Bond liquidity

When the Fed stepped in, were corporate bonds "illiquid," the market "dysfunctional," or were the prices just low, as they should be in advance of a Great Recession with larger bankruptcy risk? Did the Fed "liquefy" the market, "intermediate," grease the wheels, or is it just buying, and propping up prices so that bondholders can dump bonds on the Fed before things get really bad?

I asked for evidence on bond market liquidity in my last post on the topic, "Bailout redux," and Pierre-Olivier Weill passed on a paper he has recently written with Mahyar Kargar, Benjamin Lester, David Lindsay, Shuo Liu, and Diego Zúñiga, Corporate Bond Liquidity During the COVID-19 Crisis.

Here is their estimate of roundtrip trading costs -- if you buy and then sell, how much do you lose in bid ask spread. Feb 19 is the stock market peak.  March 18 is the day after the Fed announced it would lend money to broker-dealers and take bonds such as these as collateral. March 23 the Fed announced it would buy corporate bonds on the secondary market, and buy directly from companies issuing new corporate bonds.

Strategic Review and Beyond: Rethinking Monetary Policy and Independence

March 4, I was honored to give the Homer Jones lecture at the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Link here

Strategic Review and Beyond: Rethinking Monetary Policy and Independence.

I used the opportunity to put lots of thoughts together in condensed form, on how the Fed and other central banks should approach monetary policy, financial regulation, and ever-expanding mandates.  The link is to the html version. It will appear in prettier form in the April St. Louis Fed Review.

The conclusion

Should, and can, the Fed stimulate with strongly negative rates, immense QE asset purchases, and an arsenal of forward guidance speeches? I think not. What sort of target should it follow? A price-level target. The Fed should get out of the business of setting the level of nominal rates and target the price level directly. Price-level control will be much more effective with fiscal policy coordination. The Fed should offer a flat supply curve of interest-paying reserves, open basically to anyone, though the Treasury should take up much of that role directly. 

Going forward, the Fed and its international counterparts should disavow the temptation toward ever-expanding mandates and economic and financial dirigisme that would take them to "macroprudential" policy, discretionary credit cycle management, asset price targeting, and exploiting regulatory power to embrace social and political goals… today on climate change and inequality, perhaps tomorrow on immigration, trade restriction, China-isolation, or whatever the smart set at Davos wants to see. Only limited scope of action to areas of agreed technocratic competence will salvage the Fed's, other central banks', and international institutions' useful independence.

Of course this effort arrives with spectacularly bad timing, as nobody is talking about anything but the Covid-19 virus. Still, life does go on, and I don't see anything that is directly contradicted by current events. And perhaps you want to read and think about something other than virus crisis, and issues we will go back to thinking about when it's all over.

In the final section (see the footnotes too) I discovered that our international institutions, BIS, IMF, FSB, and so forth were busy dragging banks into the partisan warfare over green new deal style climate policy and forced redistribution. I took a dim view of that. First of all, the idea that climate and inequality present financial risks is just fanciful. Most importantly these are political minefields that will doom independence.

I think this section holds up well. That the worthies who look in to the future and spot risks to the financial system, and drag banks into accounting for them via stress tests and regulatory accounting, found climate change and inequality the biggest run-provoking risks they could think of, not even mentioning pandemic, tells you volumes about the whole technocratic project.

If you like to watch videos, here is the actual lecture somewhat shorter than the written version.

Fed Bombshell

The Fed just announced "extensive new measures to support the economy." What's this all about?

The PMCCF will allow companies access to credit ... This facility is open to investment grade companies and will provide bridge financing of four years. ... The Federal Reserve will finance a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to make loans from the PMCCF to companies. The Treasury, using the ESF, will make an equity investment in the SPV.

When the Fed buys a Treasury bill, it creates new money with which to buy the bill. It simply increases the amount of reserves, which banks can freely transform to cash, so you can think of it as printing up money to buy the bill. Why doesn't this cause immense inflation? Well, the Fed backs the money with the bill. The overall quantity of government debt has not changed, just the composition.

When the Fed lends money to a bank or business, it looks the same as a matter of accounting. The Fed prints up money, figuratively, and gives it to the bank or business. The loan then counts on the Fed's balance sheet just like the Treasury bill as an asset backing the money.

But there is a difference. Banks and businesses can default. That "asset" may be worthless. Printing money and giving it to business and counting the loan as an asset leads to all sorts of problems.

That's why the Fed is funneling this through the Treasury. The Fed prints up a dollar, gives it to a "special purpose vehicle" along with the Treasury, and the Treasury is supposed to take the risk of default. That is, in my view, appropriate. The Fed cannot stay independent if it lends to specific risky businesses, and takes on the risk they won't pay back.  The Treasury is politically accountable.

Overall, though, the government is printing money and handing it out to businesses. Functionally it is the same as if the Treasury borrowed money, lent it to business, and the Fed bought the Treasury bills. But it happens faster, and gets around the debt limit and lots of other interference.

This post refrains from judgement. I just thought it useful to explain what's going on.

Monetary policy and coronavirus -- French edition

Vox-Fi put up an edited version of my monetary policy and coronavirus post, in French, La politique monétaire en réponse au coronavirus

Un collègue et moi avons discuté de la question suivante : la Fed (Federal Reserve, la banque centrale des Etats-Unis) devrait-elle baisser ses taux d’intérêt en réponse au coronavirus?

Plus généralement, supposons qu’une pandémie devienne grave et que, par choix ou par décret, une grande partie de l’économie s’arrête pendant quelques semaines ou mois. Qu’est-ce que la Fed, ou toute autre politique économique devrait faire à ce sujet?

...

Practice your French. Read the whole thing here

From pandemic to financial crisis?

