The Brexit depreciation and exports

I’ve read a number of people say, observing the lack of growth of UK exports, that this illustrates how depreciations have little impact on trade flows these days. This is a classic case of reasoning from a price change. I think the phrase ‘never reason from a price change’ was popularised by Scott Sumner, although I got it from Nick Rowe.

The depreciation of sterling happened because of Brexit. Some of the depreciation might have been a result of the expected cut in UK interest rates, which means it should be temporary. The rest was to compensate for the impact of Brexit on UK trade. In both cases, therefore, exporting firms in aggregate get a temporary boost to their competitiveness (or profitability of trading), which will come to an end when interest rates rise again or Brexit actually happens, perhaps imposing tariffs or other costs that reduce competitiveness.

The temporary boost to competitiveness/profitability will be good for firms that already compete in overseas markets. But I learnt many years ago when I estimated aggregate trade equations that a lot of the effect from a depreciation comes from firms trading in new markets that they had previously considered unprofitable. To do that requires some investment: in distribution and marketing, for example. A firm is unlikely to make that investment if the gain in competitiveness is temporary.

This helps explain an otherwise puzzling feature of aggregate trade following a depreciation that - unlike Brexit - leads to a permanent improvement in competitiveness. It takes many months before the full improvement in trade volumes comes through. If it was just a matter of goods getting cheaper and people buying more of them you would expect a fairly instantaneous impact, but if firms are having to invest to expand markets, the full impact will take longer to come through. [1]

In the case of Brexit the gain to competitiveness is temporary. It is a mistake to start with the depreciation, and then be disappointed by the lack of any reaction. Once you ask why there has been a depreciation, it becomes clearer why any gain to exports is likely to be modest. [2]

[1] As tariff changes are perhaps likely to be more permanent than exchange rate changes, this may also help explain the puzzle discussed here.

[2] This argument apart, one other thing you quickly learn if you monitor aggregate trade is how erratic it is. We will not know for sure what the impact of the Brexit depreciation has been until well after Brexit itself.  

Do New Keynesians assume full employment?

I’ve tried to write this as jargon free as I can, but it is mainly for economists

Nick Rowe claims that the New Keynesian model assumes full employment. I think he is onto something, but while he treats it as a problem with the model, I think it is a problem with the real world.

Nick sets up a simple consumption only economy with infinitely lived self employed workers, where we are at the steady state (=long run) level of consumption C(t)= output Y(t)=100. Then something bad happens (what macroeconomists call a shock):

“every agent has a bad case of animal spirits. There's a sunspot. Or someone forgets to sacrifice a goat. So each agent expects every other agent to consume at C(t)=50 from now on. ... So each agent expects his income to be 50 per period from now on. So each agent realises that he must cut his consumption to 50 per period from now on too, otherwise he will have to borrow to finance his negative saving and will go deeper and deeper into debt, till he hits his borrowing limit and is forced to cut his consumption below 50 so he can pay at least the interest on his debt.”

To put it more formally: each agent believes the steady state level of output has fallen. That in turn has to imply that everyone makes a mistake about the desired labour supply of everyone else. I assume this is a mistaken belief. If the belief was correct, then there is no problem: the steady state level of output should fall, because people want more leisure and less work.

Nick says that there is nothing a monetary authority that controls the real interest rate can do about this mistaken belief about the steady state, because changing real rates only changes the profile of consumption (shifting consumption from the future to the present) and not its overall level. That is correct. Furthermore if each individual simply assumes what they think is true, and does not even bother to offer his pre-shock level of labour to others, then this is indeed a new equilibrium which the monetary authority can do nothing about.

But people and economies are not like that. Each agent wants to work at the pre-shock level, and will signal that in some way. They will see that the economy had widespread underemployment, and as a result they will revise their expectations about the steady state. I think Nick knows that, because he writes that the NK model needs “to just assume the economy always approaches full employment in the limit as time goes to infinity, otherwise our Phiilips Curve tells us we will eventually get hyperinflation or hyperdeflation, and we can't have our model predicting that, can we.”

He treats that as if it were a problem, but I do not see that it is. After all, we have no problem with the idea that consumers will revise down their expectations of their future income if they unexpectedly find they are always in debt. Equally I have no problem with the idea that in Nick’s economy with widespread and visible involuntary underemployment consumers might think they had made a mistake about others desired labour supply.

Let me put it another way. In a single person economy we never get underemployment. The problem arises because in a real economy we need to form expectations about what others will do. But if there exist signals which help us get our expectations right, that should shift us out of a mistaken belief equilibrium.

Which gets us to why I think Nick is on to something about the real world. Suppose there is a shock like a financial crisis, which for the sake of argument just temporarily reduces demand by a lot and creates unemployment. Central banks cannot cut real interest rates enough to get rid of the unemployment because of the zero lower bound. Inflation falls, but because everyone initially thinks this is all temporary, and maybe also because of an aversion to nominal wage cuts, we get a modest fall in inflation.

Now suppose people erroneously revise down their beliefs about steady state output, to be more like current output. Suppose also that visible unemployment goes away, because firms substitute labour for capital (UK) or workers get discouraged (US). We get to what looks like Nick’s bad equilibrium. Even inflation moves back to target, because the current output gap appears to disappear. We no longer have any signals that there is an alternative, better for everyone, inflation at target equilibrium with higher output.

