Nick Rowe - Optimism about US recovery - "What matters is the gap between what the market believes will happen and what the market believes the Fed believes will happen. I think we have just such a gap right now. The market believes the Fed is too pessimistic. That creates an upside cumulative process. That's what makes me optimistic."
Tyler Cowen - Bailout and inequality - "In short, there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good. “Going short on volatility” is a dangerous strategy from a social point of view. For one thing, in so-called normal times, the finance sector attracts a big chunk of the smartest, most hard-working and most talented individuals. That represents a huge human capital opportunity cost to society and the economy at large. But more immediate and more important, it means that banks take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in correlated fashion. When their bets turn sour, as they did in 2007–09, everyone else pays the price.
And it’s not just the taxpayer cost of the bailout that stings. The financial disruption ends up throwing a lot of people out of work down the economic food chain, often for long periods. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve System has recapitalized major U.S. banks by paying interest on bank reserves and by keeping an unusually high interest rate spread, which allows banks to borrow short from Treasury at near-zero rates and invest in other higher-yielding assets and earn back lots of money rather quickly. In essence, we’re allowing banks to earn their way back by arbitraging interest rate spreads against the U.S. government. This is rarely called a bailout and it doesn’t count as a normal budget item, but it is a bailout nonetheless. This type of implicit bailout brings high social costs by slowing down economic recovery (the interest rate spreads require tight monetary policy) and by redistributing income from the Treasury to the major banks. <..>
The upshot of all this for our purposes is that the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality. In normal years the financial sector is flush with cash and high earnings. In implosion years a lot of the losses are borne by other sectors of society. In other words, financial crisis begets income inequality. Despite being conceptually distinct phenomena, the political economy of income inequality is, in part, the political economy of finance<..>
Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world."
Paul Krugman - What is money? - "Surely we don’t mean to identify money with pieces of green paper bearing portraits of dead presidents. Even Milton Friedman rejected that, more than half a century ago. For one thing, a lot of those pieces of green paper are pretty much inert — sitting outside the United States, in the hoards of drug dealers and such. For another, checking accounts are clearly a close substitute for cash in hand.
Friedman and Schwartz dealt with this by proposing broader aggregates –M1, which adds checking accounts, and M2, which adds a broader range of deposits. And circa 1960 you could argue that those aggregates were good enough.
But now we have a large shadow banking system, in which things like repo serve much the same function as deposits; M3 used to capture some of that, but the Fed discontinued it, in part I think because it wasn’t clear which repo belonged there, and data on repo not involving primary dealers is scattered. Whatever.
The truth is that these days — with credit cards, electronic money, repo, and more all serving the purpose of medium of exchange — it’s not clear that any single number deserves to be called “the” money supply. Intellectually, this isn’t a problem; nor is there necessarily a problem maintaining monetary policy even if there isn’t any single thing you’re willing to call money."
JTapp - Textbook politics - " I had been using the Mankiw Principles of Macro text for the 2 years I’d been at my current position and decided to adopt his Micro this year in order to bring some symmetry and take advantage of his Aplia sets, etc. But I share Micro with other professors who would also be required to adopt it. One lodged a complaint when a Google search revealed Mankiw is a “New Keynesian,” which immediately raised a flag b/c anything with “Keynes” in it is problematic. Nevermind that the department, including this professor, had been using other New Keynesians, including Mishkin, for years in other classes and I’d been using Mankiw’s macro for years and adopted Ball in the M&B class– Micro was a step to far.
He had our department chair (a marketing professor) take it home to check for subversive material. One of Mankiw’s 10 Principles of Economics being “government can sometimes improve market outcomes” was a red flag. In the end we adopted it b/c they trusted my judgment. In higher education, EVERYTHING is political, maybe worse than proper academia. (I sent the story to Mankiw who found it amusing, he commented that just working at Harvard made him a socialist to many.)"
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Really good links - Global AD - Austrian theory - Germany - A sentence to ponder
Bill Gross - Global aggregate demand - "The global economy is suffering from a lack of aggregate demand. In simple English that means that consumers are not buying enough things and that companies are not hiring enough people because of it. Growth slows down, especially in developed as opposed to developing countries, and the steel mills of Allentown, USA and Sheffield, England close down.
This shortfall of global demand is a nearly impossible concept to grasp amongst politicians and their citizenry. Don’t people always want to buy more things and isn’t demand theoretically insatiable? They do, and it is. Yet economic growth is a delicate dance between production and finance and when a nation’s or a family’s credit card gets maxed out, then demand/spending slows measurably. We are witnessing these commonsensical repercussions across the entire continent of Europe today and to a lesser extent in the United States.
