New Papers

I've been remiss about blogging lately while I finished two new papers, "The Fiscal Roots of Inflation," and "The Value of Government Debt." I'm posting here for those who might  be interested, and I appreciate  comments.

Both papers apply asset pricing variance decompositions to questions of government finance and inflation. The inflation paper is  part of the long-running fiscal theory of the price level project. (Note: this post uses MathJax which may not show properly on all devices.)

I start by deriving an analogue to the Campbell-Shiller linearization of the return identity:
\[ \beta v_{t+1}=v_{t}+r_{t+1}^{n}-\pi_{t+1}-g_{t+1}-s_{t+1}. \] The log debt to GDP ratio at the end of period \(t+1\), \(v_{t+1}\), is equal to its value at the end of period t, \(v_{t}\), increased by the log nominal return on the portfolio of government bonds \(r_{t+1}^{n}\) less inflation \(\pi_{t+1}\), less log GDP growth \(g_{t+1}\), and less the primary surplus \(s_{t+1}\). The "surplus" in this linearization is the surplus to GDP ratio, divided by the steady state debt to GDP ratio. It's not a log, so it can be negative. \(\beta = e^{-(r-g)}\) is a discount rate corresponding to the steady state real rate \(r\) less GDP growth rate \(g\).

Iterating forward, the present value identity is \begin{equation} v_{t}=\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\beta^{j-1}\left[ s_{t+j}-\left( r_{t+j}^{n}-\pi_{t+j}+g_{t+j}\right) \right] .\label{pvsy}% \end{equation} I simplify by using \(\beta=1\) as the point of linearization. 1 vs. 0.99 doesn't make any significant difference for empirical purposes.

Now apply standard asset pricing ideas. To focus on inflation, in "Fiscal Roots" I take the time \(t+1\) innovation of the present value identity, \(\Delta E_{t+1}\equiv E_{t+1}-E_{t}\). Rearranging, we have the unexpected inflation identity, \begin{align} & \Delta E_{t+1}\pi_{t+1}-\Delta E_{t+1}\left( r_{t+1}^{n}-g_{t+1}\right) \label{Epiintro}\\ & =-\sum_{j=0}^{\infty}\Delta E_{t+1}s_{t+1+j}+\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\Delta E_{t+1}\left( r_{t+1+j}^{n}-\pi_{t+1+j}-g_{t+1+j}\right) .\nonumber \end{align} A decline in the present value of surpluses, coming either from a change in expected surpluses or a rise in their discount rates, must result in a lower real value of the debt. This reduction can come about by unexpected inflation, or by a decline in nominal long-term bond prices. The value of debt drops out, which is handy and simplifies matters.

All that glitters is not gold

I wrote a Wall Street  Journal Oped on the gold standard, partly in response to last week's Oped by James Grant (whose "PhD standard" is a great quip) and Greg Yp's excellent column on Judy Shelton and gold.

Pegging the dollar to gold won't  stop inflation or deflation.  Inflation was already quite volatile in the 19th  century, and it would be worse today:

What determines the value of gold relative to all goods and services? In the 19th century, gold coins were used for many transactions. People and businesses had to keep an inventory of gold coins in proportion to their expenditures. If the value of gold rose relative to everything else (deflation), people gained an incentive to spend them, and thereby drive up the prices of everything else. If the value of gold fell (inflation), people needed more of it, so they spent less and drove down other prices. This crucial mechanism linked the price of gold to all other prices. 

That link is now completely gone. Other than jewelry and some minor industrial uses, there is nothing special about gold, and little linking the price of gold to all other prices. If the Fed pegged the price of gold today, the price of everything else would just wander away. The Fed might just as effectively peg the price of chewing gum. A monetary anchor is a good thing, but the anchor must be tied to the ship. Gold no longer is. 

Broader commodity standards face the same problem. Traded commodities are such a small part of the economy that the relative price of commodities can swing widely with little effect on inflation.

In particular, if the value of gold goes up, you have deflation, which many people are  worried about today. The gold standard did nothing to stop the sharp  deflation  of the 1930s.

Gold is not really a monetary promise, it's a fiscal promise:

If people demanded more gold from the government than it had in reserve, the government had to raise taxes or cut spending to buy more gold. More often, the government would borrow to get gold, but governments must credibly promise to raise taxes or cut spending to borrow. This fiscal commitment ultimately gave money its value, not the sometimes-empty promise to exchange money for gold. Taxes ultimately back all government money. The gold standard made this fiscal commitment visible and testable. 

It is possible, though, to answer gold standard advocates critiques of current affairs without a return to gold

..the U.S. could enact a policy today that emulates the good features of the gold standard. I call it the CPI standard. First, Congress and the Fed would agree that “price stability” in the Fed’s mandate means precisely that, not perpetual 2% inflation. The Fed’s mandate would be to keep the consumer-price index (or a suitably improved index) as close as possible to a stated value. 

Second, the CPI target would bind fiscal policy (Congress and the Treasury) as well as monetary policy (the Fed). Inflation would require automatic fiscal tightening and deflation would trigger loosening, just as a gold-standard government trying to defend its currency must tighten fiscally to raise its gold reserves. 

Third, the government would emulate the promise to trade gold for notes in modern financial markets. There are many ways to do this, but the simplest is to commit to trade regular debt for inflation-indexed debt at the same price. Under this system, inflation would cost the government money and force a fiscal tightening in the same way gold once did. And vice versa—the system would forestall deflation as well. 

 I conclude

Gold-standard advocates offer a cogent critique of current monetary policy, but a return to gold is unfeasible. A stable CPI, immune from both inflation and deflation, backed by the same fiscal commitments that underlay gold, is worth taking seriously.

As usual, I have to wait 30 days to post the whole thing.

The Phillips curve is still dead

Greg Mankiw posted a clever graph a month ago, which he titled "The Phillips Curve is Alive and Well."

No, Greg, the Phillips curve is still as dead as Generalissimo Franco.

The lines, in case you can't see them are the employment-population ratio 25-54, and the average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees. Wait a minute, the Phillips curve, as it appears in contemporary macroeconomics, is a relation between inflation, a coordinated rise in prices and wages,  not real wages or hourly earnings, and unemployment or the output gap, not the employment-population ratio. How does the traditional Phillips curve look? Here is unemployment vs. CPI inflation

and here is inflation vs. the GDP gap:



Here is "core" (less food and energy) inflation vs. unemployment:

Except for one little blip in the depths of the 2009 recession. The Phillips curve is dead. (Long live the Phillips curve, the crowd sings nonetheless.) Inflation trundles along, ignoring unemployment or the output gap.

What's going on? Primarily, I think Greg goes deeply wrong in looking at average hourly earnings, or wages for short. The whole art and magic of the Phillips curve is about inflation, the rise in both prices and wages.  Greg's graph is perfectly sensible microeconomics. The labor market is tight, demand for labor is high, you have to pay people more to get them to work. The rise in wages is a rise in real wages, a rise in wages relative to prices.

Similarly, one might imagine tight product markets, with strong demand, as a time that output prices and measured inflation would rise relative to wages.

The puzzle and promise of the Phillips curve is the idea that tighter labor markets, traditionally measured by the unemployment rate, correlate with higher wages and prices. That takes more doing. Typically, you have to think that workers are fooled into working for what they think are higher real wages, and only later discover that prices have gone up too. And you have to think that firms rather mechanically raise prices passing on higher labor costs, and keep selling things when they do. Despite the intuitive appeal of tight markets leading to rising prices and wages, that simple intuition is wrong to describe a correlation between tight markets and both prices and wages, which is what the Phillips curve is and was.

The employment-population ratio is a little bit curious but less so. Much modern labor economics doesn't focus on unemployment.

What is happening should be cause for celebration by the way -- real wages are rising. From growth to inequality to the hand-wringing about declining labor share, it's hard to find anything bad to say about that!

Greg's "Phillips curve" also does not extend backwards. Here's what happens if. you push the data slider to the left on Greg's graph, going back to the 1960s rather than start in 1990:




Greg's correlation is absent in the heyday of the Phillips curve. Greg's alive Phillips curve was born in 1990.  (What you're seeing is, of course, the rise in labor force participation, particularly among women, until 1990.) That's why the traditional (ex ante!) Phillips curve really was about gap measures

The conventional inflation-unemployment Phillips curve also died just about contemporaneously with the Generalissimo:

The negative correlation which Phillips noted around 1960 turned to a positive, or stagflationary correlation in the 1970s. One nice negatively correlated data point in the disinflation of 1982 is it.

The policy world, including the Fed, ECB, and related institutions, continues to believe in the Phillips Curve, and as causation not just correlation: tight labor markets cause inflation. But its evident death is causing some unsettled feelings for sure.

