Why below target inflation is a big problem

Much of the coverage of deflation seems to miss the key point. Deflation is a sign that resources are being wasted. The lower inflation is, other things being equal, the more resources are being wasted. Wasted resources are probably a bit economics speak. What it means is that society as a whole - you and I - are worse off for no reason. There are also good grounds for thinking the sums involved could be very large, dwarfing the numbers the media normally frets about. [1]

Once you look at it this way, lots of rather silly debates become clear. First and most obviously, there is nothing magic about the number zero. Other things being equal, zero inflation suggests more resources are being wasted than if inflation is 1%, but resources are still being wasted when inflation is 1% and the target is 2%.  

Economists have worried about some of the knock on effects that deflation might have. In particular, because deflation means that the real value of debts fixed in nominal terms is rising, that may induce debtors to cut back spending, with no matching increase in spending by creditors. This will make the waste of resources worse. However this effect is not a non-linear one that kicks in when inflation is zero. If this effect is important, debtors will still be more inhibited by their debt if inflation is 1% compared to 2%. And, of course, even if this effect is unimportant resources are still being wasted if inflation is below target.

This is also why looking at some measure of core inflation is important. If below target inflation is just due to lower oil prices, say, which in turn are just lower because of increased supply, say, [2] then this is no reason to think resources are being wasted. Just as inflation targeting central banks should largely see through any inflation caused by higher oil prices, they should also do the opposite. However in the UK, US and Eurozone core inflation is significantly below target, suggesting resources are being wasted everywhere.

The really interesting thing about the current situation is that in all three places nominal wages seem to be going nowhere fast. This could be partly because plenty of domestic spare capacity exists, but partly also because workers are aware of the potential employers have to use overseas labour as an alternative. In either case, the really good news that this implies is that we can allow the economy to grow at an above average rate for some time. (It also suggests that current fiscal projections may be too pessimistic.)

This is only good news if we take the opportunity it presents. We should use the monetary and fiscal tools we have at our disposal (and invent some new ones if need be) to do so. There is no magic to raising demand - we have various tried and tested means of doing so. The basic barrier to raising demand has been and always will be inflation, so when that barrier is nowhere in sight (in fact appears to be moving further away) it is a criminal waste not to expand demand.

But what of those who advocate caution. We should raise interest rates now, so as to avoid rapid increases later? I am sure some people who argue this way are genuine, but just wrong because they have not realised the implications of the position we are now in, and in particular the balance of risks involved. But I cannot also help noticing that some on the right have been arguing for higher interest rates for some time, and refuse to admit they were wrong. They are confirming Kalecki’s idea that although what he called full employment was good for society, it may not be good for some particular parts of society. Those pursuing this line should not be dismissed: they should be laughed into obscurity.   

[1] This would be clearer if all central banks had a dual mandate.

[2] Which in the current situation is probably not true, so this is just to make the point.

A comment on Kocherlakota's suggestions for clarifying monetary policy objectives

In a recent speech (HT MT), Narayana Kocherlakota (who helps set US interest rates) makes two suggestions to clarify what US monetary policy is trying to do. The first I completely agree with. The Fed should make clear that the 2% inflation target is symmetrical. Inflation at 1% is just as much of a problem as inflation at 3%. We only need to look at the Eurozone to see the dangers of asymmetry (which in their case is explicit).

His second suggestion is that the Fed should articulate a “benchmark two-year time horizon for returning inflation to the 2 percent goal.” You can see why Kocherlakota is suggesting this change, particularly in the current context. A target which is only going to be achieved in the indefinite long term may cease to have value. However applying the two year benchmark to just the inflation target may create inappropriate pressures in different circumstances.

The UK’s Monetary Policy Committee operated until quite recently what appeared to be exactly this two year benchmark. As evidence for this, here is a chart of the Bank’s own forecast for inflation two years ahead. (The dates refer to when the forecast was made.) The inflation target was 2.5% until 2003, and 2% thereafter.

Until the Great Recession, the forecast was generally pretty close to the target. Since then, the dates on which inflation two years ahead was expected to be below target roughly correspond to dates on which the Quantitative Easing (QE) programme was expanded. (More details in this post.)