Yes, the stock market is jumping around, but Treasury markets are also going a bit nuts. And the NY Fed is pulling out the Bazookas:

Today, March 12, 2020, the Desk will offer $500 billion in a three-month repo operation at 1:30 pm ET that will settle on March 13, 2020.  Tomorrow, the Desk will further offer $500 billion in a three-month repo operation and $500 billion in a one-month repo operation for same day settlement.  Three-month and one-month repo operations for $500 billion will be offered on a weekly basis for the remainder of the monthly schedule.  The Desk will continue to offer at least $175 billion in daily overnight repo operations and at least $45 billion in two-week term repo operations twice per week over this period.

In English, you can get cash quick by parking  your treasury securities to the Fed. And the Fed is getting ready for huge amounts.

These changes are being made to address highly unusual disruptions in Treasury financing markets associated with the coronavirus outbreak. 

If I read this right, we're looking at a cut to 0.25% very soon.

A pandemic should be one grand stay-cation. (Writing here about  the economy, and those of us who do not get sick. It is of course combined with a health care disaster, which I don't write about for the simple reason that I'm not a pandemic health policy expert.) The economy shuts down as it seems to do over Christmas - New Years, or Europe in August, and then starts right back up again. Except people and businesses make sure they have cash to pay bills over the vacation. If the US follows Italy to a national shutdown, businesses start to fail, banks get in trouble, here we go. I think these are signs of a flight to cash starting up.

As far as I know the "stress tests" never asked "what are you going to do in a pandemic."

Informed commentary from market participants is especially welcome. Thanks to correspondents for both of these links, which I do not regularly follow.

Corona virus monetary policy

A colleague and I were discussing the question, should the Fed lower interest rates in response to the corona virus?

More generally, suppose a pandemic gets serious and either by choice or by fiat a large swath of the economy is shut down for a few weeks or months. What should the Fed, or other economic policy do about it?

My first instinct was that the Fed should not lower rates. This is a classic supply shock, and there is nothing more demand can do. What’s the point of encouraging more spending if the stores are closed? Even giving people money doesn't do any good if the stores and factories are closed. The first job of a central bank should be to ask “is this a supply shock or a demand shock” and respond to demand shocks, not supply shocks. This is like stoking demand at night or over the weekend.

But supply and demand aren’t so neatly distinguished. Maybe a supply shock creates its own lack of demand. And a pandemic has demand effects too. People hunker up at home and don’t want to go buy a new boat.  One job of the central bank is to spy what the natural real interest rate is, and move the nominal rate accordingly so there is no force unsteadying inflation. Well, if the economy shuts down, people don’t want to spend, since the stores are closed, so by definition they save. (Unless income is shut off). People don’t want to borrow (except to roll over) for the same reason. The marginal product of capital is nothing. So that argues for a pretty sharp fall in interest rates.

But as I think about it, the right answer is that this is the wrong question, and aggregate supply and demand is the wrong framework for thinking about it. What happens if the economy shuts down for a few weeks or months, either by choice or by public-health mandate? Shutting down the economy -- and more importantly turning it back on again --  is not like shutting down and turning on  a light bulb. It's more like shutting down and restarting a nuclear reactor. You need to do it carefully, and make sure the parts survive the shutdown intact.

I can see huge financial problems. The store and factory may shut down, but the clock still ticks. Businesses must still pay debts, with nothing coming in. They likely have to pay wages -- otherwise, what will people do to buy food? People have to make mortgage payments and rent, likely with no income coming in. Left alone, there could be a huge wave of bankruptcies, insolvencies, or just plan inability to pay the bills. A modestly long economic shutdown, left alone, could be a financial catastrophe. When the economy starts up again, if half the businesses have gone bankrupt in the meantime there is a lot less ready to start.

New paper: fiscal theory of monetary policy

A second new paper: "A fiscal theory of monetary policy with partially repaid long-term debt."

By "fiscal theory of monetary policy" I mean a model with standard DSGE ingredients, including inertemporal optimization and market clearing, monetary policy described by interest rate targets, price or other frictions, but closed by fiscal theory, "active" fiscal policy rather than "active" monetary policy.

I aim to build a standard simple but somewhat realistic model of this sort, a parallel to the three equation textbook model that has been part of the new-Keynesian tool kit since the 1990s. I keep the model as simple and standard as possible, so the effect of the innovations one the fiscal side are clearer.

Two parts of the specification are central. First, long-term debt allows the model to produce a negative response of inflation to interest rates. Long-term debt also allows a fiscal shock to result in a protracted inflation, which slowly devalues long term bonds, rather than a price level jump.

Second, and most important, the paper writes down a process for fiscal surpluses in which today's deficits are partially repaid by tomorrow's surpluses. Look quickly at the surplus response functions in my last post. When the government runs a deficit, it reliably runs subsequent surpluses that partially repay some of the accumulated debt. The surplus is not an AR(1)! It has an s-shaped response function.

So if you want a realistic fiscal theory model, you need a surplus with an s-shaped response function, but you need to keep "active" fiscal policy. This combination is the central innovation of the paper.

New Paper -- the fiscal roots of inflation

I recently finished drafts of a few academic papers that blog readers might find interesting. Today, "The Fiscal Roots of Inflation."

The government debt valuation equation says that the real value of nominal debt equals the present value of surpluses. So, when there is inflation, the real value of nominal debt declines. Does that decline come about by lower future surpluses, or by a higher discount rate? You can guess the answer -- a higher discount rate.

Though to me this is interesting for how to construct fiscal theory models in which changes in the present value of government debt cause inflation, the valuation equation is every bit as much a part of  standard new-Keynesian models. So the paper does not take a stand on causality.

Here is an example of the sort of puzzle the paper addresses. Think about 2008. There was a big recession. Deficits zoomed, through bailout, stabilizers, and deliberate stimulus. Yet inflation.. declined. So how does the government debt valuation equation work? Well, maybe today's deficits are bad, but they came with news of better future surpluses. That's hard to stomach. And it isn't true in the data. Well, real interest rates declined and sharply. The discount rate for government debt declined, which raises the value of government debt, even if expected future surpluses are unchanged or declined. With a lower discount rate, government debt is more valuable. If the price level does not change, people want to buy less stuff and more government debt. That's lower aggregate demand, which pushes the price level down. Does this story bear out, quantitatively, in the data? Yes.