*****

Catching up on Greg's blog, I also found a lovely and sage quip:

Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson argues "It’s time we tear up our economics textbooks and start over." He uses my book as a prime example. Perhaps not surprisingly, I disagree. My summary of Samuelson's article: Economics textbooks should be more like economics journalism, says an economics journalist.

There is so much "starting over" in the air -- modern monetary magic on the left, neo-mercantilism on the right -- that understanding long settled questions is indeed what education should be about. (And not just the sharing of untutored opinions.)

Textbook writers, on the other hand, emphasize those things that are true, important, and unknown to the typical reader (an 18 year old college freshman). Newness has little relevance. The lessons of Adam Smith do not apply only to the 18th century, the lessons of David Ricardo do not apply only to the 19th century, and the lessons of John Maynard Keynes do not apply only to the 20th century. They are timeless ideas that may not make good news stories but should be central to introductory economics. Just as Newtonian mechanics should remain central to introductory physics.

Well, I think Keynes will go the way of phlogiston, but I agree with the point, and anyway a good 19th century scientist should know what phlogiston is.


****

Update:

Or maybe we should call it the Phillips Cloud. Here is the traditional inflation vs. unemployment graph, for the 1990-today sample and then the whole postwar period

Some economists run a regression line here, and proclaim the Phillips curve to be flat. They conclude, unemployment is incredibly sensitive to inflation -- just a bit more inflation would make a lot of jobs. I conclude it's just mush.

Futures forecasts

Torsten Slok at DB updates this lovely graph on occasion. Here's what it means. Fed fund futures are essentially bets on where the Federal funds rate will be at various points in the future. Thus, you can read from the dashed lines the market's guess about where the federal funds rate will go -- assuming that the bets are priced to have an even chance of winning or losing.

Reading it that way, the market was systematically wrong from 2009 to 2016. It's something like springtime in Chicago -- this week, 40 degrees and raining. Next week, 75 and sunny. Week after week after week. In 2017, the market finally changed expectations to say, no, fed funds rates are not rising -- just in time to miss the actual rise in federal funds. Now, as in the blue line, market forecasts say there will be a big decline. But, as Torsten points out, why would the market be right today?

So what does this graph mean? Are market practitioners really that dumb? After all, there is a lot of money to be made here. When the graph is upward sloping -- as the entire yield curve was upward sloping from 2009-2016 -- and so long as rates don't rise, you can make a fortune borrowing short and lending long. And vice versa. In short, the difference between forward rate (right end of dashed lines) and spot rate (current fed funds rate) does a lousy job of forecasting where the spot rate will go -- and thus, mechanically, is a good signal of the extra return, positive or  (lately) negative you will get by holding long-term bonds.

The pattern is actually widespread and longstanding. Starting in the late 70s and early 1980s, Gene Fama wrote a series of papers on it, short term bonds, money markets, foreign exchange,  and (a favorite of mine) long term bonds (with Rob Bliss). Campbell and Shiller also found it in long term bonds, which Monika Piazzesi and I extended.  Piazzesi and Swanson show the pattern in federal funds futures.

There are three potential stories:

One: the market is dumb. People are dumb. Well, that's a nice story that can "explain" just about anything. But if you're so smart why are you not rich. Behavioral finance isn't that empty, and searches for common patterns in dumbness. However this graph is the opposite of the usual behavioral claim, extrapolative expectations, excess belief in momentum.  If there is a rejectable hypothesis in behavioral finance, this graph seems to reject it. (I welcome corrections to that statement in the comments.)

Two: there is a risk premium and it varies over time. For most of 2009-2015, the economy was depressed. People needed a good promised return, a coin more than 50/50, to hold the risk of long term bonds.  Once we exit the recession, the opposite pattern holds. Long term bonds should pay less than short term bonds, and maybe now the yield curve is finally waking up to that pattern. Naturally, I'm attracted to this story, but I admit it's a bit strained late in the upslope period.

Three: exit and entry to recessions is something like a rare event, a Poisson process. Such a process is like computer failure. The chance of the event is always the same, and does not increase as the length of time goes by. Recovery could happen any time. In a second paper that's what Piazzesi and I seemed to find for this pattern in bond markets. The market forecasts are right, in fact, and we just got 7 tails in a row. That is a speculative idea, and needs quantification.

Whatever the story, here is the fact: futures prices are not good forecasts (true-measure conditional means) of where interest rates are going. That fact is true not just of Fed Funds futures, but interest rates in general.

Update:

Torsten sends along an updated chart, going further back in history.

Fed Nixes Narrow Banks Redux

J. P. Koning at AEIR writes well on the Fed's efforts to quash narrow banks, more clearly than my previous efforts here here and here. 

As a quick review: Narrow banks take your money and invest it 100% in interest-paying reserves at the Fed. They are completely immune from runs, failures, and financial crises. You would get a lot higher interest than the big banks currently pay.  The Fed should be giving them a non-systemic medal. Instead, the Fed is fighting them tooth and nail.

the Fed is floating the idea of destroying the narrow-bank business model before it can ever be tested in the market.

J.P. clearly goes through the Fed's proffered objections, demolishing each in turn.  The financial stability concern makes no sense -- after all, they can buy treasury bills directly or buy treasury - backed money market funds. Reserves are that, with instant rather than one day settlement, or money market funds that now are allowed to invest in reserves.

J.P is, I think, a little too polite. He writes,

An Apocalyptic View of Central Banks

In the department of genuinely terrible, and terrifying, ideas, I just got the a request from Simon Youel, the Media and Policy Officer at Positive Money, regarding the appointment of Mark Carney's successor as Governor of the Bank of England.  Positive money is organizing a "joint letter to the Financial Times, calling on the Chancellor to appoint someone who’ll foster a pluralistic policy-making culture at the central bank."

The proposed letter:

Applicants to be the next Governor of the Bank of England are asked to commit to an eight year term lasting until 2028. By then the world will be a very different place.  

Three key trends will shape their time in post. Firstly, environmental breakdown is the biggest threat facing the planet. The next Governor must build on Mark Carney’s legacy, and go even further to act on the Bank’s warnings by accelerating the transition of finance away from risky fossil fuels.  

Secondly, rising inequality, fuelled to a significant extent by monetary policy, has contributed to a crisis of trust in our institutions. The next Governor must be open and honest about the trade-offs the Bank is forced to make, and take a critical view of how its policies impact on wider society. 

Thirdly, the UK economy is increasingly unbalanced and skewed towards asset price inflation. Banks pour money into bidding up the value of pre-existing assets, with only £1 in every £10 they lend supporting non-financial firms. The next Governor must seriously consider introducing measures to guide credit away from speculation towards productive activities.  

As the world around it changes, the function of the Bank itself must evolve. Its current mandate and tools are increasingly coming into question, and a future government may assign the bank with a new mission. The next Governor must meet this with an open mind, not seek to preserve the status quo. 

To equip the Bank to meet the challenges of the future, the new Governor will also need to ensure it benefits from a greater diversity of backgrounds, experience and perspectives throughout the organisation. 

The Bank of England’s own stated purpose is to promote the good of the people. We need a Governor genuinely committed to serving the whole of society, not just financial markets.

Financial Inflation?

Torsten Slok sends this lovely picture of the S&P500 and the price index for portfolio management and investment advice services. Torsten explains that "50% of the decline in core PCE inflation since the peak in July has been driven by financial services, and with the stock market rebounding, we should expect to see the financial services component move higher again."

What's going on? I think it's this: Most portfolio management payments are a percent of value -- you pay a fee, say 1%, of the total value of the portfolio. When the stock market goes down 10%, you pay 10% less in fees. Now, the BEA's job is to figure out, did you get 10% less quantity -- did you get 10% less "valuable advice" for that fee? You're not an idiot, so you're paying 1% off the top of your wealth annually, a third of Senator Warren's dreaded wealth tax, for something of value, the BEA figures. Or did the "price" of financial services go down 10%? Evidently, the BEA assumes the price, not the quantity changed, so the "price" of financial services tracks the stock market.

This is of course nonsense. On the other hand, I have no better idea how to separate 1% management fees into a "price" or a "quantity" (or, heaven forbid, a "quality improvement"). The number of people working to provide you financial advice didn't change 10%. Though, in the long run, it will if the market stays down. How should, or does, the PCE handle rents, or dividend payments? I don't know.

I went back to the documentation for how the PCE is constructed to try to understand these questions and see if my hunch is correct, but I failed to understand anything in there. (I got lost in the "commodity flow method," see p. 5-27.) I would value comments from people who understand this stuff.