Now we could get out of this bad equilibrium, if some positive shock or monetary/fiscal policy raised demand ‘temporarily’ and people saw that, because firms substituted capital for labour, or discouraged workers came back into the labour force, inflation did not rise well above target. But suppose policymakers also start to hold these erroneous beliefs, and so do not try and get us out of the bad equilibrium. Could that describe the secular stagnation we are in?

Can governments offset helicopter money

Nick Rowe makes a couple of simple points around my post yesterday. Let me start with the issue of whether helicopter money (HM) is ‘permanent’ or not. (Alas I cannot match Nick’s admirable brevity.)

Permanent or temporary?

Think about a really simple world, where the ratio of money to prices is always the same in the long run. In this world we have a short run recession accompanied by deflation, and nominal interest rates have hit the buffer of zero (or wherever). The inflation target is 2%, and the central bank will never let inflation go above 2%. However because interest rates have hit zero, it cannot do the reverse and prevent deflation by conventional means.

If in this world the monetary authority gives away some new money (helicopter money, or HM) to stimulate the economy, is that new money permanent or temporary? Let’s think about what happens without HM. Prices fall or stall for a while, and only when the recession ends does inflation go back to 2%. Now compare this to what would happen if the central bank does HM, and this was successful at raising inflation much more quickly to 2%. That means that the price level will in the long run be permanently higher than if the central bank had done nothing. As a result, at least some of the additional money created to end the recession quickly will be created permanently relative to the no money creation case.

So to the extent HM works, and stops deflation, it involves permanently creating some money. That permanent money creation does not mean that inflation has to be above target, but rather it stops inflation being below target.

But there is absolutely no reason to limit HM to the amount by which money will be permanently higher, because that will almost certainly be insufficient to end deflation. Money will need to overshoot its permanent long run level in the short term. [1] There is nothing wrong in temporarily creating additional money to get us out of a recession. The only issue of any interest in all this is whether unwinding any temporary money creation requires the central bank or the fiscal authorities to do anything unusual (see below)

Will the temporary money be spent?

But if you just give people additional money temporarily, will that mean it is just saved? This is a variant of the Ricardian Equivalence issue, and the real world answer is the same: all the evidence is that quite a lot of it will be spent. I would argue there are two main reasons for this: some people are credit constrained (and HM is like a bank manager that says yes), and others do not know how the money will be payed back (it could be through lower public spending).

What about governments: will they try to offset conventional (cheque in the post) HM by raising taxes, or not increase spending as a result of ‘democratic helicopter money’ (see my last post)? We need to go back to why we need HM in the first place. We need HM because governments are not undertaking the fiscal expansion through borrowing that they should do in a recession where interest rates hit their lower bound. To know how governments will respond to HM, we need to know why they will not undertake this fiscal expansion.

The real fear of too much government debt

Suppose governments have convinced themselves that any additional spending paid for by borrowing is ruled out by worries over the amount of government borrowing. Their fears about borrowing are genuine, and this fear is acting like a constraint stopping them from doing what they otherwise would like to do. So what happens if the central bank does conventional HM, or says to the government you can spend more (or cut taxes) without having to borrow in the short term. Central banks are removing the constraint that governments have (almost certainly) imagined. There is therefore no reason why governments should either try and offset conventional HM, or not spend the democratic variety.

But if HM is temporary, borrowing will have to increase at some point. It is easy to get lost in the institutional detail of the many ways this can happen, so let’s just pick one. Once the recession is over, the central bank worries that there is too much money in the system, and they do not have enough financial assets to mop it all up. They ask the government to recapitalise the central bank, which just means that the government gives the central bank some financial assets in the form of government debt. That means more government borrowing.

Will the government worry about this, and therefore try to reduce its borrowing to offset HM? I would suggest the government will almost certainly not do this. The reason is that governments have convinced themselves that the problem is not the long run position of the government’s finances, but the level of debt and the deficit right now. How do I know this? Because if the problem was the long run position of the government’s finances, they would spend now to end the recession quickly, and then cut the deficit once we were away from the interest rate lower bound. That is the obvious optimal intertemporal policy mix. The fact that they do not do this suggests some imagined short run constraint.

You can also look at what governments undertaking austerity do. They are quite happy to cut deficits through privatisation, which almost surely increases future deficits. They embark on all kinds of fiscal tricks that simply shift revenues into the short term, or shifts spending into the long term. In other words, fiscal plans operate under a short term deficit constraint, and democratic HM relaxes that constraint.

Using a fear of debt as a cover for shrinking the state

Suppose governments do not really believe that their own borrowing has to be reduced right now, but are using public anxiety over public debt (with phrases like the government has maxed out its credit card) as a pretext to cut public spending. Short term borrowing is not really a constraint, but governments just pretend it is to achieve the goal of a smaller state. Such a government would almost certainly use any democratic HM to cut taxes, so the distinction between conventional and democratic HM is not central. Would this government use HM as an excuse to cut spending by yet more, thereby offsetting the benefits of HM?

The great advantage a central bank has is speed. It takes time to put new fiscal plans into effect, but money can be created overnight. So if the government plans to cut spending by more as a result of HM, the central bank can just offset the demand impact of those additional spending cuts with yet more HM. If you think such a game cannot go on forever you are right, but it does not have to. Once the recession is over, monetary policy can offset the impact of spending cuts on demand using interest rates in the normal way.

