The UK’s 1976 IMF crisis in the light of modern theory

During the arguments over austerity, its supporters would often point to 1976 as evidence that it was possible for a country with its own currency to have a debt funding crisis. At the time this was frustrating for me, because I had been a very junior economist in the Treasury at the time, and my dim recollection was of an exchange rate crisis rather than a debt funding crisis. But I could not trust my memory and did not have time to do much research myself.

So with the publication of a new book by Richard Roberts on this exact subject (many thanks to Diane Coyle, whose FT review of the book is here), I thought it was time to revisit that episode combining Robert's comprehensive account with our current understanding of macroeconomic theory. I think any macroeconomist would find what happened in 1976 puzzling until they realised that senior policymakers did not have two key pieces of modern knowledge: the centrality of the Phillips curve, and an understanding of how the foreign exchange market works.

In terms of where the economy was, there is one crucial difference between 1976 and 2010. In the previous year of 1975 CPI inflation had reached a postwar peak of 24.2%. Although that peak owed a lot to a disastrous agreement with the unions, it probably also had a lot to do with the ‘Barber boom’ which had led to output being 6.5% above the level at which inflation would be stable in 1973 (using the OBR’s measure of the output gap). Although this output gap had disappeared by 1975 and 1976, inflation was still 16.5%. Given the lack of any kind of credible inflation target a period of negative output gaps would almost certainly be required to reduce inflation to reasonable levels.

The lack of understanding by senior policymakers of how the foreign exchange market worked was due to floating exchange rates being a novelty, Bretton Woods having broken down only 5 years earlier. We had a policy of ‘managed floating’, where policymakers thought the Bank of England could intervene in the FOREX markets to ‘smooth’ the trajectory of the exchange rate. My job at the time - forecasting the world economy - was a long way from where the action was, but my main recollection of the time comes from one of the periodic meetings of all the Treasury’s economists. It seemed as if the Treasury’s senior economists believed in the ‘cliff model’ of the exchange rate. The cliff theory suggests that if the rate moves significantly away from the target that the Bank was aiming at, it would collapse with no lower bound in sight. At the meeting I remember some more junior economists (but more senior than I) trying to explain ideas about fundamentals and Uncovered Interest Parity, but their seniors seemed unconvinced.

It is much easier to understand the 1976 crisis if you see it as a classic attempt to peg the currency when the markets wanted to depreciate it, and this is the main story Roberts tells.. The immediate need of the IMF money was to be able to repay a credit from the G10 central banks that had been used to support sterling. It is also true that sales of government debt had been weak, but Roberts describes this as stemming from a (correct) belief that rates on new debt were about to rise - a classic buyers strike. Although nominal interest rates at the time were at a record high, they were still at a similar level to inflation, implying real rates of around zero.

Here we get to the heart of the difference between 2010 and 1976. If there had been a strike of gilt buyers in 2010, the Bank of England would have simply increased its purchases of government debt through the QE programme, the whole aim of which was to keep long rates low. They could do this because inflation was low and showed no sign of rising. Contrast this with 1976, with inflation in double figures but real rates were near zero.

I think what would strike a macroeconomist even more about this period was the absence of the Phillips curve from the way policymakers thought. Take this extract from the famous Callaghan speech to the party conference that Peter Jay helped draft.

“We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you with all candour that that option no longer exists, and so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step”

As a piece of text it only makes sense to modern ears if there is a missing sentence: that we failed to raise taxes and cut spending in a boom. Far from a denunciation of Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy, it was an admission that politicians could not be trusted with operating such a policy, essentially because they imagined they could beat the Phillips curve using direct controls on prices and incomes. The fact that fiscal rather than (government controlled) interest rate policy was being used as the countercyclical instrument here was incidental.

Reading this book also confirmed to me how misleading the Friedman (1977) story of the Great Inflation was, at least applied to the UK. These were not policymakers trying the exploit a permanent inflation output trade-off, but policymakers trying to escape the discipline of any kind of Phillips curve. They were also policymakers who had not fully adjusted to a floating rate world, and the IMF crisis was superficially a failed attempt to manage the exchange rate. More fundamentally It was also a reaction by the markets to a government that was not doing enough to bring down an inflation rate that was way too high. The IMF loan was useful both as a means of paying back existing foreign currency loans, but also a means of getting fiscal policy and therefore demand to the level required to reduce inflation.

Although inflation fell steadily until 1979, another boom in 1978 together with rising oil prices reversed this, and through the winterof discontent helped elect Margaret Thatcher. Unfortunately the IMF crisis and the 1970s more generally is another example of the consequences of politicians, in this case particularly those on the left, not accepting basic lessons from economics.            

Is a currency crisis bad for you at the ZLB?

My and Paul Krugman’s comments on Ken Rogoff’s FT piece have generated an interesting discussion, including another piece from Ken Rogoff, a further response from Paul Krugman, and posts from Brad DeLong, Ryan Avent in the Economist, Matthew Klein, John McHale (follow-up here), Nick Rowe and Tony Yates. The discussion centred on the UK, but it is more general than that: a similar thought experiment is if China sells its US government debt. Paul Krugman has promised more, so this may be the equivalent of one of those annoying people in a seminar audience who try and predict with questions what the speaker will say.  