If you don't like discount rates and forward looking behavior, you can put the same observation in ex-post terms. When there is a big deficit, the value of debt rises. How, on average, does the debt-GDP ratio come back down on average? Well, the government could run big surpluses -- raise taxes, cut spending to pay off the debt. That turns out not to be the case. There could be a surge of economic growth. Maybe the stimuluses and infrastructure spending all pay off. That turns out not to be the case. Or, the real rate of return on government bonds could go down, so that debt grows at a lower rate. That turns out to be, on average and therefore predictably, the answer.

Identities

OK, to work. The paper starts by developing a Cambpell-Shiller type identity for government debt. This works also for arbitrary maturity structures of the debt. Corresponding to the Campbell-Shiller return linearization, $$ \rho v_{t+1}=v_{t}+r_{t+1}^{n}-\pi_{t+1}-g_{t+1}-s_{t+1}. $$ 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 real primary surplus to GDP ratio \(s_{t+1}\). Surpluses, unlike dividends, can be negative, so I don't take the log here. This surplus is scaled to have units of surplus to value, so a 1% change in "surplus" changes the log value of debt by 1%. I use this equation to measure the surplus.

Iterating forward, and imposing the transversality condition, we have a Campbell-Shiller style present value identity, $$ v_{t}=\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\rho^{j-1}s_{t+j}+\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\rho^{j-1}g_{t+j} -\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\rho^{j-1}\left( r_{t+j}^{n}-\pi _{t+j}\right). $$ Take innovations \( \Delta E_{t+1} \equiv E_{t+1}-E_t \) and we have $$ \Delta E_{t+1}\pi_{t+1}-\Delta E_{t+1} r_{t+1}^{n}= -\sum_{j=0}^{\infty} \rho^{j} \Delta E_{t+1}s_{t+1+j} -\sum_{j=0}^{\infty} \rho^{j} \Delta E_{t+1} g_{t+1+j}+\sum_{j=1}^{\infty} \rho^{j} \Delta E_{t+1}\left( r_{t+1+j}^{n}-\pi_{t+1+j}\right) $$ Unexpected inflation devalues bonds. So it must come with a decline in surpluses, a rise in the discount rate, or a decline in bond prices. Notice the value of debt disappeared, which is handy.

The bond return comes from future expected returns or inflation, so it's nice to get rid of that too. With a geometric maturity structure in which the face value of bonds of \(j\) maturity is \(\omega^j\), a high bond return today must come from lower bond returns in the future. $$ \Delta E_{t+1}r_{t+1}^{n} = -\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\omega^{j}\Delta E_{t+1} r_{t+1+j}^{n} =-\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\omega^{j}\Delta E_{t+1}\left[ (r_{t+1+j}^{n}-\pi_{t+1+j})+\pi_{t+1+j}\right] $$ Substitute and we have the last and best identity $$ \sum_{j=0}^{\infty}\omega^{j} \Delta E_{t+1}\pi_{t+1+j} = -\sum_{j=0}^{\infty} \rho^{j} \Delta E_{t+1}s_{t+1+j} -\sum_{j=0}^{\infty} \rho^{j} \Delta E_{t+1}g_{t+1+j} +\sum_{j=1}^{\infty} (\rho^{j} -\omega^{j})\Delta E_{t+1}\left( r_{t+1+j}^{n}-\pi_{t+1+j}\right) . $$ With long-term debt a weighted sum of current and future inflation corresponds to changes in expected surpluses and discount rates. A fiscal shock can result in future inflation, thereby falling on today's long term bonds. Equivalently, a surprise deficit today \(s_{t+1}\) must be met by future surpluses, by lower returns, or by devaluing outstanding bonds, so that the debt/GDP ratio is reestablished.

Results

I ran a VAR and computed the responses to various shocks.

Here is the response to an inflation shock - -an unexpected movement \(\Delta E_1 \pi_1\). All other variables may move at the same time as the inflation shock.

Inflation is persistent, so a 1% inflation shock is about a 1.5% cumulative inflation shock, weighted
by the maturity of outstanding debt.

So, where is the 1.5% decline in present value of surpluses? Which terms of the identity matter?
Inflation does come with persistent deficits here. The sample is 1947-2018, so a lot of the inflation shocks come in the 1970s. You might raise three cheers for the fiscal theory, but not so fast. The deficits turn around and become surpluses. The sum of all surpluses term in the identity is a trivial -0.06, effectively zero. These deficits are essentially all paid back by subsequent surpluses.

Growth declines by half a percentage point cumulatively, accounting for 2/3 of the inflation. And the discount rate rises persistently. Two thirds of the devaluation of debt that inflation represents comes from higher real expected returns on government bonds, which in turn means higher interest rates that don't match inflation. (More graphs in the paper.)

Growth here is negatively correlated with inflation, which is true of the overall sample, but not of the story I started out with. What happens in a normal recession, that features lower inflation and lower output? Let's call it an aggregate demand shock. To measure such an event, I simply defined a shock that moves both output and inflation down by 1%. Here are the responses to this "recession shock."

 Inflation and output go down now, by 1%, and by construction. That's how I defined the shock. This is a recession with low growth, low inflation, and deficits. Not shown, interest rates all decline too.

So where does the low inflation come from in the above decomposition. Do today's deficits signal future surpluses? Yes, a bit. But not enough -- the cumulative sum of surpluses is -1.15% On its own, deficits should cause 1% inflation, the fiscal theory puzzle that started me out in this whole business. Growth quickly recovers, but is not positive for a sustained period. Like 2008, we see a basically downward shift in the level of GDP. That contributes another 1% inflationary force. The discount rate falls however,  so strongly as to raise the real value debt by almost 5 percentage points! That overcomes the inflationary forces and accounts for the deflation.

