Tag: monetary policy

Ben Bernanke Doesn’t Get the Message

By James Kwak

I was on vacation last week (far from Jackson Hole) when Ben Bernanke gave his widely anticipated speech. The media (see the Times, for example) seemed to focus mainly on his criticisms of the political branches and economic policymaking, which were accurate enough. But in my opinion, Bernanke drew the wrong lessons from those observations.

He was very clear that the problem today is unemployment, not inflation:

“Recent data have indicated that economic growth during the first half of this year was considerably slower than the Federal Open Market Committee had been expecting, and that temporary factors can account for only a portion of the economic weakness that we have observed. Consequently, although we expect a moderate recovery to continue and indeed to strengthen over time, the Committee has marked down its outlook for the likely pace of growth over coming quarters. With commodity prices and other import prices moderating and with longer-term inflation expectations remaining stable, we expect inflation to settle, over coming quarters, at levels at or below the rate of 2 percent, or a bit less, that most Committee participants view as being consistent with our dual mandate.”

Continue reading “Ben Bernanke Doesn’t Get the Message” →

A Foray into Monetary Policy and Tangentially Related Speculations

By James Kwak

Yesterday I wrote an Atlantic column about the bizarre situation that the Federal Reserve is in. Ordinarily, we think central bank independence is important because it permits the bank to take unpopular, anti-growth steps when the political branches of government want popular, pro-growth steps. But today we’re in Bizarro world: the political branches are intent on strangling the economy, so the Fed should be ignoring the political winds and stimulating the economy—especially since it’s clear that fiscal policy is off the table. Rick Perry just provided a last-minute dose of color.

Obviously Perry and the Republicans don’t want the Fed to stimulate the economy because they don’t want the economy to recover before the 2012 elections. But I think there’s something deeper here, which Mike Konczal gets at in this great post. Konczal summarizes the nineteenth-century gold-standard ideology this way: “Paper money decreases the power of the husband over his wife and the father over his family, loosens the natural leadership that serves as the best protection against ‘effeminate’ manners, and gives us a democracy without nobility.”

Continue reading “A Foray into Monetary Policy and Tangentially Related Speculations” →

Paul Ryan Criticizes Bernanke for Failing to Contain Tooth Fairy

By James Kwak

In a Congressional hearing today, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), chair of the House Budget Committee, strongly criticized Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke for failing to contain the severe inflation threat posed by the Tooth Fairy.

Ryan pointed to numerous studies showing that, despite ongoing economic sluggishness, the Tooth Fairy is paying much more for children’s baby teeth than in past years. In neighborhoods such as Winnetka, Cleveland Park, the Upper East Side, and Palo Alto, children can receive more than $20 per tooth — a dramatic increase from the 25-50 cents that the Tooth Fairy paid only a decade or two ago. In the Hamptons, summertime prices for teeth can easily exceed $100, according to a survey commissioned by the American Enterprise Institute.* Because the Tooth Fairy is able to create money magically, her purchases of unused teeth (with no apparent economic value**) increase the money supply, fueling inflation. Without explicitly accusing Bernanke of participation in the Tooth Fairy’s scheme, Ryan implied that the Tooth Fairy’s higher payouts may be part of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing scheme.

Continue reading “Paul Ryan Criticizes Bernanke for Failing to Contain Tooth Fairy” →

No to Bernanke

The American Economics Association is meeting in Atlanta, where Simon says it is frigid. I went to an early-January conference in Atlanta once. There was a quarter-inch of snow, the roads turned to ice, and everything closed. All flights were canceled, so I and some friends ended up taking the train to Washington, DC, which had gotten two feet of snow, and eventually to New York.

Paul Krugman’s speaking notes are here. Ben Bernanke’s are here.

Bernanke’s speech is largely a defense of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy in the past decade, and therefore of the old Greenspan Doctrine dating back to the 1996 “irrational exuberance” speech–the idea that monetary policy is not the right tool for fighting bubbles. The Fed has gotten a lot of criticism saying that cheap money earlier this decade created the housing bubble, and I think it certainly played a role.