In this situation, both the central bank and government are happy. The central bank, by using HM in potentially unlimited amounts, can end the recession quickly. The government that wants to use the deficit as a cover for cutting public spending has succeeded in doing so, perhaps by more than they had thought possible. That might upset you because you do not want a smaller state and resent voters being tricked into allowing it to happen, but I personally would prefer that to a prolonged recession every time. [2]

[1] Macroeconomists sometimes say that in a recession the public’s demand for money increases, or there is an excess demand for money. To a non-economist, of course, that just sounds silly.

[2] Remember that HM does not stop a benevolent government doing the right thing and enacting a fiscal stimulus. It is a fall back to stop a malevolent government crashing the economy in pursuit of an ideological goal.  

MMT and mainstream macro

There were a lot of interesting and useful comments on my last post on MMT, plus helpful (for me) follow-up conversations. Many thanks to everyone concerned for taking the time. Before I say anything more let me make it clear where I am coming from. I’m on the same page as far as policy’s current obsession with debt is concerned. Where I seem to differ from some who comment on my blog, people who say they are following MMT, is whether you need to be concerned about debt when monetary policy is not constrained by the Zero Lower Bound. I say yes, they say no, but for reasons I could not easily understand.

This was the point of the ‘nothing new’ comment. It was not meant to be a put down. It was meant to suggest that a mainstream economist like myself could come to some of the same conclusions as MMT writers, and more to the point, just because I was a mainstream economist does not mean I misunderstood how government financing works. It was because I was getting comments from MMT followers that seemed nonsensical to me, but which should not have been nonsensical because the basics of MMT are understandable using mainstream theory.

One comment on that earlier post provided a link to a very useful Nick Rowe post, who as ever has been there before me. This suggested that MMT assumed a vertical IS curve (there is no impact of interest rates on aggregate demand). If the IS curve is vertical, then it explains the puzzle I have. In the thought experiment I outlined in my previous post, if the government started swapping debt for money the decline in interest rates that would follow [1] would have no impact on demand, so there would be no rise in inflation. Indeed what else could it be besides an assumption of a vertical IS curve, as MMT does not deny that excess demand would lead to inflation at full employment.

I now think that is putting it too strongly. The view that many MMT writers have is that interest rates have an unreliable impact on demand relative to fiscal instruments. In that case of course you would have to use fiscal policy to control demand and inflation. That would be the focus of the fiscal rule. It is a similar regime to one I suggest would be appropriate for individual Eurozone countries. Inflation would be a discipline on deficit bias. [2]

What about a world where monetary policy did successfully control demand and inflation, which is the world I’m writing about? Evidence suggests you then need a fiscal rule stopping deficit bias (a gradual rise in the debt to GDP ratio over successive cycles). In a country with its own central bank (so no concern about forced default) and where all debt is owned domestically, the standard reasons why you would be concerned about deficit bias are intergenerational equity, crowding out of capital, and having to raise distortionary taxes to pay the higher debt interest bill.

There is a lot you can say on all three, but the point I want to make is simple. Being in that world means you do not need to worry about other sector balances because of their impact on demand. By being in that world at no point am I misunderstanding how government financing works, or ignoring the role of money. It does not mean I read the government budget constraint from left to right or vice versa! Yet I still get comments like this one left on a more recent post.

“Your political yourself Simon. One thing more than anything really annoys me. Why do you never announce or go public and say that taxes do not fund government spending?”

Comments like the one above, taken without context from some MMT paper, just appear stupid. By all means criticise my view that monetary policy is effective, or that rising debt has costs, but in future comments like that will just be ignored.

Let me make the same point using another example. Alex Douglas in a post argues that MMT does make an original contribution to political economy. He looks at a Warren Mosler claim that the state creates unemployment, and this is the only reason unemployment exists. It seems to me (with some additional help from Alex) that this involves two elements. The first sounds like a combination of points that mainstream economists might make: deficient demand exists because we are in a monetary economy, and some combination of monetary and fiscal policy can always get rid of deficient demand. The second is that money exists because the state requires taxes to be paid with it. Now I’m less sure about that second argument, but the point is that I can unpick what I agree with and what I do not using perfectly standard economic ideas. Yet if he had simply sent me a comment which said “the state currency is fundamentally a device for coercing labour” I wouldn’t have had a clue what he was talking about.

Now you might ask at this point why is it so important to be able to put MMT arguments in the language of standard macro. MMT is a coherent school of thought, using a language that those who have read the important texts understand. [3] Someone like me should just take the time out to read those texts. Well I have read some MMT papers, but I can assure you I have read many more than pretty well every mainstream macroeconomist I know. So what you may say. But it is a fact, and you may think it is an unfortunate fact, that mainstream macroeconomics is pretty dominant in both academic and policy circles. And it will stay that way: heterodox economists have been predicting the downfall of mainstream economics for longer than I have been an economist. [4] So if MMT is to have any influence, it will be through changing how mainstream macroeconomists think.

You gain that influence by properly understanding the mainstream. Bill Mitchell, writing in 2013, lambasts economists like me who try to suggest that the fixation with debt since 2010 does not come from mainstream macro. He does not believe it, and writes

“Why is there mass unemployment if government officials understood all our claims? It would be the ultimate example of venal dysfunctional politics to hold that that everybody knows all this stuff but are deliberately disregarding it – for what?”

But that is the tragedy of what has happened since 2010. Politicians, either out of panic or with ulterior motives, decided in countries with their own currencies that we should start worrying about the market no longer buying government debt, and austerity was the result. In this they were supported by a media that thought the government was like a household, and economists from the financial sector who had their own reasons for promulgating this myth. True, they did find support from some mainstream academic macroeconomists, but that support was never based on mainstream theory.