Here is a plot of the interest rates in response to the same shock. i is the three month rate, y is the 10 year rate, and rn is the return on the government bond portfolio. Yes, interest rates at all maturities jump down in this recession. Sharply lower rates mean a one-period windfall for the owners of long term bonds, then expected bond returns fall too.

The point 

Discount rates matter. If you want to understand the fiscal foundations of inflation, you have to understand the government debt valuation equation. Inflation and deflation over the cycle is not driven by changing expected surpluses. If you want to view it "passively," inflation and deflation over the cycle does not result in passive policy accommodation through taxes, as most footnotes presume. The fiscal roots (or consequences) of inflation over the cycle are the strong variation in discount rates -- expected returns.

The fiscal process

Notice that the response of primary surpluses in all these graphs is s-shaped. Primary surpluses do not follow an AR(1) type process. In response to today's deficits, there is eventually a shift to a long string of surpluses that partially repay much though not all of that debt. This seems completely normal, except that so many models specify AR(1) style processes for fiscal surpluses. Surely that is a huge mistake. Stay tuned. The next paper shows how to put an s-shaped surplus process in a model and why it is so important to do so.

Comments on the paper are most welcome.

Boot Camp

The Hoover Institution will host another "Policy Boot Camp" August 16-22. See here for details and how to apply. It's a one-week survey of serious policy analysis.

The program includes  economists such as John Taylor, Ed Lazear, Amit Seru, Caroline Hoxby, Erik Hurst, and yours truly. Learn about international affairs from H.R. McMaster, Jim Mattis and  Condoleezza Rice. Niall Ferguson on Nationalism vs. Globalism and Bjorn Lomborg on climate should be worth it all on their own. And many more.

It's designed for "college students and recent graduates," but I think that is a bit elastic. Food and lodging free.

Update: in response to a commenter. Yes, PhD students and even those a year or two out are welcome. 

Dudley on reserves

Bill Dudley, ex President of the New York Fed, has an excellent Bloomberg editorial on reserves.

Reserves are accounts that banks hold at the Fed. The Fed used to pay no interest on these accounts. Accordingly, banks held very small quantities, as little as $10 billion in all, and they managed that quantity very carefully against legal reserve requirements, and having just enough around to make payments. To control interest rates, the Fed used to change the supply of reserves, and then watch the Federal Funds rate, the rate banks charge each other to borrow reserves.

"Each day, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York would assess whether to add or drain bank reserves from the financial system to balance the supply and demand to achieve the desired short-term interest rate. While straightforward in theory, the process was extremely complex to carry out. "

Since 2008, the Fed has started paying interest on reserves. The interest the Fed pays on reserves largely determines interest rates elsewhere, and the Fed doesn't have to go through a hoopla every morning to figure out just how many reserves to offer. The banking system is awash in trillions of dollars of reserves. And there has been no hyperinflation, nor indication that the Fed cannot control interest rates if it wishes to.

There has been a lot of controversy within the Fed about keeping the new system vs. the old.

Conference announcement

If you're working on fiscal issues, especially fiscal theory of the price level, here is a good conference you should submit to or attend. Don't wait, the deadline is today. Yes, this is self-interested -- I'm going and giving a talk so it's entirely in my interest that the other papers are interesting! The conference website is here

Low bond yields

Why are interest rates so low?

Here is the 10 year bond yield, by itself and subtracting the previous year's inflation (CPI less food and energy). The 10 year yield has basically been on a downward trend since 1987.  One should subtract expected 10 year future inflation, not past inflation, and you can see the extra volatility that past inflation induces. But you can also see that real yields have fallen with the same pattern.

There is lots of discussion. A falling marginal product of capital, due to falling innovation, less need for new capital, a "savings glut," and so forth are common ideas. The use of government bonds in finance, the money-like nature of government debt among other institutional investors and liquidity stories are strong too. And most of the press is consumed with QE and central bank purchases holding down long term rates. I hope the steadiness of the trend cures that promptly.

Along the way in another project, though, I made the following graph:

The blue line is 10 times the growth rate of nondurable + services per capita (quarterly data, growth from a year ago). The red line is the negative of an approximate measure of the real return on 10 year government bonds. I took 10 x (yield - yield a year ago), and subtracted off the CPI.

Look at the last recession. Consumption fell like a rock, while the real return on long-term bonds was great. That real return came from a double whammy: long term bonds had great nominal returns as interest rates fell, and there was a big decline in inflation.  No shock, there is a "flight to quality" in recessions, along with a sharp decline in nominal rates. From a foreign perspective, the rise in the dollar added to the return of long-term bonds. The graph suggests this is a regular pattern going back to the almost-recession of 1987. In every recession, consumption falls, interest rates fall, inflation falls, so the real ex post return on government bonds rises.

Government bonds are negative beta securities. At least measured by consumption or recession betas.  Negative beta securities should have low expected returns. They should be less even than real risk free rates. I haven't seen that simple thought anywhere in the discussion of low long-term interest rates.  

Making the graph, I noticed it was not always thus. 1975, 1980, and 1982 have precisely the opposite sign. These were stagflations, times when bad economic times coincided with higher inflation and higher interest rates. Likewise, countries such as Argentina which go through periodic currency crises, devaluations, and inflations, flights to the dollar, all associated with bad economic times, should have the opposite sign. There is a hint that 1970 was of the current variety.

One could easily make a story for the sign flip, involving recessions caused by monetary policy and attempts to control inflation, vs. recessions involving financial problems in which people run to, rather than from, money in the recession.

In any case, the period of high yields was associated with government bonds that do worse in recessions, and the period of low yields is associated with government bonds that do better in recessions and have a negative beta. I haven't really seen that point made, though I am not fully up on the literature on time-varying betas in bond markets.