Developing nations and their consumers want to buy things too. And while their economies are growing fast, their overall size is not yet sufficient to pull along the economies of Europe, Japan and the U.S. Their financial systems are still maturing and reminiscent of a spindly-legged baby giraffe, having lots of upward potential, but still striving for balance after a series of missteps, the most recent of which was the trio of the 1997–98 Asian crisis, the 1998 Russian default and the 2001 Argentine default. And so their policies are oriented towards export to debt-laden developed nations instead of internal consumption, leaving a gaping hole in global aggregate demand. China is a locomotive to be sure, but it cannot pull the global economy uphill on the basis of mercantilistic exports alone. It needs to develop many more of its own shopping malls and that will take years, if not decades."
Steve Randy Waldman - Austrian hangover theory - "Austrian-ish “hangover theory” claims, plausibly, that if for some reason the economy has been geared to production that was feasible and highly valued in previous periods, but which now is no longer feasible or highly valued, there will be a slump in production. It wisely asks us to consider not only the prosperity we measure today, but the sustainability of that prosperity going forward. I am not “Austrian”, and have no interest in defending specific claims regarding the roundaboutness of activity or the role of central banks in causing bursts of quasiprosperity. But as Brad DeLong wisely reminds us, it is good to be somewhat catholic in our evaluation of macroeconomic schools, and to take what is useful from each. I consider myself Keynesian at least as much as I am Austrian, but I recognize good and not-so-good offshoots of both schools. (Austrian and Keynesian ideas are more complementary than most people acknowledge. The Austrians focus on unsustainable arrangements of real capital, while the Keynesians focus on unsustainable arrangements with respect to money, debt, savings, and income. I think both approaches are fruitful.)<..>
At an individual level the correlation between past consumption and recent unemployment is obviously negative. The people who have sinned are not by and large the people being punished. Some people overconsumed relative to their income, and some people invested poorly. Those who overconsumed have mostly faced consequences for their misbehavior — they are either deeply in debt, or they have endured foreclosure or bankruptcy. But the people who invested absurdly, especially “savers” who lent money but permitted themselves ignorance and indifference to how their wealth would be mismanaged, have not suffered the costs of their recklessness. Instead, they have been almost entirely bailed out. It is lenders and investors more than any other group who determine the patterns of our macroeconomy. There are always people willing to overconsume or gamble on foolish enterprises. We do and must rely upon those with resources to steward to ensure those resources are used wisely. They did not, and their recklessness has brought us to catastrophe. But rather than condemn them for negligence and permit their claims to be appropriately devalued, we applaud them for “prudence” and let government action be bound by commitments to sustain their destructive and ridiculous claims. You don’t counter that sort of villainy with technocratic arguments about liquidity traps. You point out that the motherfuckers who are calling themselves prudent, who are blocking both writedowns and government action that might risk inflation, are hypocrites and thieves. You state clearly that their claims are illegitimate and will be written down one way or another, unless we can generate sufficient growth to ratify them ex post, which would require claimants to behave less like indignant creditors and more like constructive equityholders. It is not technocratic economists who will win the day and pull us out of our cul-de-sac, but angry Irishmen and Spaniards who challenge, on moral terms, the right of German bankers to impose vast deadweight costs on current activity because they lent greedily into what might easily have been recognized as a property and credit bubble."
Daniel Pfaendler - German view - "What we should not forget though is that a) just as the peripheral countries were profiting from very low real yields during the past decade amid the German economic malaise, Germany suffered from too high real yields amid the periphery's boom which rendered its economic weakness even worse and most importantly b) if Germany would not have done the corporate restructuring/budget consolidation/structural reforms, the German economy would be in a much worse shape at present."
Michael - A sentence to ponder - "Most people are libertarian with regards to their own lives and people they like, statist with regards to people they don't know, and positively fascist about people they dislike, stereotype, or don't understand."
This shortfall of global demand is a nearly impossible concept to grasp amongst politicians and their citizenry. Don’t people always want to buy more things and isn’t demand theoretically insatiable? They do, and it is. Yet economic growth is a delicate dance between production and finance and when a nation’s or a family’s credit card gets maxed out, then demand/spending slows measurably. We are witnessing these commonsensical repercussions across the entire continent of Europe today and to a lesser extent in the United States.
Developing nations and their consumers want to buy things too. And while their economies are growing fast, their overall size is not yet sufficient to pull along the economies of Europe, Japan and the U.S. Their financial systems are still maturing and reminiscent of a spindly-legged baby giraffe, having lots of upward potential, but still striving for balance after a series of missteps, the most recent of which was the trio of the 1997–98 Asian crisis, the 1998 Russian default and the 2001 Argentine default. And so their policies are oriented towards export to debt-laden developed nations instead of internal consumption, leaving a gaping hole in global aggregate demand. China is a locomotive to be sure, but it cannot pull the global economy uphill on the basis of mercantilistic exports alone. It needs to develop many more of its own shopping malls and that will take years, if not decades."
