should not wait until nominal interest rates actually hit their lower bound. If that fiscal response involves investment, used in an economists rather than national accounts sense, then there is no great loss if the deep recession does not happen, because it is wise to invest when real interest rates and wages are relatively low.

[2] In the proposals put forward in Portes and Wren-Lewis (2015), the central bank would directly tell the government the probability of the lower bound being hit.

[3] I think the argument that the amount of public investment cannot be adjusted to match macro conditions is often overstated. We are not talking HS2 here (the proposal to build a high speed train line between London and Birmingham and beyond), but improving flood defences, repairing roads and schools etc.