In any case, if we want to understand risk premiums in bond markets, this sort of simple macro story might be a good starting point before layering on institutional complexities.

Summers tweet stream on secular stagnation

Larry Summers has an interesting tweet stream (HT Marginal Revolution) on the state of monetary policy. Much I agree with and find insightful:

Can central banking as we know it be the primary tool of macroeconomic stabilization in the industrial world over the next decade?...There is little room for interest rate cuts..QE and forward guidance have been tried on a substantial scale....It is hard to believe that changing adverbs here and there or altering the timing of press conferences or the mode of presenting projections is consequential...interest rates stuck at zero with no real prospect of escape - is now the confident market expectation in Europe & Japan, with essentially zero or negative yields over a generation....The one thing that was taught as axiomatic to economics students around the world was that monetary authorities could over the long term create as much inflation as they wanted through monetary policy. This proposition is now very much in doubt.

Agreed so far, and well put. "Monetary policy" here means buying government bonds and issuing reserves in return, or lowering short-term interest rates. I am still intrigued by the possibility that a commitment to permanently higher rates might raise inflation, but that's quite speculative.

and later

Limited nominal GDP growth in the face of very low interest rates has been interpreted as evidence simply that the neutral rate has fallen substantially....We believe it is at least equally plausible that the impact of interest rates on aggregate demand has declined sharply, and that the marginal impact falls off as rates fall.  It is even plausible that in some cases interest rate cuts may reduce aggregate demand: because of target saving behavior, reversal rate effects on fin. intermediaries, option effects on irreversible investment, and the arithmetic effect of lower rates on gov’t deficits

Central banks are a lot less powerful than everyone seems to think, and potentially for deep reasons. File this as speculative but very interesting. Larry has many thoughts on why lowering interest rates may be ineffective or unwise.

The question is just how bad this is? The economy is growing, unemployment is at an all time low, inflation is nonexistent, the dollar is strong. Larry and I grew up in the 1970s, and monetary affairs can be a lot worse.

Yes, the worry is how much the Fed can "stimulate" in the next recession. But it is not obvious to me that recessions come from somewhere else and are much mitigated by lowering short term rates as "stimulus." Many postwar recessions were induced by the Fed, and the Great Depression was made much worse by the Fed. Perhaps it is enough for the Fed simply not to screw up -- do its supervisory job of enforcing capital standards in booms (please, at last!) do its lender of last resort job in financial crises, and don't make matters worse.

But how bad is it now? Here Larry and I part company. Larry is, surprisingly to me, still pushing "secular stagnation"

Call it the black hole problem, secular stagnation, or Japanification, this set of issues should be what central banks are worrying about...We have come to agree w/ the point long stressed by Post Keynesian economists & recently emphasized by Palley that the role of specific frictions in economic fluctuations should be de-emphasized relative to a more fundamental lack of aggregate demand. 

The right issue for macroeconomists to be focused on is assuring adequate aggregate demand.  

My jaw drops.

The unemployment rate is 3.9%, lower than it has ever been in a half century. It fell faster after about 2014 than in the last two recessions.

Labor force participation is trending back up.

Wages are rising faster and faster, especially for less skilled and education educated workers.

 There are 8 million job openings in the US.

Why in the world are we talking about "lack of demand?

Gold Oped

Now that 30  days have passed, I can post the whole July 18 gold oped in the Wall Street Journal.

Some of President Trump’s potential nominees to the Federal Reserve Board have expressed sympathy for a return to the gold standard. Conventional monetary-policy experts deride the idea—and not wholly without reason. The gold standard won’t work for a 21st-century monetary and financial system. It is possible, however, to emulate its best features without actually restoring the gold standard.

The idea behind the gold standard is simple: The government promises that if you bring in, say, $1,000 in cash, you can trade it for one ounce of gold, and vice versa. By pegging the dollar to something of independent value, it promises to solve the problem of inflation or deflation. And we don’t need central-bank wizards to run things anymore.

Yet the aim of monetary policy isn’t to stabilize the dollar price of gold; it is, rather, to stabilize the prices of all goods and services. The price of gold has varied from $1,000 to $1,800 an ounce in the past 10 years. Had the Fed fixed that price, critics say the price of everything else would have had to vary this much.

Letter 2 from Argentina

Alejandro Rodrigues writes again from Argentina (previous post)

"This  graph shows the evolution of peso denominated fixed income mutual funds. On Monday (after the elections) this funds suffered withdrawals of 6% of the total shares. Net assets fell by more as prices plummeted (-5%). On Tuesday, shares fell by 6% again but prices remained constant. On Monday, Money Market funds suffered withdrawals (drop in shares) of 16% although they didn't break the buck (on average). "

I gather from other discussions that Argentinians are trying to move assets fast to dollars. That is consistent with this drop in Peso denominated fund assets. (Though of course for every seller there is a buyer -- I wonder who the private parties (non funds) are that are buying Peso fixed income assets!)

There is an interesting dynamic here. The chance of a new regime with terrible economic policies rises. It causes a rush to dollars. People suspect that the new regime will impose capital controls.  The  government has trouble rolling over its own currency debt, as interest rates rise. That makes the fiscal situation worse.

In short, the chance of a bad government taking over can provoke a crisis that makes the chance of a bad government taking over larger. Or perhaps Argentines will break the usual electoral patterns.

The Reader's Guide to Optimal Monetary Policy

The Reader's Guide to Optimal Monetary Policy is a snazzy new website created by Anthony Diercks and Cole Langlois at the Federal Reserve Board.  Screenshot: 

Who said 2% inflation is a good idea? The graph shows publication date on the horizontal axis, the optimal inflation rate on the y axis, and the size of the circle is the number of citations. 