Steve Randy Waldman - Austrian hangover theory - "Austrian-ish “hangover theory” claims, plausibly, that if for some reason the economy has been geared to production that was feasible and highly valued in previous periods, but which now is no longer feasible or highly valued, there will be a slump in production. It wisely asks us to consider not only the prosperity we measure today, but the sustainability of that prosperity going forward. I am not “Austrian”, and have no interest in defending specific claims regarding the roundaboutness of activity or the role of central banks in causing bursts of quasiprosperity. But as Brad DeLong wisely reminds us, it is good to be somewhat catholic in our evaluation of macroeconomic schools, and to take what is useful from each. I consider myself Keynesian at least as much as I am Austrian, but I recognize good and not-so-good offshoots of both schools. (Austrian and Keynesian ideas are more complementary than most people acknowledge. The Austrians focus on unsustainable arrangements of real capital, while the Keynesians focus on unsustainable arrangements with respect to money, debt, savings, and income. I think both approaches are fruitful.)<..>
At an individual level the correlation between past consumption and recent unemployment is obviously negative. The people who have sinned are not by and large the people being punished. Some people overconsumed relative to their income, and some people invested poorly. Those who overconsumed have mostly faced consequences for their misbehavior — they are either deeply in debt, or they have endured foreclosure or bankruptcy. But the people who invested absurdly, especially “savers” who lent money but permitted themselves ignorance and indifference to how their wealth would be mismanaged, have not suffered the costs of their recklessness. Instead, they have been almost entirely bailed out. It is lenders and investors more than any other group who determine the patterns of our macroeconomy. There are always people willing to overconsume or gamble on foolish enterprises. We do and must rely upon those with resources to steward to ensure those resources are used wisely. They did not, and their recklessness has brought us to catastrophe. But rather than condemn them for negligence and permit their claims to be appropriately devalued, we applaud them for “prudence” and let government action be bound by commitments to sustain their destructive and ridiculous claims. You don’t counter that sort of villainy with technocratic arguments about liquidity traps. You point out that the motherfuckers who are calling themselves prudent, who are blocking both writedowns and government action that might risk inflation, are hypocrites and thieves. You state clearly that their claims are illegitimate and will be written down one way or another, unless we can generate sufficient growth to ratify them ex post, which would require claimants to behave less like indignant creditors and more like constructive equityholders. It is not technocratic economists who will win the day and pull us out of our cul-de-sac, but angry Irishmen and Spaniards who challenge, on moral terms, the right of German bankers to impose vast deadweight costs on current activity because they lent greedily into what might easily have been recognized as a property and credit bubble."
Daniel Pfaendler - German view - "What we should not forget though is that a) just as the peripheral countries were profiting from very low real yields during the past decade amid the German economic malaise, Germany suffered from too high real yields amid the periphery's boom which rendered its economic weakness even worse and most importantly b) if Germany would not have done the corporate restructuring/budget consolidation/structural reforms, the German economy would be in a much worse shape at present."
Michael - A sentence to ponder - "Most people are libertarian with regards to their own lives and people they like, statist with regards to people they don't know, and positively fascist about people they dislike, stereotype, or don't understand."
Payroll tax holiday and the credit channel
Bryan Caplan says Obama has botched the payroll tax holiday:
I have an alternative interpretation. It is true that if you cut a tax on employees, you do very little to directly correct the labor market imbalances. However, the poor functioning of the labor market was caused by the insufficiently stimulative monetary policy that is constrained by the zero bound on interest rates. The zero interest rate bound creates the most damage to those economic agents who have the weakest balance sheets. And these days the household balance sheets are the weakest. Weak household balance sheets are pushing the optimal fed funds rate down to the negative levels. If you cut a tax on employees, you relax the credit constraints on household balance sheets, and the day when the zero interest rate bound is no longer constraining Bernanke will arrive sooner.
In late 2008 - early 2009 balance sheets of non-financial corporations were very weak, so Bryan Caplan's logic would have worked then very well. But today Obama's payroll tax holiday is the solution that will have the most powerful effect.
"If you cut a tax on employers, this reduces labor costs, increases the quantity of labor demanded, and reduces surplus labor. If you cut a tax on employees, in contrast, this increases worker compensation, increases the quantity of labor supplied, and increases surplus labor.
In both cases, admittedly, a tax cut might directly increase demand and, with nominal wage rigidity, increase employment. But when you cut taxes on employers, the incentive effect and the fiscal effect work in the same direction. When you cut taxes on employees, the incentive effect and the fiscal effect work in opposite directions.
That's why Obama's proposed payroll tax holiday botches an idea of truly Singaporean cleverness. Instead of giving the tax cut to employers, where it would do the maximum good, or splitting it evenly, where it would do intermediate good, he's giving all of it to employees, where it does the minimum good"
I have an alternative interpretation. It is true that if you cut a tax on employees, you do very little to directly correct the labor market imbalances. However, the poor functioning of the labor market was caused by the insufficiently stimulative monetary policy that is constrained by the zero bound on interest rates. The zero interest rate bound creates the most damage to those economic agents who have the weakest balance sheets. And these days the household balance sheets are the weakest. Weak household balance sheets are pushing the optimal fed funds rate down to the negative levels. If you cut a tax on employees, you relax the credit constraints on household balance sheets, and the day when the zero interest rate bound is no longer constraining Bernanke will arrive sooner.