What mainstream theory says is that some combination of monetary and fiscal policy can always end a recession caused by demand deficiency. Full stop: no ifs or buts. That is why we had fiscal expansion in 2009 in the US, UK, Germany, China and elsewhere. The contribution of some influential mainstream economists to this switch from fiscal stimulus to austerity in 2010 was minor at most, and to imagine otherwise does nobody any favours. The fact that policymakers went against basic macro theory tells us important things about the transmission mechanism of economic knowledge, which all economists have to address.

[1] Bill Mitchell appears to suggest that in this case the central bank could maintain its interest rate by selling its stock of government debt. However pretty soon it would run out of assets to sell. This is exactly why some central bankers are reluctant to undertake helicopter money. One solution with helicopter money is to get the government to recapitalise the central bank, but of course to do that would involve creating more government debt. The central bank could start creating its own debt, but if governments stopped creating their own debt and asked the central bank to do it for them, nothing has really changed. 

[2] It is not clear to me that in such a world debt would always be tied down. A government that used an effective (in multiplier terms) fiscal instrument in booms (e.g. government spending) but an ineffective one in depressions (tax breaks for the wealthy) might experience an upward drift in debt. But what is clear is that in such a regime, concern about the debt stock should never justify significant departures from demand and inflation stabilisation.

[3] Although, as the range of comments to my earlier posts showed, what people understand MMT to mean varies quite a lot.

[4] I personally would not welcome the disintegration of macro back into separate schools of thought. Economists should be like doctors, and I do not want to have to ask my doctor what medical school of thought they belong to. I have relied on doctors using the same language and being able to understand each other. However I also realise that the unwise fixation of the current mainstream with microfoundations methodology can act as an exclusion mechanism, which encourages the formation of alternative schools of thought. This is yet another reason to be very critical of this methodological hegemony.  

The centrality of policy to how long recessions last

For economists

Paul Krugman reminds us that one of the most misguided questions in macroeconomics is ‘are business cycles self-correcting’. This is a particular case of another mistake, which is to say that the duration of the business cycle depends on the speed of price adjustment. That answer is seriously incomplete, because it only holds for a particular set of monetary policy rules (plus assumptions about fiscal policy).

It is very easy to see this. Suppose monetary policy is so astute that it knows perfectly all the shocks that hit the economy, and how interest rates influence that economy. In that case absent the Zero Lower Bound the business cycle would disappear, whatever the speed of price adjustment. Or suppose monetary policy followed a credible rule that related real interest rates to the output gap rather than excess inflation. Once again the speed of price adjustment is not central to how long business cycles last. As Nick Rowe points out, if you had a really bad monetary policy recessions could last forever.

A better answer to both questions (self-correction and how long business cycles last) is it all depends on monetary policy. Actually even that answer makes an implicit assumption, which is that there is no fiscal (de)stabilisation. The correct answer to both questions is that it depends first and foremost on policy. The speed of price adjustment only becomes central for particular policy rules.

So why do many economists (including occasionally some macroeconomists) get this wrong? Why are textbooks often quite unclear on this point? It could be just an unfortunate accident. We are so used to teaching about fixed money supply rules (or in my case Taylor rules), that we can take those rules for granted. But there is also a more interesting answer. To some economists with a particular point of view, the idea that getting policy right might be essential to whether the economy self-corrects from shocks is troubling. They prefer to think of a market economy as being ‘naturally’ self-correcting, and to think that government intervention only has a role to play if there is some serious ‘market imperfection’. The market imperfection in the case of business cycles is price rigidity.

Focusing on this logic alone can lead to big mistakes. I have heard a number of times good economists say that in 2015 we can no longer be in a demand deficient recession, because price adjustment cannot be that slow. This mistake happens because they take good policy for granted. It is almost certainly true that no recession should last this long, because fiscal policy can substitute for monetary policy at the Zero Lower Bound. But with sub-optimal policy the length of recessions has much more to do with that bad policy than it has to do with the speed of price adjustment.

Just how misleading a focus on the speed of price adjustment can be becomes evident at the Zero Lower Bound. With nominal interest rates stuck at zero, rapid price adjustment will make the recession worse, not better. Price rigidity may be a condition for the existence of business cycles, but it can have very little to do with their duration.        

Keynes never left Canada, and intends to stay

Nick Rowe has a post where he points out that the outgoing Conservatives did not abandon Keynes during the Great Recession. He takes a graph of government spending from an article by Matthew Klein, but we can make the same point be looking at the underlying primary balance. (As I have noted many times, no measure of fiscal stance is ideal. If you want a more detailed analysis of the Canadian macro position than I will give here, read the Klein article.) According to the OECD, this moved from a surplus of 2% of GDP in 2006 to a deficit of 3.2% of GDP in 2010. We saw a similar countercyclical swing in fiscal policy in the US, but whereas that swing was sharply put into reverse in the US, in Canada the deficit was still 1.8% in 2013. (The UK was like the US except the peak deficit was in 2009, and the reverse was well under way by 2010.)

So we saw a classic Keynesian fiscal policy in Canada. Partly as a result, Canadian GDP only fell by 2.7% in 2009 and grew strongly in the next two years. That in turn meant that short interest rates only stayed on their floor for just over a year, and rose to 1% during 2010. So it all looks like a textbook New Keynesian policy, and close to the one recommended in Portes and Wren-Lewis: fiscal expansion helped get interest rates above their lower bound.