The problem with this strategy emerged in 2011. As a result of the delayed impact of the 2008 depreciation in Sterling, increases in sales taxes (VAT) and higher commodity prices, actual inflation briefly exceeded 5% in 2011. As a result, in 2011 the MPC came pretty close to following the Eurozone in increasing interest rates. (For a number of months, 3 MPC members voted to raise rates, and the remaining 6 voted for no change.) A major concern of those who voted for higher rates was that inflation would not fall back to 2% within 2 years, and that as a result the credibility of the inflation target would be damaged.

So the 2 year time horizon came close to having a very damaging impact in the UK. (Arguably it did cause some damage, because it inhibited additional QE.) Now it is of course true that the combination of cost-push shocks experienced by the UK during that period was unusual, but even if rules allow for opt-outs in exceptional circumstances, they can nevertheless exert inappropriate pressure in those circumstances. Arguably the 2013 paper issued by the UK Treasury on monetary policy was at heart a message to the Bank to no longer apply the two year ahead rule.

Luckily there is a simple way of avoiding this danger, by making a small addition to Kocherlakota's suggestion. This is to apply the two year time horizon to both the inflation target and the output gap. I can see no convincing argument why the two year horizon should not be applied to both elements of the dual mandate. The problem in the UK arose partly because the UK does not have a dual mandate. If it had had this dual mandate, and the two year horizon had applied to both elements of the mandate, then the pressure to raise interest rates in 2011 would have been much less. (Few expected the UK output gap to close by 2013, even without interest rate increases.)

There is a more general argument that is completely independent of what happened in the UK. Whatever the intention, if the two year horizon is applied to only one element of the dual mandate, there is a danger that it appears to give priority to that element over the other. So my own opinion, for what it is worth, is that Kocherlakota's suggestions are a good idea, as long as the two year time horizon benchmark is applied to both parts of the dual mandate.    

Why a Dual Mandate is Essential

Monetary policy has two crucial roles. The first is to set the medium/long term inflation rate. Pretty well everyone understands this. The economy will not by itself settle down to an inflation rate of 2% or whatever - it needs monetary policy to set this rate and help achieve it.

The second is to ensure that aggregate demand matches aggregate supply. Now here there is sometimes confusion, even among the best economists. [1] The basic idea is that there is a ‘natural’ level of output determined by supply side factors, like how much people want to work, the degree of monopoly in the labour market, the state of technology etc. [2] There will be a real rate of interest associated with this level of output, which we can call the natural interest rate. On the other hand how much firms produce in the short run is largely determined by aggregate demand: firms tend to set prices, and do not ration demand. There is no reason why aggregate demand has to equal supply in the short run in a monetary economy. The difference between actual output and natural output is the output gap. If the output gap is not zero, problems will arise. For example with excess demand we get inflation, and with deficient demand we can have wasted resources and the misery of involuntary unemployment.

Aggregate demand depends on real interest rates. As monetary policy can influence real interest rates in the short run, then its job is to try and match aggregate supply and demand, by bringing the real interest rate as close as possible to the natural interest rate. [3]

These two roles for monetary policy map nicely into the two objectives macroeconomists typically ascribe to policy makers: minimising excess inflation and the output gap. With two goals there will also be conflicts, producing a trade-off between short run inflation stability and eliminating the output gap. Macroeconomics has extensively examined what to do when these conflicts arise.

A permanent non-zero output gap is not compatible with stable inflation in the long run. As a result, it is possible to reduce both roles to one single objective, the stabilisation of inflation, as long as that stabilisation is done ‘flexibly’. Hence the idea of a single, but flexible, inflation target. I now believe having only an inflation target, or making it 'primary', is an important mistake for two reasons. We can label each mistake as MPC and ECB for short.

The first (MPC) is due to persistent shocks to the relationship between the output gap and inflation (or equivalently to the Phillips curve). This sets up a potential conflict between the two goals. Although we know how to optimally deal with this conflict, the policy that results can appear inconsistent with inflation targeting, which puts a strain on an inflation targeting policy. The problem can be ‘solved’ by making inflation targeting even more ‘flexible’, but this in turn makes the policy less clear.

Of course macroeconomists have always acknowledged this possibility, but have thought that the impact of excess or deficient aggregate demand would always be strong enough for this not to matter in practice. However, as the recent IMF study I discuss here shows, either low inflation or credible inflation targets (or both) seem to have weakened the impact of the output gap on inflation, which makes the problem of persistent cost-push shocks more important. This has been the problem the MPC in the UK have been grappling with in recent years, and I believe the lack of a dual mandate has made their decisions less optimal. More generally, as Paul Krugman says here, thinking that stable low inflation must mean everything is OK could be very wrong.