The sizeable number of dots around -4% reflect the "Friedman rule" idea. (Sadly, the graph doesn't include Friedman. It only goes back to 1990.) The idea here is that the nominal interest rate should be zero, so you earn the same on money as on bonds. Then there is no reason to economize on holding cash. Most of these were written when real rates were thought to be around 4%, so you need 4% deflation to get a nominal interest rate of zero. Ah, the good old days. 

More dots show up around zero. These are mostly "sticky price" models. Now there are costs to changing prices. So the economy works best when people don't have to change prices at all, 0% inflation.   

Note the paucity of papers at 2%, the Fed's inflation target. This is a nice testament to the honesty of  the Fed and its researchers.

The website allows you to graph many other issues, search for papers and so on. If you hover over a paper you get a great little two-sentence summary of the paper's main idea. If you click, you get the abstract and link to the paper. Have fun. Trigger warning: you may end up wasting a good deal of time. 

Whither the Fed?

Steve Williamson has an excellent long essay, "Is the Fed Doing Anything Right?" on the current state of monetary policy.

Why is the Fed lowering rates?

(If you're impatient, skip to the ** of the most interesting and provocative points)

Steve starts with an Ode to Rules. It would be nice if the Fed acted more stably and predictably, leaving less room for the interpretation that they're just changing their minds, or panicking, or giving in to Trump tweets.

So Steve phrases the question nicely: what has changed since last September, when the Fed seemed fully on a "normalization" path? What is the "data" in a "data-dependent" policy?

They decided (with a couple of dissents) to reduce the target range for the fed funds rate by 0.25% to 2.00-2.25%. That seems to represent a change of plan, since in September 2018, the median FOMC member was thinking that the fed funds rate by the end of 2019 would be 3%. So, something important must have changed since last September. What was it?

From the FOMC statement and Powell's presser after the meeting, it seems there were 5 things bothering the committee: 

1. Weak global growth.
2. Trade policy uncertainty.
3. Muted inflation.
4. The neutral rate of interest is down.
5. The natural rate of unemployment is down.

Go see Steve's graphs. There really is not much case that the US economy is slowing down.

Typically central banks lower interest rates in the face of observed decreases in aggregate economic activity - somewhere. But we haven't seen any such thing. Must be some very weird policy rule at work here.

That's a bit overstated. Central banks do react too forecasts. But most central banks, including ours, react cautiously knowing just how unreliable forecasts are.

 I can certainly understand that there's "trade policy uncertainty." More like "Trump uncertainty," I think. But that's been with us since January 2017. And for North America, which we could argue is more relevant for the US, the trade uncertainty is actually lower than it was in September. The USMCA was signed by Mexico, Canada, and the US on November 30, 2018, though it is as yet not ratified. Brexit anxiety is with us of course, but again that's nothing new. So, I think you have to be more specific if you want to make a general case about policy uncertainty. And what's the hurry? You can't wait for resolution?

The uncertainty work is interesting (a great recent example). But if uncertainty really is an economic problem, it should be reflected in today's investment, investment plans (a great measure) hiring, durables purchases stock prices, and other forward-looking measures. Moreover, it's not clear that the Fed should offset uncertainty as trade. They are "supply" shocks. (Previous post)

The one thing that has changed a bit is inflation.

.."muted" is as a good a word as any for that, relative to the 2% inflation target. The Fed's chosen measure - headline PCE - is at 1.4%, and stripping out food and energy gives us 1.6%. Not low, certainly, and well within what you might think is reasonable tolerance, but definitely below target.

But, putting Steve's point in stronger voice, , 0.4% variation in inflation over nearly a year is tiny in historical context, certainly not the sort of things that usually reverse a steady tightening project.

**

Here though, Steve's most interesting and provocative points start.

"But, suppose we thought that the only problem here is a slightly-below-target inflation rate. What would the corrective action be?"

...
The traditional answer, of course, is, lower interest rates.

and assuming there is a stable Phillips curve, everyone knows that lower nominal interest rates imply lower real interest rates in the short run. And lower real interest rates, as everyone knows, makes "aggregate demand" go up. Further, as everyone knows, output is demand-determined, so output therefore goes up. Then, by Phillips curve logic, inflation goes up.

But, as everyone knows, I think, there are issues with the Phillips curve. AOC knows it, and Jay Powell knows it, as we can see in this exchange. 

The exchange  is really good on both sides. Don't underestimate AOC. She rather brilliantly and knowledgeably led Powell down the road to admit the Phillips curve has died, so unemployment doesn't cause inflation any more. Then she smoothly went right to the (false) implication that any policy previously criticized as being inflationary will not cause inflation. She mentioned minimum wages, but green new deal, free college, medicare for all and a  fiscal blowout cannot be far behind. Powell didn't take the bait, but it's wiggling on the hook.

What about the Phillips curve? Inflation seems to have nothing to do with unemployment (or is it vice versa??) Japan and Europe, as well as our own 10 years of slow growth, seem testament to the falsity of the proposition that lower interest rates spark inflation.

Powell seems to be telling AOC what his staff told him, which is that the Phillips curve is currently very flat. The Phillips curve is still there though, or so Powell seems to think, though he seems a little confused about how the whole thing works. ... 

you can see that in the presser with Powell. The reporters are trying hard to understand what the Fed is up to, Powell is struggling to explain it, and everything is coming out muddled. For example, this exchange: [JC: I edited for clarity] 

MICHAEL MCKEE. ...How does cutting interest rates lower, or how does cutting interest rates keep that going since the cost of capital doesn’t seem to the issue here.= 

CHAIR POWELL. You know, I really think it does, and I think the evidence of my eyes tells me that our policy ... supports confidence, it supports economic activity, household and business confidence, and through channels that we understand. So, it will lower borrowing costs. ... since we noted our vigilance about the situation in June, you saw financial conditions move up...You see confidence, which had troughed in June....You see economic activity on a healthy basis. It just, it seems to work through confidence channels as well as the mechanical channels that you are talking about.