In late 2008 - early 2009 balance sheets of non-financial corporations were very weak, so Bryan Caplan's logic would have worked then very well. But today Obama's payroll tax holiday is the solution that will have the most powerful effect.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Ireland - Greece - Fiscal vs. monetary policy - Eurozone - Overconsumption and recessions
Barry Eichengreen - Ireland - "The Irish “program” solves exactly nothing – it simply kicks the can down the road. A public debt that will now top out at around 130 per cent of GDP has not been reduced by a single cent. The interest payments that the Irish sovereign will have to make have not been reduced by a single cent, given the rate of 5.8% on the international loan. After a couple of years, not just interest but also principal is supposed to begin to be repaid. Ireland will be transferring nearly 10 per cent of its national income as reparations to the bondholders, year after painful year.
This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know. A populist backlash is inevitable. <..>
For internal devaluation to work, therefore, the value of debts, expressed in euros, has to be reduced. This would have been particularly easy in the Irish case. A bright red line could have been drawn between the third of the government debt that guarantees the obligations of the banks, on the one hand, and the rest of the government’s debt, on the other. The third representing the debts of the Irish banking system could have been restructured. Bondholders could have been offered 20 cents on the euro, assuming that the Irish banks still have some residual economic value."
John Dizard - Greece - "The Greeks and their advisers are already much further along in their thinking than euro-officialdom. They realise that reaching a “successful” conclusion of the three-year adjustment process agreed with the euro leaders would be a disaster for their balance sheet. As Greek bonds mature over that period, they are paid off in large part with new borrowings from Europe and the IMF, as well as with Greek banks’ discounting bond purchases with the ECB. That means Greece is exchanging outstanding debt that is legally and logistically easy to restructure on favourable terms with debt that is difficult or impossible to restructure. It’s as if they were borrowing from a Mafia loan shark to repay an advance from their grandmother."
Narayana Kocherlakota - Fiscal policy vs. Monetary policy - "I believe that QE is a move in the right direction. However, as I have discussed on earlier occasions, I also think there are good reasons to suspect that the ultimate effects of any amount of QE are likely to be relatively modest. That’s why I would have greatly preferred for the committee to have been able to cut its target rate rather than using QE. The problem is that its target rate is already essentially at zero, and so it was not possible to cut the target rate any further.
Given this constraint on monetary policy, I believe it is important to ask if it is possible to synthesize the effects of a one-year interest rate cut of, say, 100 basis points using fiscal policy tools. In his current and past work, Minneapolis Fed staff researcher Juan Pablo Nicolini and his co-authors have answered this question in the affirmative. Their key insight is that there is a broad equivalence between monetary and fiscal policy. They argue that the essence of an FOMC interest rate cut is that it makes current consumption cheaper relative to future consumption. With that in mind, the fiscal authorities can use the time path of consumption taxes to accomplish this same change in relative prices.
In the remainder of my remarks, I’ll illustrate this insight by describing one particular fiscal policy plan that is equivalent to a 100-basis-point cut by the Fed. The proposal has three parts. The first part is a permanent consumption tax of 100 basis points, instituted with a one-year delay. The second part is a permanent decrease in labor income taxes of 100 basis points, also instituted with a one-year delay. The third part is an investment tax credit undertaken in 2011. The Nicolini et al. results demonstrate that, in a wide class of economic models, the effects of this three-part plan would be equivalent to the effects of a 100-basis-point interest rate cut."
Tyler Cowen - Eurozone - "Fiscal union was, is, and will remain a fantasy. The best the eurozone could have done was to abolish national banking systems and have a truly European banking market. It's too late for even that, though."
Karl Smith - Overconsumption theory of recessions
This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know. A populist backlash is inevitable. <..>
For internal devaluation to work, therefore, the value of debts, expressed in euros, has to be reduced. This would have been particularly easy in the Irish case. A bright red line could have been drawn between the third of the government debt that guarantees the obligations of the banks, on the one hand, and the rest of the government’s debt, on the other. The third representing the debts of the Irish banking system could have been restructured. Bondholders could have been offered 20 cents on the euro, assuming that the Irish banks still have some residual economic value."
John Dizard - Greece - "The Greeks and their advisers are already much further along in their thinking than euro-officialdom. They realise that reaching a “successful” conclusion of the three-year adjustment process agreed with the euro leaders would be a disaster for their balance sheet. As Greek bonds mature over that period, they are paid off in large part with new borrowings from Europe and the IMF, as well as with Greek banks’ discounting bond purchases with the ECB. That means Greece is exchanging outstanding debt that is legally and logistically easy to restructure on favourable terms with debt that is difficult or impossible to restructure. It’s as if they were borrowing from a Mafia loan shark to repay an advance from their grandmother."