The second (ECB) is that, in the wrong hands, the flexible inflation targeting regime can become a severely non-optimal policy that pays too little (or asymmetric) attention to the output gap, even in the absence of supply side shocks. In academic language, we could express this in terms of Rogoff’s conservative central banker (giving less weight to the output gap than the public does), but it also allows bad policy enacted by an incompetent central bank (that does not understand the importance of the output gap) or a malevolent central bank (that wants to achieve its own objectives that may not just involve hitting an inflation target).

There is a nice quote by Duisenberg from February 2003 contained in this paper by Jörg Bibow (page 35) that a comment from an earlier post pointed me to. In discussing what price stability meant, he said it “implies that, in practice, we are more inclined to act when inflation falls below 1% and we are also inclined to act when inflation threatens to exceed 2% in the medium term.” [4] Now Andrew Watt and others would argue that this is not a good reading of the ECB’s actual mandate, but it seems to me a good reading of what they actually do, and it is one that a single rather than a dual mandate helps them to get away with.

So what is the objection to a dual mandate? As it reflects how an academic thinks about monetary policy, it should not lead to suboptimal policy in the hands of an informed and benevolent policy maker. So the fear must be that it will misdirect an uninformed policy maker, and encourage non-benevolent behaviour. The exemplar here is the 1970s, but for reasons I discussed here, I do not think that period should be used as evidence against the dual mandate. I discuss here why I think the standard inflation bias story is also overrated in this respect.

Is there any evidence that the US with its dual mandate has done better compared to inflation targeters? There has been some discussion of that recently (e.g. here and here), although the data analysis is not very sophisticated. [5] Until we see good evidence that having a dual mandate worsens outcomes, then I believe the presumption must be that the dual mandate is better because it reflects the two goals of monetary policy.

My argument here concerns higher level objectives. It is not about how best to achieve those objectives, which is where I would locate questions about the wisdom of nominal GDP targets. It does not address the relative weight that the two objectives should have, or the extent that the objectives should be vague or concrete. My own view is that the benefits of a publicly announced inflation target are overwhelming - indeed so much so that I recently forgot how new this ‘innovation’ was for the Fed. How best to express the goal of matching aggregate demand with supply is more difficult, because of the uncertainties involved in measuring the output gap. However output gap uncertainty is not so great that we should ignore the concept, and so this uncertainty cannot justify a single inflation mandate. There are lots of things in life that are difficult to define, but which are still worth striving for.

[1] See, for example, Brad DeLong here. The reasons for this confusion are interesting, but I have speculated on this elsewhere and do not want to get distracted. Of course none of this implies that the natural level of output and its associated interest rate need be in any sense optimal or efficient, but that should be a different and separable question.

[2] There is nothing mysterious about the natural level of output. It is the output which pretty much every macroeconomist not investigating problems of aggregate demand analyse. It could be called the level of output that comes out of an RBC model, for example. It is often described as the level of output that would occur if prices were completely flexible, and here I do have a quibble, because at a zero lower bound and with inflation targets I cannot see how increasing the flexibility of prices will ensure that output reaches the natural level.

[3]

If monetary policy cannot do this, then fiscal policy can help reduce the output gap. We could describe this as fiscal policy raising the natural interest rate, but an equivalent and more intuitive description is that fiscal policy just raises aggregate demand.

There are plenty of caveats to this econ 101 account, such as the possibility that actual output might have an influence on longer term aggregate supply.

[4] If the implied asymmetric differentiation between actual and possible future here was a slip, I’m tempted to suggest it was a Freudian one.

[5] For example, MPC decisions since the recession have tended to define flexibility as ‘seeing through’ actual inflation and focusing on expected inflation two years out. Inflation targets then become a constraint when the impact of cost-push shocks persist for two years or more.

Myths and Realities of the 1970s

I have been pondering why inflation targeting is so popular, as opposed to the more natural idea of a dual mandate. I say more natural for two reasons. First, because the dual mandate corresponds to the two roles of monetary policy: short run demand management and determining medium/long term inflation. Second, because it maps naturally to the objectives that macroeconomists typically assume or derive when modelling monetary policy: minimising both excess inflation and the output gap.

I think a big reason for the popularity of inflation targeting is the 1970s. A common story for why inflation was allowed to rise so high for so long in that decade is that monetary policy was targeting the output gap, and policy makers got their estimate of the natural rate very wrong. (A classic reference is Orphanides (2002). [1]) A dual mandate, it is suggested, encouraged that mistake, and could lead to the same mistake being made again. So central banks given independence since the 1970s tend to have low inflation or price stability as their primary goal, rather than a dual mandate.