Steve comments scathingly:

Well, there's no confidence channel running from Powell to me, that's for sure.... Powell started off well when he was appointed. He opted for press conferences after every FOMC meeting, reduced the wordiness of FOMC statements, and generally seemed to be communicating well. But this decision makes clear what his limitations are. Powell is an attorney whose experience with monetary policy comes from sitting on the FOMC since 2011. You may think that puts you at the center of things. Sorry, it doesn't. There's a lot Powell doesn't know, and it shows.

True, a "confidence channel'' is something of a new idea, though quite common in central banking circles. We just need to give more and better speeches. All we have to fear is fear itself. But if one accepts an "uncertainty channel" certainly "confidence" can be interpreted as "belief in the Fed put," or other beliefs about future Fed policy.

I think Steve's personal attack on Powell is unwarranted.  Here and in other speeches I see someone who does a darn good job  of digesting fancy macroeconomics, and distinguishing the nuggets of wisdom from the craziness. Many (most) trained PhD economists are no better at steering the ship. You don't necessarily want a PhD hydrodynamicist at the wheel in a storm.

Most of all "There is a lot Powell doesn't know, and it shows" seems to me totally unwarranted. Just what is there to "know" about the Phillips curve? I would much rather have Powell's healthily acknowledged uncertainty than a PhD economist who thinks he or she "knows" how the Phillips curve really works.

(As a reminder, the Phillips curve is not standard economics. It is an empirical correlation that gained causal status by its repetition. Tight labor markets should coincide with higher real wages, wages higher than prices. But there is no natural logic that tight labor markets should coincide with higher wages and prices overall.)

Steve himself goes on to prove just how little anyone "knows" about the Phillips curve and the proper direction of policy right now:

So what's going on here? The Fed announced a normalization plan.. What's that mean? Normal means that short-term nominal interest rates are high enough to be consistent with 2% inflation over the long term. ... That's just the logic of Irving Fisher, which we all learned as undergrads. But, if the nominal interest rate is too low on average, then inflation will be too low, on average. That's abundantly obvious given the post-1995 Japanese experiment. Late last year, the FOMC was thinking that a normal fed funds rate is about 2.5-3.0%. I think that's about right. Basically, they aborted normalization. And, if the FOMC thinks an important goal is hitting 2% inflation, it should have kept its target fed funds rate range constant, or moved it up. [My emphasis]

Steve acknowledges here participation in the great neo-Fisherian heresy, which I flirt with as well. The equations of our best models scream it. Japan and Europe scream it, and their comparison with the US.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But Neo-Fisherians have no business criticizing the Fed chair for uncertainty and a bit of muddiness about how the Phillips curve works, or how interest rates affect inflation!

Steve goes on to discuss the end of QE and IOER, with interesting facts. The "floor system" does seem to be falling apart. I think the answer is simple: if you want to peg rates, peg rates: offer anyone to deposit at 2.00%, and offer anyone to borrow (with treasury collateral) at 2.25%. The Fed wants only the former, to limit quantities, and to offer different rates to different institutions according to their favor with the Fed. All a topic for another day.

Letter from Argentina

My friend Alejandro Rodriguez, at Universidad del CEMA, sends the following report:

Oops we did it again. Macri (the current president) lost in the open primary elections (all parties present their candidates in an open  general election so it is like a very big poll). The formula Alberto Fernandez- Cristina Fernandez (the ex president who ruled between 2007 and 2015 is the candidate to vice president) is expected to win in October. 

The peso is falling like a rock (down 25%) and interest rates are up by 1000 bps. The Central Bank has to 1.3 trillion ARS (22 billion USD at the current FX) in short term debt (all expires in the next 5 days). Today it has to roll 250 billion ARS and in the first round it only managed to roll 14 billion ARS. Argentine. 

Argentina stocks in NY are down 50% to 60% and President Macri will adress the nation at 16:30 local time. The Central Bank has a lot of internatinal reserves (over 60 billion USD) but nearly 1/4 are the counterpart of dollar deposits at commercial banks. The remaining reserves are mostly borrowed from the IMF and China... We can surely screw over the IMF but I don't think that messing up with the Chinese is a smart move... so nobody knows how much fire power the Central Bank has to hold the FX. I don't know what can be done to stop a major currency crisis which might in turn into a debt crisis (if we are not in one already).

Trade and the Fed

Nina Karnaukh of Ohio State sent along this lovely graph of the 6 month Fed Funds futures around the beginning of August. Read this as the market's guess about what is happening to the Federal Funds rate over the next 6 months.

The first drop in price occurs with the FOMC announcement 2 PM July 31. The price drop is equivalent to a a rise in expected future interest rates of about 5 basis points or 0.05%. This has been read as market disappointment that the Fed did not signal more future rate cuts.

The subsequent price spike is this,

That statement caused a 10 bps rise in price, i.e. decline in expected interest rate.  The natural interpretation: The markets expect the  Fed to lower rates in a trade war, either directly or in response to the economic damage the trade war will cause.

I had read the Fed's recent actions as just a case of late expansion jitters, perhaps with a mild response  to slightly lowered inflation. But this is clear evidence that the market sees the Fed reacting to trade news.

************

Should central banks offset trade wars? I think this is a question nobody is asking but it needs to be asked. Central banks including the US Fed and ECB seem to take for granted that any reduction in economic activity demands "stimulus" to offset it. But stimulus can only provide "aggregate demand." What if the problem is "aggregate supply" -- an economy humming along at full demand, and then someone throws a wrench in the works, be it a trade war, a bad tax code, or a regulatory onslaught? (I'll stop using quotes, to signal my dislike for these terms.)