That was then. More recently GDP has been falling, and interest rates have been cut to 0.5%. So is it time for a tight fiscal policy, or instead some additional deficit financed public investment? Ask the man on the escalator, the new Canadian Prime Minister. In the election Trudeau played a classic Keynesian card (Labour leadership please note). Both his two opponents criticised this deviation from a balanced budget policy. Trudeau won, so Keynes remains in Canada. While interest rates may not have yet hit their lower bound, it makes sense to borrow to invest when rates are low and when there is a significant risk rates could hit ‘zero’ (Osborne please note).

Unlike governments in Europe and the US, Canada did not dash for austerity just as the recovery was beginning and while interest rates were still on their floor. They had a clear choice a week ago to allow a deficit to finance investment or go for a balanced budget, and they chose the more sensible fiscal policy. I think there are two lessons beyond Canada. First, right wing governments do not have to make major macroeconomic policy mistakes with fiscal policy. Second, voters do not always suffer from deficit fetishism.

Evidence for monetary offset

As Tony Yates among others has observed, antagonism towards using fiscal policy for macroeconomic stabilisation seems to be an essential part of market monetarism. However their argument is not that fiscal policy will have no impact on demand and therefore output, but rather that monetary policy can always offset this impact. This can be called the ‘monetary offset’ argument.

As I have noted before, the idea of monetary offset is actually a key part of Keynesian objections to austerity in a liquidity trap [1]. In a liquidity trap monetary policy’s ability to offset fiscal austerity is severely compromised, but at other times it can be done. It therefore makes much more sense to postpone austerity until a time when monetary offset is clearly possible. So the idea that monetary offset can happen is common ground. What is in dispute is the extent to which a liquidity trap (or almost equivalently the fact that nominal interest rates cannot become too negative) prevents complete monetary offset.

If empirical evidence could be found that complete monetary offset has operated during a liquidity trap that would be powerful support for the market monetarist case. Scott Sumner recently presented (HT Nick Rowe) some analysis by Mark Sadowski which he said did just that. Taking the cyclically adjusted primary balance as a measure of fiscal policy, it showed that there was no correlation between this and growth in nominal GDP in the single period from 2009 to 2014 for those countries with an independent monetary policy.

There are tons of problems with simple correlations of this kind, some of which I discuss here, which is why quite elaborate econometric techniques are nowadays used to assess the impact of fiscal policy. But there is a rather simpler problem with this correlation. As far as I know, no one had expressed a concern about fiscal austerity because of the impact this will have on nominal GDP. The issue is always the impact on real activity, for reasons that are obvious enough.

So what happens if we relate fiscal policy to real GDP growth, using Sadowski’s data set? Here is the answer.

There are two obvious outliers here: at the top Singapore, and to the right Iceland. Exclude those and we get this.

There is a clear negative correlation between the extent of fiscal tightening and the amount of real GDP growth. Strange that Sumner gave no hint of this :)

Do I think this is definitive evidence? No, for two reasons. First, the obvious problems with simple correlations of this kind noted earlier. Second, this sample includes quite a few countries where interest rates over this period have averaged over 2% (Australia, Norway, New Zealand, and Korea) and so are unlikely to be subject to a liquidity trap. Others may only have been in a liquidity trap for a part of this period. What we can say is that these correlations are perfectly consistent with the view that austerity reduces growth in countries with an independent monetary policy. [2]

If you were to conclude that we just do not have enough data to know to what extent monetary offset can operate in a liquidity trap, I think you would be right. If you then went on to say that therefore the data cannot discriminate between the two sides in terms of policy, you would be wrong. What market monetarists want you to believe is that there is no need to worry about fiscal austerity in a liquidity trap, because an independent monetary policy can and will always offset its impact. This is wrong, precisely because the empirical evidence is so limited. We know, both from theory and the great majority of econometric studies, that fiscal contraction has a fairly predictable impact in reducing GDP. We have virtually no idea how much unconventional monetary policy is required to offset this impact. Given lags, that means trying to achieve monetary offset in a liquidity trap is always going to be hit and miss. The moment you think about uncertainty, the market monetarist argument for not worrying about austerity in a liquidity trap falls apart. 

[1] It is not the only reason why fiscal austerity in a severe recession might be a bad idea. There is a lot of empirical evidence that the impact of austerity is greater in recessions than when the economy is stronger, and there are other theoretical reasons besides monetary offset why that may be the case. This is of some importance for individual economies in a monetary union.

[2] If the coefficient on fiscal policy was lower for this sample than for Eurozone countries (I’ve not tried), would that at least be evidence for some monetary policy offset? The trouble here is that some of the countries driving the EZ results were also suffering from an overvalued real exchange rate as a result of earlier excess demand, and so this might bias upwards the coefficient on fiscal policy in those regressions.

Austerity: Nick Rowe's not so silly question

Nick Rowe has a silly question for those who oppose austerity. Actually he really means it is a question involving silly numbers: would you still advocate fiscal stimulus in a liquidity trap (with interest rates stuck at some lower bound - the ZLB) if government debt was ten times annual GDP?

It is not a silly question for two reasons. First, thinking of this kind of unimaginable extreme is often a useful way of clarifying ideas, which is what Nick is trying to do. Second, this is a variant of question I was actually asked in No.10 Downing Street half a dozen years ago. What follows is a better version of the answer I gave on that occasion. To make things easier, let’s assume GDP is 100, so government debt is 1000, but the negative output gap is near 10%, so GDP could be 110. Let’s also assume that the government does not want to default, and that it is willing and able to service or even reduce that huge debt once the output gap is closed. Finally, and this is critical for the answer I give, assume government debt is in the currency that is issued by the country’s own central bank.