Narayana Kocherlakota - Fiscal policy vs. Monetary policy - "I believe that QE is a move in the right direction. However, as I have discussed on earlier occasions, I also think there are good reasons to suspect that the ultimate effects of any amount of QE are likely to be relatively modest. That’s why I would have greatly preferred for the committee to have been able to cut its target rate rather than using QE. The problem is that its target rate is already essentially at zero, and so it was not possible to cut the target rate any further.
Given this constraint on monetary policy, I believe it is important to ask if it is possible to synthesize the effects of a one-year interest rate cut of, say, 100 basis points using fiscal policy tools. In his current and past work, Minneapolis Fed staff researcher Juan Pablo Nicolini and his co-authors have answered this question in the affirmative. Their key insight is that there is a broad equivalence between monetary and fiscal policy. They argue that the essence of an FOMC interest rate cut is that it makes current consumption cheaper relative to future consumption. With that in mind, the fiscal authorities can use the time path of consumption taxes to accomplish this same change in relative prices.
In the remainder of my remarks, I’ll illustrate this insight by describing one particular fiscal policy plan that is equivalent to a 100-basis-point cut by the Fed. The proposal has three parts. The first part is a permanent consumption tax of 100 basis points, instituted with a one-year delay. The second part is a permanent decrease in labor income taxes of 100 basis points, also instituted with a one-year delay. The third part is an investment tax credit undertaken in 2011. The Nicolini et al. results demonstrate that, in a wide class of economic models, the effects of this three-part plan would be equivalent to the effects of a 100-basis-point interest rate cut."
Tyler Cowen - Eurozone - "Fiscal union was, is, and will remain a fantasy. The best the eurozone could have done was to abolish national banking systems and have a truly European banking market. It's too late for even that, though."
Karl Smith - Overconsumption theory of recessions
Monday, November 29, 2010
Really good links - Uncertainty and AD - Cash is the king - Interest on reserves - Tea party
Brad DeLong - Uncertainty and aggregate demand - "The future is always uncertain--and how uncertain it is fluctuates. When the future is more than unusually uncertain, economic players want the security of extra financial asset holdings before they are willing to spend to put people to work. It is, then, the business of the government to make sure that they have the amount and the kinds of financial assets they need to sleep easily. That was one of the insights of John Maynard Keynes. That was one of the insights of Milton Friedman."
Jeremy Grantham - Cash is the king - "We've already started to sell [stocks]. We're not even— averagely weighted. We're modestly underweighted. And you must remember bonds are even worse than stocks on a seven-year forecast. So, you get caught in this paradox. It's very tempting— and this is what the Fed wants by the way.
It wants us to go out there and buy stocks, which are overpriced because bonds they have manipulated into being even less attractive. So, we’re being forced to choose between two overpriced assets. That is not always a terrific choice to make because there is a third choice, and that is don't play the game and hold money in cash.
And cash has a— a virtue that people don't appreciate fully. And that is its— its optionality. In other words, if anything crashes and burns in value— say the U.S. stock market, if you have no resources, it doesn't help you. If the bond market crashes, and you have no resources, it doesn't help you. And what cash is is an available resource. It buys you the right to buy the U.S. market if the S&P drops from 1,220 today to 900, which is what we think is fair value."
Mark Thoma - Interest on reserves - "There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Fed’s policy of paying interest on reserves with many claiming that this has caused banks to retain reserves that might have otherwise been turned into loans, and thus the policy has depressed aggregate activity. However, paying interest on reserves is a safety net for the Fed that allowed them to do QEI and QEII. If the Fed wasn’t paying interest on reserves, QEI would have likely been smaller, and QEII may not have happened at all. <..>
The tool the Fed has for removing reserves from the system is open market operations (QEI and QEII are essentially traditional open market operations, but the Fed buys long-term rather than the more traditional short-term financial assets). So why do they need another tool — interest on reserves — to control reserves? Removing reserves too fast through open market operations could disrupt financial markets. Paying interest on reserves gives the Fed a way to remove reserves in a more leisurely fashion while still maintaining control over inflation."
Steve Landsburg - Cut agencies - "Like I said, cut agencies. And cut them in bunches, to dilute opposition. As I’ve said before on this blog, the department of commerce steals from workers and farmers to subsidize businesses; the department of agriculture steals from workers and businesses to subsidize farmers, and the department of labor steals from businesses and farmers to subsidize workers. Eliminate them all at once and every American will lose one friend and two enemies."
Jeremy Grantham - Cash is the king - "We've already started to sell [stocks]. We're not even— averagely weighted. We're modestly underweighted. And you must remember bonds are even worse than stocks on a seven-year forecast. So, you get caught in this paradox. It's very tempting— and this is what the Fed wants by the way.