Conventional wisdom ways that central banks should not offset reductions in aggregate supply. You can fight a lack of aggregate demand, but monetary policy cannot fight a decline in aggregate supply. The first job of a central bank should be to distinguish demand from supply shocks, so it can react to the former, but not to the latter.  This standard wisdom emanates from the 1970s, where central banks kept rates low to offset the effects of oil price shocks -- supply shocks -- and ended up producing worse recessions and inflation.

Yet expressing this view at central banks these days, people stare at me with blank expressions. Distinguish... supply... from... demand... shocks....why would we do that? The view from about 1960s Keynesianism that all fluctuations in output, employment and prices come from demand, seems to have flowered again.

Now, in this conventional (i.e. 1980 Keynesianism vs 1965 Keynesianism) view the problem with offsetting a "supply" shock is that the monetary stimulus causes inflation. And now we have inflation once again drifting slightly lower. So perhaps the trade war is a "demand" shock? It's hard to see how though.

More plausibly, perhaps the policy uncertainty about the trade war is causing a decline in "demand." Why build a factory if any day now another tweet  could render it unprofitable? The prospect of a trade war -- or the kind of serious political and trade turmoil that would follow Tianamen II in Hong Kong -- is a "confidence" shock. But the uncertainty is genuine. A rise in risk premium in an uncertain environment is genuine. People should hold off building factories that depend on a Chinese supply chain until we know if there is going to be a trade war. Unless the Fed is stepping more and more into the role of psychologist in chief, to decree that such fears are irrational, it's not obvious that the Fed should try to goose investment by artificially lowering the short term rate in response to a  rise in trade fears.

A second possibility arises from more 1980s economics. A "supply" or productivity shock also lowers the expected return on investment. So the real  interest rate should decline in response to such a shock. That is another reason perhaps for some interest rate decline in response to a negative supply shock. But how much? This still does not justify the same response to all sources of output decline, or (in our case) fear of output decline that has not happened yet.

The other possibility is that the Fed is now watching the exchange rate, as most other central banks do. The one thing that still does seem to work is that raising interest rates raises the value of the currency. The trade war raises the value of the dollar, and the US clearly wants to manipulate the dollar back down again.

Every era’s monetary and financial institutions are unimaginable until they’re real

Every era’s monetary and financial institutions are unimaginable until they’re real, writes Tyler Cowen in an excellent Bloomberg.com essay on the anniversary of Bretton Woods. (MR link)

Our ancestors' experience with paper money leading quickly to massive inflation would leave them agape at our completely unbacked fiat money and floating exchange rates which has led only to mild inflation.

...fast forward [from the gold standard] to the current day. Currencies are fiat, the ties to gold are gone, and most exchange rates for the major currencies are freely floating, with periodic central bank intervention to manipulate exchange rates. For all the criticism it receives, this arrangement has also proved to be a viable global monetary order, and it has been accompanied by an excellent overall record for global growth. 

Yet this fiat monetary order might also have seemed, to previous generations of economists, unlikely to succeed. Fiat currencies were associated with the assignat hyperinflations of the French Revolution, the floating exchange rates and competitive devaluations of the 1920s were not a success, and it was hardly obvious that most of the world’s major central banks would pursue inflation targets of below 2%. Until recent times, the record of floating fiat currencies was mostly disastrous.

As Tyler points out, even 20 years ago the standard opinion was that the euro would not work.

Another surprising monetary innovation would be the euro. Both Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman warned that the euro was unlikely to succeed and persist. Yet it has proven more durable than many people expected, and there does not seem to be an end in sight. This kind of a common fiat currency, spread across so many nations, is without precedent in world history.

(I quibble with that one: Gold coins were an international currency, and throughout history coins have been shared among countries. Our own "dollar" comes from the common colonial use of a Spanish coin.)

The sovereign default issue remains, but that less-than-desired  inflation remains the euros' problem would have been a big surprise. That countries like Greece and Italy would, so far, choose the hard path of staying on the euro rather than take the sugar high of another devaluation is indeed a political if not an economic surprise.

Bretton Woods' system, including fixed exchange rates, the IMF, a dollar sort of pegged to gold but you can't have gold, dollar reserves, and extensive capital controls is as archaic to us as it was radical to pre WWII thinking.

Tyler only hints at the main message:

 Looking forward, don’t assume the status quo will hold forever, but rather prepare to be shocked....

So as you consider the legacy of Bretton Woods this week, remember that core lesson: There will be major changes in monetary and institutional arrangements that no one can even imagine right now. Assume the permanency of the status quo at your peril.

My main point is to underline that hint.

We forget how recent our own monetary certainties are,. Well into the 1970s, mainstream Keynesian economists thought that inflation came from "wage price spirals" and administered prices, and that central banks were pretty irrelevant. Milton Friedman was a radical upstart. He won, dramatically, on the importance of central banks. Yet too his focus on money growth rates died out with the 1980s. The current consensus view that central banks have the power to control inflation, and the power, ability, and duty to stabilize the economy, all by setting short term rates, is an idea that only took shape in the late 1980s and 1990s.

And that is falling to pieces all around us. That no "deflation spiral" breaks out at the zero bound undermines that view entirely. The death of the Phillips curve, the antithesis of the 1970s -- strong output and employment with puzzlingly low inflation -- the endless inflation below central bank targets, all stand witness. (And be careful what you wish for! Strong growth with low inflation is pretty darn nice!)

Intellectually, we grope to maintain the illusion of an all-powerful central bank, whose asset purchases and Delphic pronouncements about its future actions powerfully steer the economy. But the feeling that perhaps Friedman won too much, and that central banks are not nearly as powerful as they seem (other the power to screw things up, which they retain!)  is getting stronger and stronger.

The only thing that is sure is that our current doctrines will look as archaic 20 years from now as Bretton Woods, and the 1950s-60s Keynesian consensus, do today. That humility -- and the hard and and critical thinking it ought to provoke -- are indeed great lessons of this anniversary.

Every era’s monetary and financial institutions are unimaginable until they’re real. And so will be the next era's institutions.