Overall, I think the lesson is that our measures of inflation are pretty noisy. First we throw out food and energy. Now it looks to me that "core" should throw out management-fee based financial services, or at least assume that the price is fixed (1% sounds like a fixed price) rather than the quantity. Do real estate and other commissions do the same thing and the price index rises and falls with the price of housing? What's next?

(The point of throwing out food and fuel is not that they don't matter but a feeling that the core CPI today is a better guide of where the overall CPI will be in the future. A more thorough analysis of which components are better forecasters of overall CPI would be welcome.)

Maybe an inflation measure that is less comprehensive but better measured isn't such a terrible idea. Maybe the Fed worrying about 1.8% vs. 2% inflation is not such a good idea.

Smith, MMT, and science in economics

Many blog readers have asked for my opinions of "Modern Monetary Theory." I haven't written yet, because I try to read about things in some detail, ideally from original sources, before reviewing them, which I have not done. Life is short.

From the summaries I have read, some of the central propositions of MMT draw a false conclusion from two sensible premises. 1) Countries that print their own currencies do not have to default on excessive debts. They can always print money to pay off debts. True. 2) Inflation in the end can and must be controlled by raising taxes or cutting spending, sufficiently to soak up such printed (non-interest-bearing) money. True. The latter proposition is the heart of the fiscal theory of the price level, so I would have an especially tough time objecting.

It does not follow that the US need not worry about deficits, and may happily borrow tens of trillions to finance all sorts of spending. Borrow $50 trillion or so. When bondholders revolt, print money to pay off the bonds. When this results in inflation, raise taxes to soak up the money. OK, but this latter step is exactly raising taxes to pay off the bonds. Moreover, if bondholders see that the plan is to pay off bonds with printed money, they refuse to buy or roll over bonds in the first place and the inflation can happen right away.

This may reflect a common confusion between today's money with the new money that pays off debt. It would only take $1.5 trillion in extra taxes or lower spending to retire current currency (non-interest bearing government debt) outstanding. But  that's not the task after the great bond bailout. Then we have to raise taxes or cut spending by, in my example,  the $50 trillion printed to pay off the bonds. Large debts are either paid or defaulted, and inflation is the same thing economically as default. Period. (Currency boards run in to some of the same problem. Backing today's currency is not enough to avoid devaluation, if one does not back all the debt which promises to pay currency.)

I must admit some amusement that Keynesian commentators, having urged fiscal stimulus and decried evil "Austerians" for years, are apoplectic to be passed on the left. But that does not make the ideas of those passing on the left any more right.  There is also a different and interesting strain of thought, exemplified by recent writings by Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard, that the current low interest rate environment might allow for somewhat, but not unlimited, extra borrowing. Those ideas are completely different analytically. I hope to cover them in a later blog post.

Noah Smith and guru-based theory

But, as I said, I have not studied MMT, so perhaps I'm missing something. Enter Noah Smith, who has delved in to figure out just what MMT is and whether or how it hangs together.

Noah interestingly characterizes MMT as  "Guru-based theory." Noah:

Perpetually wrong forecasts

Torsten Slok of Deutsche Bank sends along the following fascinating graphs

The titles seem a little off. Yes, the market is expecting rate cuts (forward rate) but the market has been exactly wrong about everything for 10 years (and longer) first forecasting the recovery that never came, then forecasting much slower interest rate rises than actually happened.  Survey expectations seem to match the forward curves well except perhaps at the very end.

Mechanically, a rising forward curve and rates that never rise means you earn a lot of money in long term bonds. It's a "risk premium" Monika Piazzesi and Eric Swanson point out this pattern is common. The same pattern holds in longer term bonds, as well known since Fama and Bliss. An upward sloping term structure indicates higher expected returns on long term bonds, and vice versa. And it makes some sense. In recessions, people don't want to hold risks, so we expect a premium for riskier assets. In booms, as interest rates rise, people are more willing to take risks.

Still it's unsettling for lots of reasons. Why did the forward curve suddenly flatten exactly when interest rates finally took off? Another interpretation is something like a Poisson process in the end of recessions, in which the chance of fast recovery is independent of how long you've been in a recession, rather than arriving slowly and predictably. That makes it rational to continue these expectations persist despite continual disappointment, and to change forecast quickly once the long-awaited fast growth arrives.

Operating Procedures

The Fed sets interests rates. But how does the Fed set interest rates? The Fed is undergoing a big review of this question. We had a little workshop at Hoover, in preparation for the larger May 3 Strategies for Monetary Policy conference, which provokes the following thoughts.

Issue

Here is the issue.

The graph plots the demand for reserves, as a function of the interest rate on other short-term assets such as overnight federal funds, Libor, money market rates, and so on.

(Reserves are accounts that banks have at the Fed. The Fed sets the interest rates on such accounts.)

The lower horizontal line is the rate the Fed pays on reserves.

If the interest rate on other similar assets (overnight federal funds, Libor, repo rates) is above the interest rate on reserves, then banks should want to get rid of reserves. However, reserves are useful, as money is useful, so banks are willing to hold some even when they lose interest on reserves by doing so. The greater the interest costs -- the greater the difference between the rate banks can lend at and the rate they get on reserves -- the more they work hard to avoid holding reserves. At the end, there are legal and regulatory requirements to hold reserves.

In the flat zone, banks are satiated in reserves. Reserves don't have any marginal liquidity value. But banks are happy to hold arbitrary quantities as an asset so long as the interest on reserves is above or equal to what they can get elsewhere.

If banks can borrow at less than the interest on reserves, they would do so and demand infinite amounts. Therefore, competition among banks should drive those rates up to the interest on reserves.  Similarly, if rates banks can lend at are higher than interest on reserves then banks should compete to lend, driving other rates down to the interest on reserves. Therefore, the Fed by setting the interest on reserves sets the overall level of overnight interest rates.

Questions

Here are the questions:

1) Where should the supply of reserves be? This is the biggest question the Fed is asking right now. The three vertical lines in the graph are three possibilities.

The Fed currently fixes the supply of reserves, which is referred to as the "size of the balance sheet," so the lines are vertical. The Fed raises the supply of reserves by buying assets such as treasuries or other assets, "printing money," i.e. creating reserves, in return for the assets. The balance sheet shows the assets (e.g. Treasuries) against liabilities (reserves and cash). Yes, the Fed is nothing more than an enormous money market fund, offering fixed value floating rate accounts which it backs by treasury and other securities.

The debated is couched as "floor system" vs. "corridor system."  A "floor system" refers to the two supplies on the right, where there are so many reserves that the other interest rates will equal the rate on reserves.

There are two floor-system variants: abundant reserves, with the supply well to the right, and minimalist reserves, with the supply of reserves set to the smallest possible level, where the demand curve just hits the lower bound, "satiation" in reserves. The latter seems to be where the Fed is heading -- a minimal-reserves floor system.

In a "corridor system," the Fed has an upper and lower band for the market interest rates it wants to target. Historically this was the Federal funds rate, which is the rate at which banks lend reserves to each other overnight. It tries to place that interest in the middle of the band, by artfully putting the supply of reserves in the downward sloping component. This is how the Fed operated before 2008.

The rate at which the Fed is willing to lend reserves also provides an upper bound, which I'll get to in a minute.

2) If there is going to be a corridor, which rate should the Fed care about? The (justly) moribund federal funds rate? The overnight general collateral repo rate? Libor? One advantage of the abundant floor, is that the Fed can stay quiet about all this and let the market sort out just what kind of overnight lending it prefers.

3) If there is a band, how wide should the range between the upper and lower bound be?  1%? 0.5? 0.25%? 0.01%?

3) How free should lending and borrowing be? Who gets access to interest paying reserves, and how much interest do they get? Who can borrow reserves, and on what therms -- what collateral is acceptable, is it overnight or term borrowing, does such borrowing incur formal regulatory attention or informal "stigma"?

4) What assets should the Fed buy on the other side of the balance sheet, or accept as collateral if it lends reserves?  Just short-term treasuries? (My favorite) The current mix of long term treasuries and mortgage-backed securities? Or, perhaps, follow the ECB and BOJ and buy corporate bonds and stocks, many countries debts, or lend newly created reserves to banks and count the loans as assets?

The motivations here are, I think, as much political as economic, and it's better to acknowledge that. (We should understand the Fed can't do that in writing, but we can!) Having touted QE as extraordinary accommodation the Fed is under big pressure to stop stimulating. It's too late to say that QE was mostly symbolic. Having seen the Fed buy all sorts of securities, congresspeople are coming up with dandy ideas for new things the Fed can "invest" in by printing money. Having paid banks about a quarter point more than they can get anywhere else, and indeed allowed a pleasant little arbitrage to go on, the Fed is under pressure to pay other investors the same. Congress is even more full of ideas for who the Fed should lend to, and how the Fed should use its expanded regulatory powers to channel credit here and deny credit there.