One way I like to frame this issue is to think about different time frames. A large output gap is an immediate problem which can be dealt with quickly using fiscal stimulus if interest rates are at the ZLB. A high level of government debt is a medium to long term problem, which is much less costly to solve when interest rates are not at the ZLB. [2] So it is not a matter of trading off two conflicting objectives (see this recent post for example). You can satisfy both objectives by doing stimulus now and austerity later.

Does debt being ten times GDP change this logic? There are four main potential costs associated with high government debt. The first is that, by generating high real interest rates, it crowds out private capital. However at the ZLB long term real interest rates are likely to be low, not high. Second, paying the interest on that debt requires higher distortionary taxes. (In macro terms it is the distortion that matters here - if the debt is owned domestically the money is just being circulated.) However if there is an output gap the possibility that people are not supplying labour because income taxes are too high is not a current problem either.

A third issue with debt is the ‘burden on future generations’. How real that is or not, dealing with excessive debt is going to screw the current generation (who have to suffer the higher taxes or lower spending to get debt down), so asking them to also suffer continuing unemployment is hardly fair.

The final problem is that the markets might suddenly take fright that the tax burden implied by the debt is too large in political terms, and as a result the government may default. So the funding that enables the government to roll over the 1000 in debt might dry up. Now imagine two scenarios. In the first, the government eliminates the 10% output gap by means of a fiscal stimulus worth 10% of GDP, say. That increases the debt from 1000 to 1010, but GDP rises to 110, so the debt to GDP ratio falls from 10 to 9.2. In the second, there is no stimulus but austerity instead, involving a budget surplus of 10% of GDP. So debt falls from 1000 to 990. Even if we make the outlandish assumption that austerity on this scale does no further damage to GDP, which stays at 100, the debt to GDP ratio falls to 9.9. Which scenario is going to worry the markets more?

Suppose, despite this, the funding does dry up. You have your own independent central bank, so you print the money to cover the stimulus and any debt rollover required. That might require a lot of money creation - perhaps as much as central banks have actually undertaken as a result of Quantitative Easing (QE)! Just as with QE, the world does not fall in. Will that not lead to massive inflation? No, for exactly the same reason QE does not. The moment the output gap has been eliminated, and interest rates are off the ZLB, you can start the austerity programme that begins to roll back money creation. That stops the output gap becoming positive and therefore stops inflation. [1] People sometimes throw in an exchange rate crisis at this point, but as Paul Krugman has repeatedly pointed out, this does not change the basic logic.

So I think the answer to Nick’s question is not the answer he thinks. The logic is that every time and whatever the numbers you first eliminate the output gap and get off the ZLB. Only when that is done do you start taking action to reduce deficits.

[1] Various contributors to this blog tell me this is the key contribution of MMT. The fact that I do not describe it as such is simply because I also think this is what mainstream macro implies.

[2] As I like to point out to market monetarists, what they call monetary offset has always been central to the anti-austerity argument.

Redistribution between generations

I ought to start a series on common macroeconomic misunderstandings. (I do not watch zombie films.) One would be that the central bank’s balance sheet normally matters, although this nice comment on my last post does the job pretty well. Here is one that crops up fairly regularly - that government debt does not involve redistribution between generations. The misunderstanding here is obvious once you see that generations overlap.

Take a really simple example. Suppose the amount of goods produced each period in the economy is always 100. Now if each period was the life of a generation, and generations did not overlap, then obviously each generation gets 100, and there can be no redistribution between them. But in real life generations do overlap.

So instead let each period involve two generations: the old and young. Suppose each produced 50 goods. But in one period, call it period T, the government decides that the young should pay 10 goods into a pension scheme, and the old should get that pension at T, even though they contributed nothing when young. In other words, the young pay the old. A fanciful idea? No, it is called an unfunded pension scheme, and it is how the state pension works in the UK. As a result of the scheme, the old at T get 60 goods, and the young only 40, of the 100 produced in period T. The old at T are clear winners. Who loses? Not the young at T if the scheme continues, because they get 60 when old (and assume for simplicity that people do not care when they get goods). The losers are the generation who are old in the period the scheme stops. Say that is period T+10, when the young get to keep their 50, but the old who only got 40 when young only get 50 when old. So we have a clear redistribution from the old in period T+10 to the old in period T. Yet output in period T and T+10 is unchanged at 100.

That example did not involve any debt, but I started with it because it shows so clearly how you can have redistribution between generations even if output is unchanged. To bring in debt, suppose government taxes both the old and young by 10 each period, and transforms this 20 into public goods. So each generation has a lifetime consumption of 80 of private goods.

Now in period T the government says that the young need pay no taxes, but will instead give 10 goods in exchange for a paper asset - government debt - that can be redeemed next period for 10 goods. In period T nothing changes, except that the young now have this asset. In period T+1 this allows them (the now old) to consume 50 private goods rather than 40: the 40 it produces less tax and the 10 it now gets from the government by selling the debt. Their total consumption of private goods has increased from 80 to 90. How does the government obtain these 10 to give the now old? It says to the young: either you pay 20 rather than 10 in taxes, or you can buy this government debt for 10. As people only care about their total consumption, the young obviously buy the debt. They now consume 30 in private goods in T+1, but 50 in T+2 when they sell their debt, which gets us back to the original 80 in total lifetime consumption.