It wants us to go out there and buy stocks, which are overpriced because bonds they have manipulated into being even less attractive. So, we’re being forced to choose between two overpriced assets. That is not always a terrific choice to make because there is a third choice, and that is don't play the game and hold money in cash.
And cash has a— a virtue that people don't appreciate fully. And that is its— its optionality. In other words, if anything crashes and burns in value— say the U.S. stock market, if you have no resources, it doesn't help you. If the bond market crashes, and you have no resources, it doesn't help you. And what cash is is an available resource. It buys you the right to buy the U.S. market if the S&P drops from 1,220 today to 900, which is what we think is fair value."
Mark Thoma - Interest on reserves - "There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Fed’s policy of paying interest on reserves with many claiming that this has caused banks to retain reserves that might have otherwise been turned into loans, and thus the policy has depressed aggregate activity. However, paying interest on reserves is a safety net for the Fed that allowed them to do QEI and QEII. If the Fed wasn’t paying interest on reserves, QEI would have likely been smaller, and QEII may not have happened at all. <..>
The tool the Fed has for removing reserves from the system is open market operations (QEI and QEII are essentially traditional open market operations, but the Fed buys long-term rather than the more traditional short-term financial assets). So why do they need another tool — interest on reserves — to control reserves? Removing reserves too fast through open market operations could disrupt financial markets. Paying interest on reserves gives the Fed a way to remove reserves in a more leisurely fashion while still maintaining control over inflation."
Steve Landsburg - Cut agencies - "Like I said, cut agencies. And cut them in bunches, to dilute opposition. As I’ve said before on this blog, the department of commerce steals from workers and farmers to subsidize businesses; the department of agriculture steals from workers and businesses to subsidize farmers, and the department of labor steals from businesses and farmers to subsidize workers. Eliminate them all at once and every American will lose one friend and two enemies."
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Really good links - Case against the Fed - Fiscal democracy - IOR - Bernanke and Palin - EMU - Boom-bust-bailout
Tyler Cowen - The case against the Fed is weak - "To whatever extent we can do without a Fed, it's because there are so many Treasury securities, which should be a sobering thought to a market-oriented perspective. If the Fed were shut down, over time the new base money would not be gold, "Hayeks," or a commodity bundle. It would be T-Bills. We would have achieved the full integration of the monetary and fiscal authority but to what useful end? (Better not balance the budget!) The real question is whether the Treasury should be the Fed or whether the Fed should be the Fed, but you won't often see it framed that way."
John McDermott - Democracy as a solution for fiscal crisis - "Imagine that in country X, measure A receives 90 per cent support in parliament but measure B squeezes through with only 51 per cent. The bond issued to pay for measure A is given seniority. Its holders get paid before those with the bond behind measure B. (If measure C then receives 98 per cent support it would trump A, and so on.)
[Hans Gerbach of the ETH says:] Vote-share government bonds align the strength of the political support for particular government activities with the pledge to repay debt. This is desirable in its own right, as voting for debt-financed government expenditures is connected to the willingness to repay. Accordingly, it may have a favourable effect on deliberation in democracy by linking debt-financing with repayment promises when political debates about new government expenditures take place."
Bill Woolsey - Interest on reserves and inflation - "Murphy does make an odd error when discussing the possible strategy of the Fed paying higher interest on reserves. He says that investors will figure out that an exponential increase in reserves will hardly allow the Fed to control inflation. Now, suppose the expected inflation rate does rise to 10 percent and that a 12 percent interest rate is needed so that the demand for reserves will be high enough so that the demand for base money remains $2.6 trillion. Murphy seems to imagine that since each reserve balance would increase by 12 percent each year, base money would rise at a 12 percent annual rate. No. The Fed would simply have to sell between $200 billion and $300 billion in assets each year to leave base money the same. Rather than having to sell off $1.8 trillion in assets post haste, they could sell much fewer assets and prevent any excess inflation."
Scott Sumner - Ben Bernanke and Sarah Palin - "The reason QE worked was not the operation itself (which I agree does little or nothing) but rather because it tells the market that the Fed is now more serious about boosting long term prices and NGDP. In other words they are now willing to leave that base money out there long enough to get closer to their implicit inflation target. The Fed was afraid to directly call for higher inflation (something Krugman thinks could work) so they spoke in code, hoping the markets would understand them but Sarah Palin would not. Unfortunately for Bernanke, Sarah Palin has advisers who know exactly what the Fed was up to. "
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Way out for EMU - "A reader asked me this week whether there is any graceful way to avoid this coming chain of disasters.
Yes, there are two options, neither entirely graceful. The European Central Bank can print money like a drunken sailor, flood the bond markets with €2 trillion, and tank the euro against China’s yuan for good measure.