"Normalization" is a pretty meaningless economic term to me -- why is whatever the Fed was doing in 2007 "normal," why is it good? But "normalization" is a tremendously useful marketing banner. We're going back to "normal," so leave us alone with your bright ideas. Well, fine, but let us quietly  go to a new normal that incorporates all the interesting things we've learned in the last 10 years.

My answer

My (radical as usual) answers:

I like the "floor" system, with abundant reserves. The great lesson of the last 10 years is, we can live the Friedman rule. We can have money that pays full interest, so that holding money has no opportunity cost, and this will not cause inflation. This is genuinely new knowledge. Liquidity is free! There is no need for people to waste time and effort on cash management. Liquidity is good for financial stability too: Banks holding huge reserves don't fail.

I go beyond the abundant floor: The Fed should not target the supply of reserves at all. The supply curve of reserves should be horizontal.  The Fed should just say, "bring us your treasuries, and we'll give you reserves and pay the IOER rate." Or, "Bring us your reserves and you can have treasuries."

Why? Well, if you want to target a price, you offer to buy and sell freely at that price. If you want to target an interest rate, target an interest rate. We have seen limited arbitrage between reserves and other assets due to lack of competition in banking and Fed restrictions, who can hold reserves, and the fixed supply.

I see no economic or financial harm whatever from arbitrary expansion of the Fed's balance sheet, if the assets are all short-term Treasuries. Reserves are just overnight, electronically transferable government debt. If the banking system wants more overnight debt and less three week to six month debt, let them have what they want. I see no reason to artificially starve the economy of overnight debt.  The Fed offers free exchange between cash and reserves; the government as a whole should offer free exchange between short term treasuries and overnight treasuries, i.e., reserves.

To accommodate the economy's desire for ample reserves, and the Fed's desire not to provide them, the Treasury should offer the same asset, and the Fed should encourage this and work with the Treasury to make it happen. 

Specifically, the treasury should issue overnight, fixed-value ($1), floating-rate, electronically-transferable debt. Let's call it treasury electronic money. Legally, this is treasury debt that any individual or financial institution can hold, just as they can hold treasury bills or treasury coins. Functionally, these are interest-paying reserves. Like reserves, but not even like T bills, these can be bought or sold immediately: Owners can transfer their ownership of $1 worth of treasury money to someone else on the treasury website, and owners can sell $1 worth of treasury money and have the money wired (i.e. the treasury sends $1 of reserves to the owner's bank) instantly. (Details here.)

Given the Fed's resistance to narrow banking, and the potential of treasury electronic money to undercut bank's (subsidized) deposit financing, I suspect the Fed's first instinct would be to fight such an innovation. The Fed should overcome that instinct and welcome a solution to the problem of providing lots of liquid assets without the (genuine, below) downsides the Fed feels about a large balance sheet.

I agree with critics that the composition of the Fed's assets should return quickly to short-term treasuries only, and in my ideal world to just this treasury electronic money. That is mostly for political economy reasons outlined below. Other assets should be on the balance sheet in emergencies only.

If the Fed feels the need to buy long-term treasurys or take them as collateral, issuing reserves in return, because of a shortage of safe assets, that means the Treasury has not issued enough short-term liquid treasurys. There are simpler ways to fix that problem. 

Other answers

Central Bank Independence

I'm on a panel at the "ECB and its watchers" conference Wednesday, to discuss central bank independence. Here are my comments. Yes, there is a lot more to say, but I get exactly 15 minutes. I hope I'm not scurrying back tomorrow to retract something stupid here.

Central Bank Independence

John H. Cochrane

Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Remarks presented at the “ECB And its Watchers” conference, March 27 2019. 

I believe central bank independence is a good thing, and that it is in increasing danger. I don’t think that’s a controversial view, or we would not be here.

I sense that our mission today is to decry politicians that wish to influence the central banks’ good works, especially by pressing for low interest rates.

But I’ll argue instead that much of the threat to central bank independence stems ultimately from how central banks are behaving, and has little to do with interest rates.

Principles

What is, can and should be independent? Let me suggest three principles.

1) In a democracy, independence must come with limited powers, and a limited scope of authority.

2) An independent agency must follow rules, norms, and traditions, not act arbitrarily, with lots of discretion.

3) To be independent, an agency must be, and be perceived to be, competent at its task.

What cannot be independent? A lot of government activity transfers wealth from one person to another, or fights for political power. Those activities must be politically accountable.

Limited powers: Central banks operate within legal restrictions. For example, it seems puzzling that central banks struggle to raise inflation. We all know how to stoke inflation: drop money from helicopters. To stop inflation, soak up the money supply with heavy taxes.

Yet central banks are legally prohibited from this one, most effective action for stoking or stopping inflation.  Why? Well, in a democracy, writing checks to voters or confiscating their hard-earned cash must be reserved for politically accountable institutions.

Rules and norms: Most restraints on central bank actions are rules, norms, and traditions, not legal limitations. Central banking remains something of a black art, so central bankers must sometimes use judgement and discretion, especially in crises, and let the rules or norms evolve with experience. But if they are to stay independent, they must quickly return to or re-form rule, norm, or traditional limitations on their power.

From this perspective, the ECB was set up as an almost perfect central bank. It followed an inflation target. It only acted on the short-term interest rate. Its assets were uncontroversial.  And it was not to finance deficits or bail out sovereigns.

The inflation target and Taylor rule are most important here for their implied list of things that the central bank should not, is not expected to, and pre-ccommits not to pay attention to or control directly: stock prices, housing prices, sectoral and industry health, regional imbalances (especially in Europe), credit for small businesses, income and wealth inequality, infrastructure investment, decarbonization, bad schools, and so on.

An independent central bank should say often, “that’s a terrible problem, but it’s not our job to fix it.” It loses power and prestige in the moment, but gains independence in the long run.

Actions:

So what are central banks doing to invite challenges to their independence?

Interest rates get a lot of attention, but they are not, I think, the core of the problem. Yes, President Trump is violating established norms by complaining publicly about interest rates. But most people in both parties understand this is a violation, and a norm worth keeping, so for the moment I think the norm against interest-rate jawboning will hold in the future.

The big threat to independence comes from the expansion of activities and responsibilities that central banks have taken on, on an apparently permanent basis, in the years since the financial crisis: Asset purchases, regulatory expansion, a much larger set of goals, and a marriage of regulatory and macroeconomic policy.

Purchasing assets in dysfunctional markets, as in 2008, is what central banks traditionally do in a crisis. (We can argue whether they should, but that’s for another day.) But once markets returned to normal, continuing to buy large portfolios of long-term bonds, mortgage backed securities, corporate bonds, imperiled European sovereign debt, and even stocks, for years on end, was a different choice.

We can argue the benefits. Maybe QE lowered some rates, a bit, for a while, and maybe that stimulated a bit.

But we have ignored the costs. Central banks took on a new, and apparently permanent power, formerly foresworn: to buy assets directly, to control asset prices, not just short term interest rates.

It is harder to say to a politician, who complains that mortgage rates are too high, that this is not our problem; we set the short term rate to stabilize inflation; we don’t pay direct attention to other assets, or to directing credit to mortgages rather than big business.

It will get worse. The US Congress has noticed the Fed’s balance sheet. Under the mantra of “modern monetary theory,” a swath of congresspeople want the Fed to print trillions of dollars to finance the Green New Deal.

The ECB and euro were set up with a clear rule that the ECB does not bail out sovereigns. In the crisis, President Draghi rather brilliantly stemmed the first debt crisis with a “do what it takes” promise, that did not have to be executed, along with a warning that this could not be permanent.

But in response, Italy took the St. Augustinian approach — Lord, give me structural reform, but not quite yet. The ECB continues to repo government debt and Italian banks are still stuffed with Italian government bonds. The doom loop looms still, and markets still expect a bailout.

The ECB has lost the long run game of chicken. It will likely have to actually do what it takes when the next crisis comes.

But there is little that is more political, little that cannot stay independent more clearly, than bailing out insolvent sovereigns, with euros that must either inflate or be backed up by taxes on the rest of Europe.

The ECB is still directly financing questionable banks and questionable corporations. These are also activities that will invite political scrutiny.

The crisis spawned a vast expansion of regulation. The US Fed is now using an immense,confusing, and constantly changing set of rules to act with great discretion on telling banks what to do.

