Other posts in this occasional series.
As you might imagine, I read (or skim) a lot of economics blogs. One of my favorites is Econbrowser, written by James Hamilton and Menzie Chinn. Whereas many blogs tell me good ideas that I didn’t think of but that theoretically I might have come up with (given infinite time and mental alertness), Econbrowser almost invariably teaches me something I absolutely couldn’t have known beforehand.
In the last week, both Hamilton and Chinn have written about the causes of the current economic crisis.
For Chinn, the current situation was created by a “toxic mixture” of:
- Monetary policy
- Deregulation
- Criminal activity and regulatory disarmament
- Tax cuts and fiscal profligacy
- Tax policy
He thinks that lax monetary policy was not particularly significant (or, more specifically, the policy was not lax given the information available at the time). He says that some examples of deregulation were more significant than others (repealing Glass-Steagall OK, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act not so much, which is the distinction I also made in an earlier post). Deregulation bleeds into the third point – the abandonment of regulatory agencies of their policing functions, along with examples where regulators committed actual fraud to aid the companies they were supposedly regulating (IndyMac being the prime example).
But the last two points are the ones you don’t hear a lot about. The Bush tax cuts fueled the asset price bubble, especially the second one (in 2003), which came long after the recession had ended and when housing prices were on the steep part of their climb. Under tax policy, Chinn takes aim at the tax deductibility of second homes; combined with tax cuts that largely favored the rich, this increased demand for second homes, and therefore the prices of homes. Right now many people are calling for tax cuts as a way to stimulate the economy, and while you can debate whether tax cuts are more effective than increased spending, that is a reasonable debate to have. In retrospect, the error Chinn is pointing to is cutting taxes – providing a fiscal stimulus, in other words – when it wasn’t needed, at the same time that interest rates were low. Since the Reagan administration, the argument for tax cuts has been to shrink the size of government, increase the incentive to work, and return money to people who know how to spend it better than the government. Only this time, we’ve reached a point where (almost) everyone agrees we need a fiscal stimulus, and the need is so pressing we’re going to ignore the fiscal handcuffs created by the Bush tax cuts, which makes no one happy.
In a November 2008 lecture, current IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard discusses the boom in oil prices in a footnote:
How could the very large increase in oil prices from the early 2000s to mid-2008 have such a small apparent impact on economic activity? After all, similar increases are typically blamed for the very deep recessions of
the 1970s and early 1980s.
Hamilton takes almost the opposite approach: maybe it was high oil prices that tipped the global economy into recession. While this may sound preposterous (everyone knows it was housing, right?), remember that the U.S. housing bubble has been front-page news since at least early 2007, yet the peak of financial panic didn’t occur until September-October 2008. Was there really a lot of new information about the subprime mortgage market that appeared during that time? Christopher Dodd was already holding hearings on the subprime meltdown in March 2007 (thanks to Michael Lewis’s book Panic! for reminding me of that.) Or was it something else?
Hamilton takes a 2007 model created by Lutz Kilian and Paul Edelstein of how changes in energy prices affect personal consumption. (Summary: an increase in energy prices that would require a 1% reduction in other purchases to buy the same amount of energy actually leads to a 2.2% decrease in consumption over 15 months.) He then applies the model to actual energy prices since the middle of 2007 and (according to my eyeballing the chart) shows that about half of the falloff in consumption over the period is due to increased energy prices.
The (possible) implication is that if oil had remained at its early 2007 prices, the decline in housing prices that was already clearly visible would not have been enough to cripple the financial system and bring the global economy to its knees. In the process, of course, we ended up with oil in the $30s, but the damage has clearly been done. Hamilton promises to continue this topic in a future post, and I’ll be watching out for it.
The Baseline Scenario 