This process continues until period T+10, say, when the government refuses to give the young the choice of buying debt, and just raises an extra 10 in taxes on the young. So the debt disappears, but the young are worse off, as they only have 30 of private goods to consume this period. Their total lifetime consumption of private goods is 70. We have a clear redistribution of 10 from the young in period T+10 to the young in period T enacted by the government issuing debt in period T.

If you are thinking that these redistributions need not occur if the debt is never repaid or the pension scheme never wound up, then we need to get a bit more realistic and bring in interest rates and growth (and the famous r<>g relationship), which these posts of mine (and these at least as good posts from Nick Rowe) discuss. But the idea with this post is to get across in a very simple way how redistribution between generations can work because generations overlap.

Unfunded pension schemes and intergenerational equity

Government debt and the burden on future generations

The Burden of Government Debt

Nick Rowe

How time travel is possible,

The burden of the (bad monetary policy) on future generations

Understanding fiscal stimulus can be easy

There seems to be a bit of confusion about fiscal stimulus. I think most people understand what is going on in undergraduate textbook models, but some seem less sure of what might be different in more modern New Keynesian models. This seems to revolve around three issues:

1) In Traditional Keynesian (TK) models any fiscal giveaway seems to work, whereas in New Keynesian (NK) analysis the type of fiscal policy seems to matter much more.

2) Is the dynamics of how policy works different in TK and NK models?

3) In TK models fiscal and monetary policy seem interchangeable, but NK models imply fiscal policy is a second best tool. Why is that?

In this post I will just cover the first two issues.

The best way to answer these questions is to ask how NK models differ from TK models, and where this matters. To keep things simple, let’s just think about a closed economy. I’ll also assume real interest rates are fixed, which switches off monetary policy. This is not quite the same as fiscal policy in a liquidity trap, because expected inflation may change, but that is a complication I want to avoid for now.

First, a difference that does not matter much for (1) and (2). The most basic NK model assumes the labour market clears, while the TK model does not. I tried to explain why that was not critical here.

The difference that really matters is consumption. In TK models consumption just depends on current post tax income, while in the most basic NK model consumption depends on expectations of discounted future income, and expectations are rational. This makes NK models dynamic, whereas in the textbook TK model we do not need to worry about what happens next.

This immediately gives us the best known difference between NK and TK: Ricardian Equivalence. A tax cut today to be financed by tax increases in the future leaves discounted labour income unchanged, and so consumption remains unchanged. However this is only a statement about tax changes. Changes in government spending have much the same impact as they do in TK models.

In particular, if we have a demand gap of X that lasts for Y years, we can fill it by raising government spending by X for Y years, and pay for it by reducing government spending in later years. A practical example of what I call a pure government spending stimulus would be bringing forward public investment. As taxes do not change, then for given real interest rates consumption need not change.

Nick Rowe sets up a slightly different problem, where there is a wedge shaped gap to fill. In that case government spending can initially rise, but then gradually fall back, filling the wedge. Same logic. Nick says that a policy that would work equally well in theory is to initially leave government spending unchanged, but then let it gradually fall, so that it ends up permanently lower. This is not nearly as paradoxical as Nick suggests. By lowering government spending in the long run, taxes will be lower in the long run. Consumers respond by raising consumption now and forever, so it is consumption that fills the gap. It works in theory, but may not in practice because consumers cannot be certain government spending will be lower forever. It is also an odd experiment that combines demand stabilisation with permanently changing the size of the state. So much simpler to do the obvious thing, and raise government spending to fill the demand gap. As fiscal stimulus in a liquidity trap does not require fine tuning, implementation lags are unlikely to be critical.  

So if we restrict ourselves to fiscal changes that just involve changing the timing of government spending, fiscal demand management in NK models works in much the same way as in TK models, which is simple and intuitive. It really is just a matter of filling the gap.

What annoys me about market monetarists

I missed this little contretemps between Nick Rowe and Paul Krugman. Actually this appears to be a fuss over nothing. The main point Paul was trying to make, it seemed to me, was about how far the Republican base were on monetary policy from anything reasonable, and so what he called the neomonetarist movement did not have much chance with this group. By implication, neomonetarism was something more reasonable, although he had well known problems with its ideas. So a sort of backhanded compliment, if anything.

Nick responded by pointing out that what he called neofiscalists (those, like me, who argue for fiscal stimulus at the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB)) hadn’t done too well at finding a political home recently either. Which, alas, is all too true, but I think we kind of knew that.

What interests me is how annoyed each side gets with each other. Following my earlier posts, I will use the label market monetarist (MM) rather than neomonetarist. It seems to me that I understand a little why those in the MM camp get so annoyed with those like me who go on about fiscal policy. Let me quote Nick:

“We don't like fiscal patches that cover up that underlying problem. Because fiscal policy has other objectives and you can't always kill two birds with the same fiscal stone. Because we can't always rely on fiscal policymakers being able and willing to do the right thing. And because if your car has alternator trouble you fix the alternator; you don't just keep on doing bodge-jobs like replacing the battery every 100kms.”

I’ll come back to the car analogy, but let me focus on the patches idea for now. In their view, the proper way to do stabilisation policy outside a fixed exchange rate regime is, without qualification, to use monetary policy. So the first best policy is to try every monetary means possible, which may in fact turn out to be quite easy if only policymakers adopt the right rule. Fiscal policy is a second best bodge. MM just hates bodgers.