Moreover such regulation changed from “micro,” somewhat rules-based regulation, to more nebulous and discretionary “macro prudential” regulation that directs the activities of “systemic” institutions — something nobody can define other than “we know it when we see it.” The Fed wanted to include large insurance companies, until courts struck that down, and tried for a while to systemically regulate equity asset managers, on the theory that the managers might sell in a behavioral herd and send prices down.

But telling banks and other institutions what to do, who to lend to, when to buy and sell assets, with billions on the line, using a high degree of judgment and discretion, is a political act that invites loss of independence. Your “bubble” is my “boom,” your “fire sale” my “buying opportunity.”

More than current actions, the ideas swirling around central banks seem to me even more dangerous for their future independence.

It is taken for granted that central banks should embrace the task of managing and directing the entire financial system. This only starts with managing bank assets to try to manage “systemic” risks. It goes on to managing asset prices and housing prices, I guess so that nobody ever loses money again, and directing the “credit cycle.” And central banks should go beyond short rates and asset purchases, and use regulatory tools to direct the macroeconomy and asset markets.

Nobody even seems to stop and think that such actions are intensely political, and will invite strong attacks on central bank independence.

Moreover, faith that we economists and the central banks we populate have any actual technical competence to implement such grandiose schemes is evaporating, and rightly so. That the already vast regulatory system failed to stop the last crisis eroded a lot of trust. In many ways the revelation that elites didn’t know what they were doing led to today’s populism. That once this horse was out of the barn, Europe’s regulators nonetheless kept sovereign debt risk free, inviting a second sovereign debt crisis, eroded more trust. If the next crisis blindsides larger, and much more pretentious grand plans, that trust and the independence it grants will vanish.

Even monetary policy is becoming more dangerous to independence. Much of the post-crisis analysis hinges on how monetary policy effects income transfers, for example from investors to mortgage borrowers or from all of us to bank balance sheets. Well, if the point of monetary policy is to take money from Peter, and give it to Paul, on the grounds that Paul has a higher marginal propensity to consume, Peter is going to call his congressman.

I sense that a lot of this expansion of tools, scope, and discretion comes from a natural human and institutional tendency towards aggrandizement.  It’s fun to become the grand macro-financial planner, always in the news. It’s boring to be a limited, technical institution that says “not my job.”

For example, I think a lot of QE was simply done to be seen to be “doing something” in the face of slow supply-side growth. Remember, monetary problems, especially any ill effects of 1% rather than 2% inflation, do not last 10 years. Long run growth comes from productivity, and structural reform, not stimulus, and not money.

But in the language of central bankers, “growth” and “demand” seem to be synonyms. This morning, describing a decline in growth with no decline in consumption, President Draghi used the word “demand” many times, and “supply” never. Like helicopter parents, central banks want always to be in charge.

Maybe you disagree, but think of the costs. For sure, the promise of endless QE, and reiterating the promise that central-bank provided demand stimulus is the vital answer, lessened the pressure for structural reform.

More generally, imagine that about 5 years ago, central banks had said, “We’ve done our job. The crisis is over. ‘Demand’ is no longer the problem. If you think growth is too low, get on with structural reform. Low inflation and interest rates are fine. Welcome to the Friedman rule. QE is over, and we are no longer intervening in asset markets. In place of intrusive bank regulation, countercyclical buffers, stress tests, and asset price management, we are going to insist on lots and lots of capital so there can’t be crises in the first place. We’ll be taking a long vacation.”

Just how much worse would the overall economy be? We can argue. How much better would the threats to central bank independence be? A lot.

Well, it’s not too late.

Suggestions

Let me offer some practical suggestions:

1) Separate monetary policy and regulation. Regulation is much more intrusive, and much harder to resist political pressure. Using regulatory tools for macroeconomic direction is inherently going to threaten independence. The ECB’s Chinese wall between regulation and monetary policy is a good start.

2) Transfer, or swap, all balance sheet assets other than short term treasuries to a “bad bank,” controlled by fiscal authorities.

3) Solve the sovereign debt problem. Stop the doom loop: get own country sovereign debt out of banks, or backed by capital. Create a mutual fund with a diversified portfolio of government debts, and force banks to hold that if they don't want big risk weights. Allow pan-europeans banks that hold diversified portfolios. Then insolvent sovereigns can default without shooting their hostage.

4) Abandon the pretense that risk regulation, asset price management, and credit allocation policy will stop another crisis. Move to narrow deposit taking and equity financed banking, or at least allow these to emerge rather than fighting them tooth and nail.

The US Fed is clearly perceived to be defending monopoly profits of large banks, a big threat to its independence. If you don’t like President Trump’s tweets, wait for President Elizabeth Warren’s. And she knows where the regulatory bodies are buried.

5) Europe needs structural financial reform more than continued bank support from the ECB. For example, corporate bonds should be held in mutual funds marketed directly to investors.

6) Be quiet. Federal Reserve officials should not give speeches about inequality or other hot-button partisan political issues, no matter how passionately they feel about them.

7) But don’t throw away the bad with the good. In the face of political criticism, I sense central banks, rushing to apply the label “normalization.” The Fed is rushing to reduce the quantity of reserves and go back to older reserve management schemes, losing the lessons of how well an abundant reserves system can work.

Independence is not ours to claim. Central banks are government agencies, not private institutions with rights. Governments grant them independence when it is useful for government to pre-commit not to use some of its vast powers for political ends. Independence must be earned by, well, not using power in ways that must be politically accountable.

Central banks need to answer, What economic problems, are not your job to worry about? What tools will you not use? Central banks need to choose the power and allure of trying to fix everything, and thus acting politically, vs. the limitations that allow independence. They can’t have both. And we voters need to tell our politicians which kind of central bank we want. We can’t have both either.

Having laid out the options, it seems clear to me that nobody wants a limited, and hence independent central bank. The trend to central banks as the large, integrated, monetary-financial-and macroeconomic planners, integrating broad control of financial markets and their participants, is desired by central banks, politicians, and not contested by voters. So they shall be, but not independent.

Competitive deposits?

In its death note to narrow banks (link to Federal Register where you can post comments; previous post),  the Fed claimed charmingly that retail deposit rates are fully competitive, so we don't need a narrow bank option to help spread the interest on reserves to deposit rates. In the Fed's view, the fact that banks pay so little compared to reserves just reflects the costs (many of them regulatory!) of servicing retail accounts.

"Some have argued that the presence of PTIEs could play an important role in raising deposit rates offered by banks to their retail depositors. The potential for rates offered by PTIEs to have a meaningful impact on retail deposit rates, however, seems very low...retail deposit accounts have long paid rates of interest far below those offered on money market investments, reflecting factors such as bank costs in managing such retail accounts and the willingness of retail customers to forgo some interest on deposits for the perceived convenience or safety of maintaining balances at a bank rather than in a money market investment. 

Here is some data. From "The Deposits Channel of Monetary Policy"  by Itamar Drechsler  Alexi Savov  and Philipp Schnabl, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132 (2017)1819–1876:

When the Fed Funds rate rises, checking  account rates do not. (It's interesting that savings and time deposits do move more quickly, indicating banks face more competition there.) The Fed's story that the spread between checking account rates and federal funds (now IOER) rates reflects costs is very hard to square with this graph -- why should costs and benefits of checking accounts change over time so much, and coincidentally rise exactly one for one with the Federal Funds rate?

Pablo Kurlat, Deposit Spreads and the Welfare Cost of Inflation plots similar data cross sectionally, which lets you estimate the pass through rate better at the expense of the time pattern:

Pablo puts the spread between deposit and federal funds rate on the vertical axis. So, if banks passed through interest rates one for one, the line would be flat. If there were a constant cost, it would be flat but at a higher level. If banks pay the same lousy rate no matter what interest rates are, the curve lies on the 45 degree line. You can see the same general picture.

(Pablo's paper is very nice. He concludes that therefore the "Friedman rule" that interest rates should perpetually be zero, with slight deflation making real rates positive, has yet another thing going for it, that banks are not able to use their market power against us so much.)

Pablo also plots data from different countries:

It's interesting that Sweden and Italy have flatter (more competitive lines). It's really interesting that Argentina lies on the 45 degree line, with no pass through, despite huge inflation-induced interest rates. I would guess that Argentina has a law against paying interest rate on deposits, as the US used to have.

No, it strikes me we have exactly what it seems to be, looking out the window, a heavily regulated not very competitive oligopoly, sort of like airlines 1972.

Fed vs. Narrow Banks

Suppose an entrepreneur came up with a plan for a financial institution that is completely safe -- it can never fail, it can never suffer a run, it offers depositors perfect safety with no need for deposit insurance, asset risk regulation, capital requirements, or the rest, and it pays depositors more interest than they can get elsewhere.