If the Germans refuse to accept this, they should abandon EMU at once, leaving France and southern Europe with the residual euro and the institutions of monetary union. Existing euro debt contracts would be upheld. Germany would revalue – alone or with Finns, Dutch, etc - so holders of Bunds would enjoy a windfall gain.
France could revive the Latin Union of the late 19th Century, a more benign venture than the Máquina Infernal now asphyxiating Portugal, and deflating Spain.
Any better ideas out there?"
Simon Johnson - Boom-Bust-Bailout - "In “The Quiet Coup,” published in Atlantic magazine in May 2009, I compared the U.S. economic boom-bust-bailout cycle to what has become typical in emerging middle-income countries such as Russia, Argentina or Indonesia. Just don’t think these problems are limited to emerging markets.
There is a much more general or global phenomenon in which powerful people cooperate to build an economic model that provides growth based on a great deal of debt. When the crisis comes, those who control the state try to save their favorite oligarchs, but there aren’t enough resources to go around."
John McDermott - Democracy as a solution for fiscal crisis - "Imagine that in country X, measure A receives 90 per cent support in parliament but measure B squeezes through with only 51 per cent. The bond issued to pay for measure A is given seniority. Its holders get paid before those with the bond behind measure B. (If measure C then receives 98 per cent support it would trump A, and so on.)
[Hans Gerbach of the ETH says:] Vote-share government bonds align the strength of the political support for particular government activities with the pledge to repay debt. This is desirable in its own right, as voting for debt-financed government expenditures is connected to the willingness to repay. Accordingly, it may have a favourable effect on deliberation in democracy by linking debt-financing with repayment promises when political debates about new government expenditures take place."
Bill Woolsey - Interest on reserves and inflation - "Murphy does make an odd error when discussing the possible strategy of the Fed paying higher interest on reserves. He says that investors will figure out that an exponential increase in reserves will hardly allow the Fed to control inflation. Now, suppose the expected inflation rate does rise to 10 percent and that a 12 percent interest rate is needed so that the demand for reserves will be high enough so that the demand for base money remains $2.6 trillion. Murphy seems to imagine that since each reserve balance would increase by 12 percent each year, base money would rise at a 12 percent annual rate. No. The Fed would simply have to sell between $200 billion and $300 billion in assets each year to leave base money the same. Rather than having to sell off $1.8 trillion in assets post haste, they could sell much fewer assets and prevent any excess inflation."
Scott Sumner - Ben Bernanke and Sarah Palin - "The reason QE worked was not the operation itself (which I agree does little or nothing) but rather because it tells the market that the Fed is now more serious about boosting long term prices and NGDP. In other words they are now willing to leave that base money out there long enough to get closer to their implicit inflation target. The Fed was afraid to directly call for higher inflation (something Krugman thinks could work) so they spoke in code, hoping the markets would understand them but Sarah Palin would not. Unfortunately for Bernanke, Sarah Palin has advisers who know exactly what the Fed was up to. "
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Way out for EMU - "A reader asked me this week whether there is any graceful way to avoid this coming chain of disasters.
Yes, there are two options, neither entirely graceful. The European Central Bank can print money like a drunken sailor, flood the bond markets with €2 trillion, and tank the euro against China’s yuan for good measure.
If the Germans refuse to accept this, they should abandon EMU at once, leaving France and southern Europe with the residual euro and the institutions of monetary union. Existing euro debt contracts would be upheld. Germany would revalue – alone or with Finns, Dutch, etc - so holders of Bunds would enjoy a windfall gain.
France could revive the Latin Union of the late 19th Century, a more benign venture than the Máquina Infernal now asphyxiating Portugal, and deflating Spain.
Any better ideas out there?"
Simon Johnson - Boom-Bust-Bailout - "In “The Quiet Coup,” published in Atlantic magazine in May 2009, I compared the U.S. economic boom-bust-bailout cycle to what has become typical in emerging middle-income countries such as Russia, Argentina or Indonesia. Just don’t think these problems are limited to emerging markets.
There is a much more general or global phenomenon in which powerful people cooperate to build an economic model that provides growth based on a great deal of debt. When the crisis comes, those who control the state try to save their favorite oligarchs, but there aren’t enough resources to go around."
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Really good links - Sovereign default - Brad DeLong and Larry Summers - No Trade Theorem - Austrian zero bound - Billion prices - Interest elasticity
Simon Johnson and Peter Boone - Sovereign default - "The Germans should recall the last episode of widespread sovereign default – Latin America in the 1970’s. That experience showed that countries default when the costs are lower than the benefits. Recent German statements have pushed key European countries decisively closer to that point. <..>
Bond-market participants naturally turn now to calculating “recovery values” – what creditors will get if countries default today. For example, Greece’s debt stock, including required bridge financing under the IMF program, should peak at around 150% of GNP in 2014; much of this debt is external. If a country can support debt totaling 80% of GNP (a rough but reasonable rule of thumb), then we need approximately 50% “haircuts” on this existing and forthcoming debt (reducing it to 75% of its nominal value).