Continue reading “No to Bernanke” →

Fed Chest-Thumping for Beginners

I generally avoid writing about monetary policy, since every economics course I’ve taken since college has been a micro course, and besides Simon is a macroeconomist, among other things. But since just about everyone in my RSS feed has been linking to Tim Duy’s recent article on the Fed, I thought I would try to put in context for all of us who don’t understand Fed-speak.

Duy takes as his starting point a series of statements by Fed governors and bank presidents indicating “hawkishness,” which in central banker jargon means caring primarily about inflation, not economic growth. (“Doves” are those who care more about economic growth and jobs, although, just like in the national security context, no one likes to be known as a dove. This itself is a disturbing use of language, since it implicitly justifies beating up on poor people, but let’s leave that for another day.)

Continue reading “Fed Chest-Thumping for Beginners” →

Escape from Punchbowlism

This post was written by StatsGuy, a regular commenter here and very occasional guest contributor. We asked him to expand on the ideas he put forward in this comment on the relationships between monetary policy, international capital flows, and bank capital requirements.

Former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin is most famous for his notorious quip that the job of the Fed is to “take away the punchbowl just as the party gets going.” It seems this has evolved into a full fledged theory of monetary management.

Unfortunately, structural problems – like trade imbalances, inadequate capital ratios, and weak financial regulation – severely constrain Fed monetary policy options by impacting currency flows and the value of the dollar. (Some specific mechanisms are listed in the previous comment.)

Why does this matter? Because it means the Fed cannot use monetary policy as effectively to keep the country going at full throttle and avoid a prolonged fall in utilization rates (unemployment and idle machines).  How can it be that capacity utilization is still lower than at the bottom of the 81/82 recession and we’re ALREADY raising the bubble/inflation alarm? (Paul Krugman discusses this here, and the answer is that the output gap is itself defined against neutral inflation, not just capacity utilization.)

Continue reading “Escape from Punchbowlism” →

Much Ado About Bernanke

There has been a lot of talk recently about Ben Bernanke, he of the Wall Street Journal op-ed and the multiple Congressional appearances. (Hey, can anyone put me in touch with his agent?*) At the risk of seeming ignorant (or revealing myself to be ignorant), I must say I don’t really understand what the fuss is about.

The question seems to be whether the Fed will be able to tighten monetary policy fast enough when necessary to dampen the potential inflationary effect of its current expansive monetary policy (Fed funds rate at zero, buying long-term securities, etc.). My read on the situation is as follows:

  1. Almost everyone agrees that expansive monetary policy has been appropriate during the crisis and recession to date.
  2. Everyone agrees that at some point monetary policy will have to be tightened.
  3. No one knows when that will happen.
  4. Everyone agrees that because policy has been so expansionary recently, tightening monetary policy when necessary will be more difficult than usual.
  5. Everyone agrees more or less on what tools will be available to the Fed.
  6. No one is certain the Fed will or will not be successful, because there are no relevant datapoints to compare it to.
  7. No matter what Bernanke actually thought, he would still have to say exactly what he is saying this week.

I don’t see much in there worth arguing about.

As Catherine Rampell says, a more interesting question is when the Fed will start tightening policy. This is the kind of thing that can set the Fed against the administration, as stereotypically one focuses on inflation and the other on unemployment. But since most people think it is too early to start now, that debate would be purely speculative at the moment.

* He does need a grammar checker, though. His first sentence – “The depth and breadth of the global recession has required a highly accommodative monetary policy” – contains an error in subject-verb agreement.

By James Kwak

One World Recession, Ready or Not

The usual grounds for optimism these days is the fact that the Obama Administration is clearly going to propose a big fiscal package with two components: a large conventional stimulus (spending plus tax cuts); and a big housing refinance scheme, in which the Treasury will potentially become the largest-ever intermediary for mortgages.