Narrow banks are such institutions.  They take deposits and invest the proceeds in interest-bearing reserves at the Fed. They pay depositors that interest, less a small profit margin. Pure and simple. Economists have been calling for narrow banks since at least the 1930s.

You would think that the Fed would welcome narrow banks with open arms.

You would be wrong.

The latest chapter in the Fed's determined effort to quash The Narrow Bank (TNB) and at least one other effort to start a narrow bank is unfolding. (Previous posts here and here.)

Last year, TNB sued the Fed for refusing to allow TNB an account at the Fed at all. The Fed has just now filed a motion to dismiss the suit. The Fed has also issued an advance notice of proposed rule making, basically announcing that it would, on a discretionary basis, refuse to pay interest on reserves to any narrow bank. In case anyone gets a bright idea to take a small bank that already has a master account and turn it in to a narrow bank, thereby avoiding TNB's legal imbroglio, take note, the Fed will pull the rug out from under you.

I find both documents outrageous. The Fed is acting as a classic captured regulator, defending the oligopoly position of big banks against unwelcome competition, its ability to thereby coerce banks to do its bidding, and to run a grand regulatory bureaucracy, against competitive upstarts that will provide better products for the economy, threaten the systemically dangerous big bank oligopoly, and reduce the need for a large staff of Fed regulators.

I state that carefully, "acting as." It is my firm practice never to allege motives, a habit I find particularly annoying among a few other economics bloggers. Everyone I know at the Fed is a thoughtful and devoted public servant and I have never witnessed a whiff of such overt motives among them. Yet institutions can act in ways that people in them do not perceive. And certainly if one had such an impression of the Fed, which a wide swath of observers from the Elizabeth Warren left to  Cato Institute anti-crony capitalism libertarians do, nothing in these documents will dissuade them from such a malign view of the institution's motives, and much will reinforce it.  

On the outrage scale, the first paragraph of the Fed's motion to dismiss takes the cake:

Selgin on IOER and TNB

George Selgin has a nice piece on TNB and IOER, which I missed when it came out in September, but it's still relevant.

(HT a correspondent. TNB is "The Narrow Bank" which I wrote about here; IOER is interest on excess reserves. The Fed pays banks interest on reserves, which are accounts that banks hold at the Fed.) 

As George points out, TNB's model is to take money from, large corporations or money market funds, invest that money at the Fed as interest-paying reserves, and give as large an interest rate back to the depositors as possible. (Well, that's what their model will be if their suit against the Fed  winds through the US legal system before the next crash, which is unlikely, These customers can't get large enough insured deposits at regular banks; that TNB invests entirely in reserves make it impossible for TNB to fail so its customers don't need insurance. TNB doesn't want to let you or me give them money because that opens them to an immense amount of costly regulation.

The puzzling question is, how can TNB make money at that.?TNB takes money, invests it with the Fed, and the Fed in turn buys US treasuries. How is that better than TNB simply operating a money market mutual fund that invests directly in Treasurys?

The answer is, that for most of the last decade, the Fed has paid more interest on reserves than comparable treasury rates. Yes, "money" pays higher interest than "bonds," an inversion of classic monetary theory. Since money is more liquid, how can this survive? The answer is, because only banks can access this kind of "money." TNB was going to upend that.

Just why does the Fed pay more interest on reserves than comparable treasuries?  This is, like it or not, a nice little subsidy to banks, who get about 0.2% more on their reserves than anyone else can get.

Where does that 0.2% come from? You and me. George explains vividly

Just how is it that the Fed's IOER payments could allow MMMFs to earn more than they might by investing money directly into securities themselves? Because the Fed has less overhead? Don't make me laugh. Because Fed bureaucrats are more astute investors? I told you not to make me laugh! No, sir: it's because the Fed can fob-off risk — like the duration risk it assumed by investing in so many longer-term securities — on third parties, meaning taxpayers, who bear it in the form of reduced Fed remittances to the Treasury. That means in turn that any gain the MMMFs would realize by having a bank that's basically nothing but a shell operation designed to let them bank with the Fed would really amount to an implicit taxpayer subsidy. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch... As it stands, of course, ordinary banks are already taking advantage of that same subsidy.

This is good, and I conclude that the Fed should keep a large balance sheet, flood the economy with liquidity as Friedman said it should, and run a tight corridor system paying no more on excess reserves than comparable Treasury rates.  Here we part company.

George seems to agree with the Fed though, that this subsidy is an integral part of the interest on reserves scheme, and that TNB will undermine the whole project of a large balance sheet and targeting interest rates directly via interest on reserves and later, the discount rate. I disagree.

Canadian Debt

Corey Garriott, Sophie Lefebvre, Guillaume Nolin, Francisco Rivadeneyra and Adrian Walton at the Bank of Canada have issued a thoughtful and crisply written proposal for restructuring Canadian government debt, titled Alternative Futures for Government of Canada Debt Management.

Their third and fourth ideas are the most radical and attractive to me: Replace all government debt with 1) a set of zero-coupon bonds issued on a fixed schedule and/or  2) a long perpetutity, a long indexed perpetuity, and fixed-value, floating-rate short term debt, essentially the same as interest-paying central bank reserves or a money market fund. (Naturally I like it, since it draws on my "new structure for Federal Debt")

Why? Well, a simpler and smaller set of securities would be more liquid.

...investors will pay more in the primary market for assets they believe will be more liquid. Thus, issuing assets that are more liquid would decrease the issuer’s costs. ... a decrease in the total cost of funding of just one basis point would save the government $68 million annually

There is a social benefit as well. We hear a lot about "safe asset shortage," and the need for liquidity. Well, the easiest way to create safe liquid assets is to make the safe assets more liquid!

Kotlikoff on the Big Con

In preparing some talks on the financial crisis, 10 years later, I ran across a very nice article, The Big Con -- Reassessing the "Great" Recession and its "Fix" by Larry Kotlikoff. (Here, if the first link doesn't work.) 

Larry is also the author of Jimmy Stewart is Dead – Ending the World's Ongoing Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking, from 2010, which along with Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig's The Bankers' New Clothes is one of the central works outlining the possibility of equity-financed banking and narrow deposit-taking, and how it could end financial crises forever at essentially no cost.

Larry points out that the crisis was, centrally a run. He calls it a "multiple equilibrium."  Financial institutions have promised people they can have their money back in full, at any time, but they have invested that money in illiquid and risky assets. When people all do that at the same time, the system fails. Such a run is inherently unpredictable. If you know it's happening tomorrow, you run to get your money out and it happens today.

This is a common view echoed by many others, including Ben Bernanke. What's distinctive about Larry's essay is that he pursues the logical conclusion of this view. If the crisis was, centrally, a run, all the other things that are alluded to as causes of the crisis are not really central.  Short-term debt, run-prone liabilities are gas in the basement. Just what causes the spark, how big the firehouse is, are not central, as without gas in the basement the spark would not cause a fire.

Larry puts it all together nicely by starting with the 2011 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report:

"There was an explosion in risky subprime lending and securitization, an unsustainable rise in housing prices, widespread reports of egregious and predatory lending practices, dramatic increases in household mortgage debt, and exponential growth in financial firms’ trading activities, unregulated derivatives, and short-term “repo” lending markets, among many other red flags. Yet there was pervasive permissiveness; little meaningful action was taken to quell the threats in a timely manner. "

Larry then takes apart each of these non-culprits, as below.

Dollarize Argentina

Argentina should dollarize, says Mary Anastasia O'Grady in the Wall Street Journal -- not a peg, not a currency board, not an IMF plan, just give up and use dollars.

Another currency crisis is roiling Argentina... The peso has lost half its value against the U.S. dollar since January. Inflation expectations are soaring. 

The central bank has boosted its overnight lending rate to an annual 60% to try to stop capital flight. But Argentines are bracing for spiraling prices and recession. 

...the troubles have been brewing for some time. On a trip to Buenos Aires in February, I got an earful from worried economists who said Mr. Macri was moving too slowly to reconcile fiscal accounts. 

In 2016 and 2017 the government continued spending beyond its means and borrowing dollars in the international capital markets to finance the shortfall. That put pressure on the central bank to print money so as not to starve the economy of low-priced credit ahead of midterm elections in 2017.... 

A sharp selloff of the peso in May was followed by a new $50 billion standby loan from the International Monetary Fund in June. With a monetary base that is up over 30% since last year, in a nation that knows something about IMF intervention, that was like waving a red cape in front of a bull. 

The peso was thus vulnerable when currency speculators launched an attack on the Turkish lira last month and the flight to the dollar spilled over into other emerging markets, including Argentina. After decades of repeated currency crises, Argentines can smell monetary mischief. A peso rout ensued.