However, of this 150% of GNP, at least half is or will be official in some form. If it is fully protected, as seems likely (the IMF always gets paid in full), then the haircut on private debt rises to an eye-popping 90%. And this leaves out government spending that may be needed for further recapitalization of Greek banks."
Robert Waldman - Brad DeLong and Larry Summers - "You [DeLong] thought the problem was George Bush not Joe Cassano. You thought the fundamental problem with the US economy was the huge federal budget deficit. You thought the crisis would come when the People's Bank of China got tired of throwing good money after bad and let the dollar collapse and US long term interest rates shoot up.
Why did you think this (aside from evidence and logic) ? Well you are much inclined to think that the Clinton economic team did a very good job. So you are much inclined to think that Bush did a terrible job. Also you can't stand him.
The idea high deficits cause high real interest rates which are terrible for growth is very dear to you (not to mention overwhelmingly supported by massive evidence).
I think this is also true of Larry Summers. He put Harvard's money where his mouth was. He bet on high interest rates on US Treasuries. That most definitely was not because he thought that Greenspan could control everything. That was because he was sure that Bush would cause a catastrophe not just by neglecting dangerous Wall Street developments but by undoing the great work of Clinton, Bentson, Rubin and Summers."
Alex Tabarrok - No Trade Theorem
Tweet of the day - Garrett Jones - "In Austrian term-structure-of-capital theory, the zero nominal bound would seem particularly perilous."
James Hamilton - Billion prices project
Jeremy Grantham - Interest elasticity of consumption - "And let me point out that the Fed's actions are taking money away from retirees.
They're the guys, and near retirees, who want to part their money on something safe as they near retirement. And they're offered minus after-inflation adjustment. There's no return at all. And where does that money go? It goes to relate the banks so that they're well capitalized again. Even though they were the people who exacerbated our problems.
And, hopefully, the redeeming feature in that infamous trade is that your corporations go out there, borrow money, build factories, hire people, which they're not doing because consumption is weak and because they were also terrified by the crunch. I— I think, therefore, under these conditions, low rates is actually hurting the economy. It's taking more money away from people who would have spent it —retirees — than are being spent by passing it on to financial enterprises and being distributed as bonuses to people who are rich and, therefore, save more."
Bond-market participants naturally turn now to calculating “recovery values” – what creditors will get if countries default today. For example, Greece’s debt stock, including required bridge financing under the IMF program, should peak at around 150% of GNP in 2014; much of this debt is external. If a country can support debt totaling 80% of GNP (a rough but reasonable rule of thumb), then we need approximately 50% “haircuts” on this existing and forthcoming debt (reducing it to 75% of its nominal value).
However, of this 150% of GNP, at least half is or will be official in some form. If it is fully protected, as seems likely (the IMF always gets paid in full), then the haircut on private debt rises to an eye-popping 90%. And this leaves out government spending that may be needed for further recapitalization of Greek banks."
Robert Waldman - Brad DeLong and Larry Summers - "You [DeLong] thought the problem was George Bush not Joe Cassano. You thought the fundamental problem with the US economy was the huge federal budget deficit. You thought the crisis would come when the People's Bank of China got tired of throwing good money after bad and let the dollar collapse and US long term interest rates shoot up.
Why did you think this (aside from evidence and logic) ? Well you are much inclined to think that the Clinton economic team did a very good job. So you are much inclined to think that Bush did a terrible job. Also you can't stand him.
The idea high deficits cause high real interest rates which are terrible for growth is very dear to you (not to mention overwhelmingly supported by massive evidence).
I think this is also true of Larry Summers. He put Harvard's money where his mouth was. He bet on high interest rates on US Treasuries. That most definitely was not because he thought that Greenspan could control everything. That was because he was sure that Bush would cause a catastrophe not just by neglecting dangerous Wall Street developments but by undoing the great work of Clinton, Bentson, Rubin and Summers."
Alex Tabarrok - No Trade Theorem
Tweet of the day - Garrett Jones - "In Austrian term-structure-of-capital theory, the zero nominal bound would seem particularly perilous."
James Hamilton - Billion prices project
Jeremy Grantham - Interest elasticity of consumption - "And let me point out that the Fed's actions are taking money away from retirees.
They're the guys, and near retirees, who want to part their money on something safe as they near retirement. And they're offered minus after-inflation adjustment. There's no return at all. And where does that money go? It goes to relate the banks so that they're well capitalized again. Even though they were the people who exacerbated our problems.
And, hopefully, the redeeming feature in that infamous trade is that your corporations go out there, borrow money, build factories, hire people, which they're not doing because consumption is weak and because they were also terrified by the crunch. I— I think, therefore, under these conditions, low rates is actually hurting the economy. It's taking more money away from people who would have spent it —retirees — than are being spent by passing it on to financial enterprises and being distributed as bonuses to people who are rich and, therefore, save more."
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