As I explained in this post, the situation is not symmetric. I do not get annoyed with MM because I think monetary policy is a bodge. I have spent much time discussing what monetary policy can do at the ZLB, and I have written favourably about nominal GDP targets. But, speaking for just myself, I do get annoyed by at least some advocates of MM.

Before I say why, let me dismiss two possible reasons. First, some find MM difficult because there does not seem to be a clear theoretical model behind their advocacy (see this post from Tony Yates for example). I can live with that, because I suspect I can see the principles behind their reasoning, and principles can be more general than models (although they can also be wrong). Second, I personally would have every right to be annoyed with some MMs (but certainly not Nick) because of their debating style and lack of homework, but I see that as a symptom rather than fundamental.

To understand why I do get annoyed with MM, let me use another car analogy. We are going downhill, and the brakes do not seem to be working properly. I’m sitting in the backseat with a representative of MM. I suggest to the driver that they should keep trying the brake pedal, but they should also put the handbrake on. The person sitting next to me says “That is a terrible idea. The brake pedal should work. Maybe try pressing it in a different way. But do not put on the handbrake. The smell of burning rubber will be terrible. The brake pedal should work, that is what it is designed for, and to do anything else just lets the car manufacturer off the hook. Have you tried pressing on the accelerator after trying the brake?”

OK, that last one is unfair, but you get my point. When you have a macroeconomic disaster, with policymakers who are confused, conflicted and unreliable, you do not obsess over the optimal way of getting out of the disaster. There will be a time and place for that later. Instead you try and convince all the actors involved to do things that will avoid disaster. If both monetary and fiscal policymakers are doing the wrong thing given each other’s actions, and your influence on either will be minimal, you encourage both to change their ways.

MM agrees that fiscal stimulus will work unless it is actively counteracted by monetary policy. Nick says we can't always rely on fiscal policymakers being able and willing to do the right thing. But since at least 2011 we have not been able to rely on monetary policymakers in the Eurozone to do either the right thing, or consistently the wrong thing. So why is anyone with any sense saying that austerity is not a major factor behind the second Eurozone recession? That is just encouraging fiscal policymakers to carry on doing exactly the wrong thing, in the real world where monetary policy is set by the ECB rather than some MM devotee.

Sticky prices: how we confuse students, and sometimes ourselves

For teachers and students of macroeconomics.

I’m about to teach a small number of first year undergraduate students Keynesian macroeconomics, and my aim will be not to tell them that this is the macroeconomics of sticky prices. Yet I realise I’ve already gone wrong. In week one I talked about time periods in macro, and how the ‘short run’ was the length of time ‘it takes prices to fully adjust’. I must have been saying this for years. But it is at best highly misleading.

In both the New Keynesian closed economy model, and the IS/LM model, the short run is the length of time it takes the central bank to stabilise inflation (output goes to its natural rate), or less precisely to achieve full employment. For students we could equally say it is the period it takes monetary policy to achieve the real rate of interest implied by the RBC, or Classical, model.  Calling this the time period it takes prices to fully adjust only makes sense when monetary policy involves some kind of nominal anchor, like a fixed money target in IS/LM. It makes no sense when monetary policy involves a central bank trying to choose the best nominal interest rate. The impact of an unexpected but subsequently known preference/demand shock, for example, would be very short lived when such a central bank knew what it was doing. (See this excellent post from Nick Rowe.)  

The big danger in equating Keynesian economics with sticky prices is that students forget about the crucial role monetary policy is playing. Too many think that after an increase in aggregate demand, if contracts and menu costs were absent, higher prices would in themselves choke off the increase in aggregate demand.  As they have just learnt micro, it is a natural mistake to make. They then get very confused when price flexibility does (at best) nothing at the zero lower bound.

Yet the linking of the short run with sticky prices is ubiquitous. In the edition of Mankiw I have to hand it says

“In the long run, prices are flexible and can respond to changes in supply or demand. In the short run, many prices are sticky at some predetermined level. Because prices behave differently in the short run than the long run, economic policies have different effects over different time horizons.”

This kind of statement makes sense in a fixed money supply world, but it makes much less sense in the real world. (Mankiw uses the term ‘long run’ where others would use ‘medium run’, but let us not worry about that.) Compare it with this alternative statement:

“In the long run, monetary policy adjusts to achieve steady inflation, which means output goes to its ‘natural’ or Classical level. In the short run, monetary policy fails to achieve this, so we need to look at movements in aggregate demand to explain output.”

This works for any sensible monetary policy.

In my second year lectures, I ask my students to think about a monetary policy that involved moving real interest rates in response to the output gap, but not to excess inflation.  If that policy stabilised a closed economy, then what impact would the speed of price adjustment have on anything except inflation? Inflation aside, a world where price adjustment was quick would look much like a world where prices were much stickier. The ‘short run’ would have the same length, irrespective of how quickly prices adjusted.

All this is about how Keynesian economics is taught, rather than about how it is done. Yet how it is taught can also influence how it is eventually understood. One of the problems some people have with understanding that we are still in a situation of deficient demand is that it is five years after the recession ‘and surely prices should have adjusted by now’. There is also a rather more profound point. Many anti-Keynesians use this misunderstanding about price adjustment to dismiss Keynesian economics. When they say ‘I ignore Keynesian economics, because I think prices adjust rapidly’ they are really saying ‘I ignore Keynesian economics because I think monetary policy is very successful’. And in the real world, monetary policy can only be very successful by understanding Keynesian economics!