Conventional Wisdom these days -- the standard view around the Fed, IMF, OECD, BIS, ECB, and at NBER conferences -- says that countries need their own currencies, so they can quickly devalue to address negative "shocks." For example, conventional wisdom says that Greece would have been far better off with its own currency to devalue rather than as part of the euro. I have long been skeptical.

It's not working out so great for Argentina. As Mary points out, short term financing means there can be "speculative attacks" on the currencies of highly indebted countries that run their own currencies, just as there can be runs on banks. And Conventional Wisdom, silent on this issue advocating a Greek return to Drachma, was full in that the Asian crises of the late 1990s were due to "sudden stops," and such speculative machinations of international "hot money."

Well, says CW, including the IMF's "institutional view," that means countries need "capital flow management," i.e. governments need to control who can buy and sell their currency and and who can buy or sell assets internationally.  Yet Venezuela and Iran are crashing too, and not for lack of capital flow "management." My understanding is Argentina does not allow free capital either. Moreover, if there is a chance you can't take your money out, you don't put it in in the first place. There is a reason the post Bretton Woods international consensus drove out capital restrictions.

So I agree with Mary -- dollarize. Just get it over with. What possible benefit is Argentina getting from clever central bank currency manipulation, if you want a dark word, or management, if you want a good one? Use the meter and the kilogram too.

There is a catch, however, not fully explicit in Mary's article. The underlying problem is fiscal, not monetary. To repeat,

"Mr. Macri was moving too slowly to reconcile fiscal accounts. ...In 2016 and 2017 the government continued spending beyond its means and borrowing dollars in the international capital markets to finance the shortfall." 

So, I think it's a bit unfair for Mary to complain that Argentina's problem is that it "has a central bank." I don't know what any central banker could do, given the fiscal problems, to stop the currency from crashing.

If the government dollarizes, it can no longer inflate or devalue to get out of fiscal trouble. Argentina has pretty much already lost that option anyway. If the government borrows Pesos, inflating or devaluing eliminates that debt. But if the government borrows in dollars, a devaluation or inflation taxes a much smaller base of peso holders to try to pay back the dollar debt.

Still, a dollarized government must either pay back its bills or default. That's how the Euro was supposed to work too, until Europe's leaders, seeing how much Greek debt was stuffed into French and German banks, burned the rule book.

So the underlying problem is fiscal. With abundant fiscal resources, the government could have borrowed abroad to stop a run on the Peso. And without those resources, dollarization will not solve its debt and deficit problem. Dollarization will force the government to shape up fast, which may be Mary's point.

Dollarization will insulate the private economy from government fiscal troubles. This is a great, perhaps the greatest, point in its favor. Even if the government defaults, companies in a fully dollarized, free capital flow economy, can shrug it off and go about their business. Forced to use pesos, subject to sharp inflation, devaluation, capital and trade restrictions, the government's problems infect the rest of the economy.

Last, CW likes devaluation and inflation because it supposedly "stimulates" the economy through its troubles surrounding a crisis. That strikes me as giving a cancer patient an espresso. Argentina is getting both inflation and recession, not a stimulative boom out of its inflation.

Dollarization is not a currency board, which Argentina also tried and failed. A currency board is a promise to keep the peso equal to the dollar, and to keep enough dollars around to back the pesos. Alas, it does not keep dollars around to back all the governments' debts, so the government soon enough will see the kitty of dollars and grab them, abrogating the currency board. Dollarization means the economy uses dollars, period, and there is no pool of assets sitting there to be grabbed.

Lira Crash

No, a currency board won't save the Lira, contra Steve Hanke's oped in the Wall Street Journal. Steve:

Turkey should adopt a currency board. A currency board issues notes and coins convertible on demand into a foreign anchor currency at a fixed rate of exchange. It is required to hold anchor-currency reserves equal to 100% of its monetary liabilities,...

Well, that sounds reasonable no? If 100% of the country's currency and bank reserves are backed by US dollars, and the currency is pegged to the dollar, what could go wrong? Don't want Lira? The central bank promises to exchange 1 Lira for 1 dollar and always has enough dollars to make good on the promise. It sounds like an ironclad peg.

Government debt is the problem. Turkey may still have the resources to back its currency 100% with dollar assets. But what about the looming debt? Turkey does not have the resources to back all its government debt with dollar assets! If it did, it would not have borrowed in the first place.

So what happens when the debt comes due? If the government cannot raise enough in taxes to pay it off, or convince investors it can raise future taxes enough to borrow new money to roll it over, it must either default on the debt or print unbacked Lira.

I.e. a currency board run by an insolvent government will fail. The government will eventually grab the foreign reserves.

The Argentinian currency board did fail, and this is basically why.

Nobel Symposium on Money and Banking Day 2

Day 2 of the Nobel Symposium on Money and Banking focused on monetary policy. (My last post covered Day 1 on banking.)

Bernanke

Sadly Ben Bernanke's video and slides are not up on the website. Ben showed some very interesting evidence that the crisis was an unpredictable run, rather than the usual story about predictable defaults resulting from too much credit. Things really did get suddenly a lot worse in September and October 2008. Yes, it's easy to say this is defense against the charge that he should have done more ahead of time. But evidence is evidence, and I find it quite plausible that the relatively small losses in subprime need not have caused such a massive crisis and recession absent a run. Ben says the material is part of a paper he will release soon, so look for it. One can understand that Bernanke is careful about releasing less than perfect drafts of papers and videos.

History

Barry Eichengreen gave a scholarly account of why history matters, especially the great depression, and we should pay more attention to it. (Paper, video.) He aimed squarely at typical economists whose knowledge stopped at Friedman and Schwartz, or perhaps Ben Bernanke's famous non-monetary channels paper, in which bank failures propagated the depression. He emphasized the role of the gold standard and international cooperation or non-cooperation, and warned against facile comparisons of the gold standard experience to today's events and the euro in particular.

Randy Kroszner has a great set of slides and an engaging presentation. He also started on parallels with the great depression, and told well the story of the US default on gold clauses. He closed with a warning about fighting the last war -- particularly apt given the exclusive focus of most of this conference on the events of 2008 -- and on how to start a crisis. In his view when Bank of England Gov Mervyn King said: “We will support Northern Rock." People hear "Northern Rock's in trouble? Run!" Likewise, in my view, speeches by President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson did a lot to spark the run in the US.

DSGE

A highlight for me, was the session on DSGE models.

Marty Eichenbaum (video, slides, subsequent paper) gave a nice review of the current status of new Keynesian DSGE models, and how they are developing in reaction to the financial crisis and recession, and the zero bound episode.

Harald Uhlig

Critiques, or more precisely lists of outstanding puzzles and challenges, are often more memorable and novel than positive summaries, and Harald Uhlig delivered a clear and memorable one. (Video, Slides)

Asset prices are a longstanding problem in DSGE models. In typical linearized form, the quantity dynamics are governed by intertemporal substitution, and the asset prices by risk aversion, and neither has much influence on the other. (I learned this from Tom Tallarini.) Rather obviously, our recent recession was all about risk aversion -- people stopped consuming and investing, and tried to move from private to government bonds because they were scared to death, not a sudden attack of thriftiness. There is a lot of current work going on to try to repair this deficiency, but it still lives in the land of extensions of the model rather than the mainstream. Harald also points out a frequently ignored implication of Epstein-Zin utility, the utility index reflects all consumption and anything that enters utility

Financial frictions are blossoming in DSGE models, in two forms: First, HANK or "heterogenous agent" models, which add things like borrowing constraints and uninsurable risks so that the distribution of income matters, and in an eternal quest to make the models work more like static ISLM. Second, in response to the financial crisis (see first day!) stylized models of banking and intermediary finance are showing up. I'm still a little puzzled that the more standard time-varying risk aversion part of macro-finance got ignored, (a plea here) but that is indeed what's going on.

The conundrum, here as elsewhere in DSGE, is that the more people play with the models, the further they get from their founding philosophy: macro models that do talk about monetary policy, (now) financial crises, but that obey the Lucas rules: Optimization, budget constraints, markets, or, more deeply, structures that have some hope of being policy invariant and therefore predictions that will survive the Lucas critique. Already, many ingredients such as Calvo pricing are convenient parables, but questionably realistic as policy-invariant.

Harald points out that since most of the frictions are imposed in a rather ad-hoc manner, neither will they be policy-invariant. This is a deeper and more realistic point than commonly realized. Every time market participants hit a "friction," they tend to innovate a way around that friction so it doesn't hurt them next time. Regulation Q on interest rates was once a "friction," and then the money market fund was invented. The result is too often "chicken papers:"

The understandable trouble is, if you try to microfound every single friction from Deep Theory -- just why it is that credit card companies put a limit on how much you can borrow, in terms of asymmetric information, moral hazard, and so forth -- the audience will be asleep long before you get to the data. Also, as we saw in day 1, there is (to put it charitably) a lot of uncertainty in just how contract or banking theory maps to actual frictions. I think we're stuck with ad-hoc frictions, if you want to go that route.