The track I want to pursue starts from my argument that Quantitative Easing (QE) will ensure that the UK government never runs out of money with which to pay the bills. The obvious response, which Paul Krugman’s comment took up, is that a market reaction against UK government debt might be accompanied by a reaction against the UK’s currency, leading to a ‘sterling crisis’. For those with a long memory of UK macro history, would this be 1976 all over again?

Ken Rogoff’s original article, and his reply, both focus on the trigger for these events being a collapse in the Euro. While such risks should be taken seriously (although, for the record, I have never thought such a break up was the likely outcome), I want to ignore this possibility here, simply because it introduces too many complicating issues. Instead I just want to look at a much more limited scenario. Specifically, suppose Labour had not lost the election, and austerity had been delayed (by more than Ken Rogoff would have thought wise, bearing in mind that he agrees that government ‘investment’ in its widest sense was in fact cut too aggressively). Suppose further that markets had decided that because of this alone it was no longer wise to buy UK debt. QE fills the gap, but the flight from UK debt is also a flight from sterling, which depreciates as a result. If the market believes the government is not solvent, it will assume some part of QE is permanent rather than temporary, so inflation expectations rise. This validates the fall in sterling, in the sense that the market does not see any capital gains to be made from its depreciation.

In this thought experiment the UK government is solvent before the crisis, so other things being equal QE will be temporary. We are not talking about a strategy of inflating away the debt. There are two directions we could follow at this point. One would be the idea that a depreciation makes the UK government insolvent: in other words the crisis is self-fulfilling. The analogy is with a funding crisis under a fixed exchange rate, where by pushing up the interest rate on debt, markets can induce the insolvency they fear. (The government was not insolvent under pre-crisis interest rates, but is insolvent if it has to borrow at post-crisis rates.) But its not clear how this would work when exchange rates are flexible. The depreciation would do nothing to raise current or future borrowing costs, or reduce the long term tax base. At some stage markets would realise their mistake. I cannot see why there are multiple equilibria here, but maybe that is a failure of my imagination.

The second direction is to focus on the short run costs of the nominal depreciation. Some of those who commented on my original post talked about a ‘downward spiral’ in sterling. Now of course the depreciation itself may raise inflation to some extent, but this is not an unstable process. At some point sterling falls to a point where the market now thinks it is OK to hold. There is no bottomless pit.

As domestic prices are sticky, the depreciation increases UK competitiveness, which increases the demand for UK goods. If the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) is a constraint, then this increase in demand reduces or eliminates the constraint. It may also raise inflation because demand is higher, but higher demand is what monetary policy wanted but was unable to achieve. If the depreciation is so large that demand has to be reduced through increasing interest rates, that is fine: this is what monetary policy is for. In essence the ZLB is a welfare reducing constraint that the crisis relieves, and we are all better off.

If that sounds too good to be true, I think it could be. It treats the depreciation as simply a positive demand shock, that first eliminates the cost of the ZLB, and then can be offset by monetary policy. However a sterling crisis may also involve a deterioration in the output/inflation trade-off: equivalent to what macroeconomists call a cost-push shock. Take a basic Phillips curve. If agents start to believe inflation will be higher - even if these beliefs are incorrect (the crisis, and QE, is temporary) - while these mistaken expectations last this is a cost to the economy, because the central bank will have to raise interest rates to prevent these expectations fully feeding through into actual inflation. Either output will be lower, or inflation higher, or both.

Now as long as interest rates stay at zero, this is not a problem: the ZLB constraint still dominates. [1] However if the crisis was big enough, we could overshoot Brad DeLong’s sweet spot, and end up living with a cost-push shock that was more costly than the ZLB constraint. Personally I think this is stretching non-linearities rather too much. First you have to believe that austerity, which reduces debt a bit more quickly than otherwise, is just enough to prevent a crisis, and then that the crisis is so big that it more than offsets the ZLB constraint. Unlikely, but it seems to be a coherent possibility.

But what about 1976, when pressure on sterling led the UK government to seek help from the IMF? Of course that was different, because we were not at the ZLB. I also suspect there were other differences. I was a very junior economist working in the Treasury at the time. I do not remember very much, but what I do remember was that there seemed to be a mindset among senior policy makers that sterling was on a kind of slippery slope. Once it started falling, who knows where it might end up? They seemed to believe there was a bottomless pit, and the IMF loan was required to stop us going there. I suspect that was in part just a lack of familiarity with how flexible exchange rates work. In the end, sterling did stabilise such that some of the IMF loan was not needed, and I wonder how necessary it really was. But if anyone who reads this post knows more about this period, I would be very interested in their thoughts.

[1] A possibility suggested by John McHale is that, although the interest rate set by the Bank of England could stay at its lower bound, there might be an increase in the interest rate spread, such that UK firms or consumers end up paying more. I’m not clear in my own mind why a depreciation would raise this spread. Even if the market believes the UK government is no longer solvent, the central bank still has the ability to prevent a run on UK banks. If the spread did increase, then programmes like Funding For Lending would still be possible.