These ideas are appealing under the circumstances, but this Fiscal First approach also has definite limitations, for both domestic and foreign reasons.  Continue reading “One World Recession, Ready or Not” →

More Signs of Monetary Expansion

With the Federal Reserve’s main policy tool, the Fed funds rate, past the point of diminishing returns (although the target rate is 1%, the actual rate has been well below that for weeks), there are more signs that the Fed is willing to use new tools to stimulate the economy. Fed Chairman Bernanke’s speech today spelled out quite clearly (no more Greenspan-speak here) what the plan is (emphasis added):

Although conventional interest rate policy is constrained by the fact that nominal interest rates cannot fall below zero, the second arrow in the Federal Reserve’s quiver–the provision of liquidity–remains effective. Indeed, there are several means by which the Fed could influence financial conditions through the use of its balance sheet, beyond expanding our lending to financial institutions. First, the Fed could purchase longer-term Treasury or agency securities on the open market in substantial quantities. This approach might influence the yields on these securities, thus helping to spur aggregate demand. Indeed, last week the Fed announced plans to purchase up to $100 billion in GSE debt and up to $500 billion in GSE mortgage-backed securities over the next few quarters. . . .

Second, the Federal Reserve can provide backstop liquidity not only to financial institutions but also directly to certain financial markets, as we have recently done for the commercial paper market. Such programs are promising because they sidestep banks and primary dealers to provide liquidity directly to borrowers or investors in key credit markets. In this spirit, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury jointly announced last week a facility that will lend against asset-backed securities collateralized by student loans, auto loans, credit card loans, and loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration. . . .

Expanding the provision of liquidity leads also to further expansion of the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve. To avoid inflation in the long run and to allow short-term interest rates ultimately to return to normal levels, the Fed’s balance sheet will eventually have to be brought back to a more sustainable level. The FOMC will ensure that that is done in a timely way. However, that is an issue for the future; for now, the goal of policy must be to support financial markets and the economy.

There have been a number of articles in the last week on the shift toward quantitative easing, and in particular the fact that the Fed is no longer sterilizing all of its liquidity injections (compensating for them by selling Treasuries to suck up cash). Here’s one from FT Alphaville with some nice graphs.

In their Real Time Economics post a week ago, Simon and Peter argued that this is precisely what we need. However, opinions differ – some fear that the increased long-term risk of inflation outweighs the benefits of monetary stimulus now.

Signs of Monetary Expansion

There was a new theme buried in today’s announcements about purchasing $600 billion in mortgage-backed assets $200 billion in assets backed by other debt including student loans, credit cards, car loans, and small business loans. The New York Times story included these two paragraphs (emphasis added):

The action by the Federal Reserve on buying mortgage-backed securities brings the full force of monetary policy to bear on the credit markets. Having already reduced the benchmark federal funds rate to just 1 percent, the central bank is now effectively using what economists call “quantitative easing” to reduce the costs of money.

Instead of trying to reduce overnight lending rates in the hope of influencing longer-term interest rates for things like mortgages, the Fed is directly subsidizing lower mortgage rates. It is doing so by printing unprecedented amounts of money, which would eventually create inflationary pressures if it were to continue unabated.

The Bloomberg article has a similar passage, indicating that this is a message the Fed is consciously putting out, while taking care to deny that they are trying to increase inflation (emphasis added)

The Fed won’t be removing cash from other parts of the financial system to make up for the purchases, government officials told reporters on a conference call. They rejected any comparison with Japan’s so-called quantitative easing effort to combat deflation, saying that the Fed’s objective is to buttress credit markets rather than ramp up money.

What does this mean? It looks like the Fed will be buying securities either by wiring cold, hard cash to sellers, or by increasing their account balances at the Fed itself, without simultaneously selling Treasuries (or asking the Treasury Department to issue new Treasuries) to sop up an equivalent amount of cash. This ordinarily would run the risk of increasing inflation, but with short-term prices falling, arguably a bit of inflation is just what we need, as Simon and Peter argued yesterday.

(If you found the last paragraph confusing, see my Federal Reserve for Beginners post.)

More economics bloggers trying to be funny: Free Exchange reported on today’s $800 billion worth of announcements and concluded with this sentence: “So, you know, hopefully that will work out.”

How to Create Inflation

Simon and Peter argued in Real Time Economics earlier today that we need some inflation (see the post just before this one) – not only because deflation is bad, but also because it helps protect asset values, including the assets for which the government is now on the hook.

James Hamilton at Econbrowser has a plan for how to create some inflation (he suggests a target of 3%). And if that doesn’t work, he has an even more clever plan.