Harald's next point is, I think, his most devastating, as it describes a huge hole in current models that is not (unlike the last two) a point of immense current research effort. The Phillips curve and inflation are the central point of the New Keynesian DSGE model -- and a disaster. 

The Phillips curve is central. The point of the model is for monetary policy to have output effects. Money itself has (rightly) disappeared in the model, so the only channel for monetary policy to work is via the Phillips curve. Interest rates change inflation, and inflation causes output changes. No surprise, it is very hard for that model to produce anything like the last recession out of small changes in inflation. (I have to agree here with the premise of the financial frictions view -- if you want your model to produce the last recession, other than by one huge shock, the model needs something like a financial crisis.)

The Phillips curve in the data is well known

Less well known, but worth lots of attention, is how the now standard DSGE models completely fail to capture inflation. Harald's slide:

The point of the slide, in simpler form: The standard Phillips curve is

inflation today = beta x expected inflation next year + kappa x output gap  + shock

Essentially all inflation is accounted for by the shock. The model is basically silent about the source of inflation. Looking at the model as a whole, not just one equation, Neither monetary policy shocks nor changes in rules accounts for any significant amount of inflation. 

I made a similar graph recently. Use the standard three equation model

Now, use actual data on output y, inflation pi, and interest rate i, to back out the shocks v. Turn off the monetary policy shock vi = 0. Solve the model and plot the data -- what would have happened if the Fed had exactly followed the Taylor rule? 

Answer: Inflation and output would have been virtually the same. The inflation of the 1970s and its conquest in the 1980s had nothing to do with monetary policy mistakes. It is entirely the fault, and then fortunate consequence, of "marginal cost" shocks that come from out of the model. This is a pretty uncomfortable prediction of a model designed to be about monetary policy! Or, as Harald put it

• Data: no Phillips-Curve tradeoff.
• QDSGE: don’t account for inflation with monetary policy shocks.
• The NK / Phillips-Curve-based NK QDSGE models may thus provide a poor guide for monetary policy.

Wait, you ask, what about Marty Eichenbaum's pretty graphs, such as this one, showing the effects of a monetary policy shock?

The answer: After a lot of work, the effects of a monetary policy shock look (at last) about like what Milton Friedman said they should look like in 1968. But monetary policy shocks don't account for any but a tiny part of output and inflation variation, quite contra Friedman (and Taylor, and many others') view.

Last, standard new Keyensian DSGE models have strong "Fisherian" properties. In response to long lasting or expected interest rate rises, inflation goes up. More on this later.

Ellen McGrattan

Ellen stole the show. (Slides.) Take a break, and watch the video. She manages to be hilarious and incisive. And unlike the rest of us, she didn't try to sheohorn a two hour lecture into her 15 minutes.

Her central points. First, like Harald, she points out that the models are driven by large shocks with less and less plausible structural interpretation, and thus further from the Lucas critique solution than once appeared to be the case. The shocks are really "wedges," deviations from equilibrium conditions of the model with unknown sources

What to do? Focus on rules and institutions. This is a deep point. Even DSGE modelers, in the desire to speak to policy makers, often adopt the static ISLM presumption that policy is about actions, about decisions, whether to raise or lower the funds rate. The other big Lucas point is that we should think about policy in terms of rules and institutions, not just actions.

Monetary policy and ELB

Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé (slides, video)  talked about the Fisherian possibility -- that raising interest rates raises inflation. New-Keynesian DSGE models, with rational expectations, have this property, especially for permanent or preannounced interest rate increases, and when at zero interest rates or otherwise in a passive regime where interest rates do not react more than one for one with inflation. She and Martin Uribe have been advocating this possibility as a serious proposal for Europe and Japan that want to raise inflation.

She presented some nice evidence that permanent increases in interest rates do increase inflation -- and right away, not just in the long run.

Mike Woodford. (slides, video)  gave a dense talk (37 slides, 20 minutes) on policy at the lower bound. During the ELB, central banks moved from interest rates to asset purchases and forward guidance. Mike asks,

To what extent does this mean that the entire conceptual framework of monetary stabilization policy needs to be reconsidered, for a world in which ELB might well continue periodically to bind? 

In classic form, Mike sets the question up as a Ramsey problem. Given a DSGE model, what is the optimal policy, given that interest rates are occasionally constrained? He derives from that problem a price level target. The price level target works, intuitively, by committing the central bank to a period of extra inflation after the zero bound ends. It is a popular form of forward guidance. The innovation here is to derive that formally as an optimal policy problem.

Mike's price level target is stochastic, changing optimally over time to respond to shocks. I'm a little skeptical that the central bank can observe and understand such shocks, especially given the above Uhlig-McGrattan discussion about the nature of shocks. Also, as I emphasize in comments, I'm dubious about the great power of promises of what the central bank will do in the far future to stimulate output today. I'm a fan of price level targets, but on both sides, not just as stimulus, but for utterly different reasons.

Mike takes on rather skeptically the common alternative -- quantitative easing, asset purchases during the time of the bound. He points out that to work, people have to believe that the increase in money is permanent, and won't be quickly withdrawn when the zero bound is over. As evidence, he points to Japan:

Similarly, he likes the price level target over forward guidance -- speeches in place of action -- as it is a more credible commitment to do things ex-post that the bank may not wish to do ex-post.

Finally, he addresses the puzzles of new Keynesian models at the zero bound -- forward guidance has stronger effects the further in the future is the promise; effects get larger as prices get less sticky, and so on. He argues that models should replace rational expectations with a complex k-step iterated expectations rule.

Me.

Video, slides from Sweden, slides from my webpage, written version. I covered this in a previous blog post, so won't repeat it all. I put a lot of effort in to it, and it summarizes a lot of what I've been doing in 15 minutes flat, so I recommend it (of course). It also offers more perspective on above points by Mike and Stephanie. My favorite line, referring to Mike's push for irrational expectations is something close to

"I never thought we would come to Sweden, that I would be defending the basic new-Keynesian program, and that Mike Woodford would be trying to tear it down. Yet here we are. Promote the fiscal equation from the footnotes and you can save the rest." 

Emi Nakamura

Poor Emi had to go last in an exhausting conference of jet-lagged participants. She did a great job (video, slides) covering a century of monetary history and monetary ideas clearly and transparently. These are great slides to use for an undergraduate or MBA class on monetary policy, as well. An abbreviated list:

• Gold standard
• Seasonal variation in interest rates under the gold standard; money demand shocks
• Money demand shocks in the 1980s -- how the supposedly "stable" V in MV=PY fell apart when the Fed pushed on M.
  
  
  
• Theoretical instability / indeterminacy of interest rate targets
• The switch to interest rate targets and corridors in operating procedures
• The (near-miraculous) success of inflation targets
  
• Taylor rules and other theory of determinate inflation under interest rate targets
• How is it "monetary economics" without money?
• Why did immense QE not cause inflation? 

The overarching theme is the grand story of a move, intellectual and practical, from money supply targets (of which gold is one) to interest rate targets.

Postlude

Monday featured two panels, Macroeconomic research and the financial crisis: A critical assessment, with Annette Vissing-Jørgensen, Luigi Zingales, Nancy Stokey, and  Robert Barro ; and Banking and finance research and the financial crisis: A critical assessment with Kristin Forbes, Ricardo Reis, Amir Sufi, and Antoinette Schoar.

Perhaps it's in the nature of panels, but I found these a disappointment, especially compared to the stellar presentations in the main conference. Also I think it would have been better to allow more (any, really) audience questions; the whole conference was a bit disappointing for lack of general discussion, especially with such a stellar group.

In particular, Luigi led by excoriating the profession for not paying attention to housing problems and financial crises. I thought this a bit unfair and simultaneously short-sighted. He singled out monetary economics textbooks, including Mike Woodford's, for omitting financial crises. Well, Mike omitted asteroid impacts too. It isn't a book about financial crises. And, after lamabasting all of us, he said not one word about events since 2009. What are we missing now? I had to stand up and ask that rude question, again suggesting that perhaps we are all not listening to Ken Rogoff this time. Annette went on to ask something like "don't you Chicago people believe in any regulation at all," and the respondents were too polite to say what an unproductive question that is and just move on.

Again, I offer apologies to authors and discussants I didn't get to. The whole thing was memorable, but there is only so much I can blog! Do go to the site and look at the other sessions, according to your interests.