There is an obvious rejoinder to that argument. The US Fed maintains its dual mandate, yet it shows no signs of acquiescing to the kind of increases in inflation we saw in the 1970s. Its latest forward guidance says it will tolerate inflation up to 2.5% (as long as unemployment stays high) before it considers raising interest rates. That is hardly going back to the 1970s. There are people who think that QE will, any moment now, open the inflation floodgates, but I want to keep to serious macro in this post.  

So current experience shows there is no reason why a dual mandate should inevitably lead to rising inflation. I think there were three important contributory factors to what happened in the 1970s that are just not present today. First, our knowledge of inflation output trade-offs, although hardly complete now, was much weaker back then. Second, the Fed and other monetary policy makers did not have clear inflation targets that they were publicly committed to. Third, there appeared to be an alternative instrument for dealing with inflation: direct controls on prices and wages. [Postscript: see comment from Robert Waldmann and my reply below.] The 1970s really was a different world in terms of the understanding of macroeconomic policy.

I’m reminded of all this by a fascinating chapter (released today) in the forthcoming IMF World Economic Outlook. The main focus of the chapter is on how the Phillips curve has shifted over time. There are two clear findings. The first is that the sensitivity of inflation to the output gap is much lower now than in the 1970s. Second, the importance of expectations about future inflation (compared to past inflation) is much greater. An obvious way of interpreting both results is that inflation expectations are now much more firmly anchored.

However the chapter also contains an interesting comparison between the behaviour of 1970s inflation and monetary policy in the United States and Germany. We all know that the US had to wait until Volcker in 1979 before inflation control was restored. However the Bundesbank did this much earlier: inflation was brought down to below 3% in 1978. While it could hardly be immune from the impact of the oil price shocks and high inflation elsewhere, its record in keeping inflation anchored looks much better than other countries. Here is the relevant chart from the chapter.

Now there is a popular story about this as well, which is that the Bundesbank was practicing monetary targeting during this period. But, as the WEO chapter points out, this is also a bit of a myth. Studies suggest [2] that in practice the Bundesbank was not a rigid money supply targeter in the way both the US and UK attempted to be in the early 1980s, but instead adopted a more flexible approach which can be characterised by some form of Taylor rule. Furthermore the output gap played an important role in that rule, and the Bundesbank also got its estimates of the output gap wrong.

To quote from the WEO chapter:

“the Bundesbank’s success was not linked to meticulously meeting the monetary targets, which it actually missed throughout the 1970s, or to focusing on inflation with no regard for output developments. Rather the Bundesbank’s success was a reflection of the robust framework it developed, which allowed it to keep longer-term inflation expectations anchored while flexibly responding to shorter-term output shocks.”

I think you can argue that what monetary targets did was proxy a dual mandate. Inflation would not be allowed to rise unchecked for too long, but equally movements in output would be offset by interest rate changes, in the classic IS-LM manner.

So I think the lesson of the 1970s is that it is important to have publicly stated inflation targets, but not that the short term output stabilisation role should be subordinate to hitting those targets. In the future there will surely be a similar IMF WEO chapter looking back at the divergent behaviour of US and Eurozone output in the 2010s (see Ryan Avent here). I’m sure one of its arguments will be that the US did so much better in part because monetary policy had a dual mandate, while the ECB acted as if all that mattered was inflation.

 

[1] Orphanides, Athanasios, 2002, “Monetary-Policy Rules and the Great Inflation,” American Economic Review, Vol. 92, No. 2, pp. 115–20.

[2] The WEO chapter notes Clarida, R.H. and Gertler, M. (1997) “How the Bundesbank Conducts Monetary Policy” in Reducing Inflation: Motivation and Strategy eds Romer and Romer, Chicago University Press, pp 363-412 and Gerberding, C., Seitz, F. and Worms, A. (2005) “How the Bundesbank Really Conducted Monetary Policy” North American Journal of Economics and Finance, 16, 277-92. The second study reconstructs the real time data set that would have actually been available to policy makers, and finds as a result that it is the change rather than the level of the output gap that was important in their Taylor rule, and that a term in excess money growth is also significant. This slightly earlier paper by Clausen and Meier does something similar, but with results closer to a traditional Taylor rule.