Tag Archives: Federal Reserve

Negative Rates and the Thrift Imperative

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in Monetary Policy

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An article of faith among central bankers is that negative interest rates will stimulate spending by consumers and businesses, ending the stagnant growth that has plagued many of the world’s biggest economies. Short-term rates are zero or negative in much of Europe and Japan, and even the Federal Reserve holds out the possibility of bringing rates below zero in the event of a downturn. This policy is almost assuredly counter-productive. It very likely stimulates saving, especially in the context of an aging population, and it distorts the allocation of resources over time and across the risk classes to which saving is applied.

Real vs. Nominal Rates

A preliminary consideration is the distinction between the so-called nominal or stated interest rates, those quoted by banks and bond sellers, and real interest rates, which are net of expected inflation. If the short-term nominal interest rate is zero, but expected inflation is -2%, then the real interest rate is +2%. If expected inflation is +2%, then the real interest rate is -2%. When negative rates are discussed in the media, they generally refer to nominal rates, and central bank interest rate targets are discussed in nominal terms. Again, some central banks are targeting very low or slightly negative nominal rates today. In most of these cases, inflation is low but positive, indicating that real interest rates are negative. With that said, it’s important to note that the discussion below relates to real interest rates, not nominal rates, despite the fact that central banks explicitly target the latter.

Saving Behavior

Most macroeconomists casually assume that lower interest rates discourage saving and thus stimulate spending. However, this is being called into question by observers of recent central bank actions around the world. Those actions have been relatively futile in stimulating spending thus far. In fact, data suggest that the negative-rate policies might be increasing saving rates. These points are discussed in “Are Negative Rates Backfiring? Here’s Some Early Evidence” in the Wall Street Journal (or this Google search if the first link fails).

An examination of the microeconomic foundations of the standard treatment of saving behavior shows that it requires some limiting assumptions. We all face constraints in meeting our future income goals: our current income imposes a limit on what we can save, and the rate of return we can earn on our funds limits what we can accumulate over time from a given level of saving. Those constraints must be balanced against an individual’s preferences for present pleasure relative to future gain.

Time Preference

The rate at which agents are willing to sacrifice future for present consumption is often called the rate of time preference. This differs from one individual to another. A high rate of time preference means that the individual requires a large future reward to induce them to set aside resources today, foregoing present consumption. A low rate of time preference means that little inducement is necessary for saving, so the individual is “thrifty”. It’s generally impossible to directly observe differing rates of time preference across individuals, but they reveal their preferences for present and future consumption via their saving (or borrowing) behavior. If an individual saves more than another with an equal income, it implies that the first has a lower rate of time preference at a given level of present consumption.

Substitution and Income Effects

A lower interest rate always creates a tendency to substitute present for future consumption. That’s because the change is akin to an increase in the price of future consumption. However, that substitution might be offset, or more than offset, by the fact that total achievable lifetime income is diminished: the lower rate at which the individual’s use of resources can be transferred from the present to the future means that some sacrifice is necessary. In other words, the negative “income effect” might cause consumers to reduce consumption in the future and in the present! Thus, saving may increase in response to a lower interest rate. Perhaps that tendency will be exaggerated if rates turn negative, but it all depends on the shape of preferences for present versus future consumption.

Which of these two effects will dominate? The substitution effect, which increases present consumption and reduces saving? Or the income effect, which does the opposite? Again, consumers are diverse in their rates of time preference. There are borrowers who prefer to have more now and less later, and savers who might wish to equalize consumption over time or accumulate assets in pursuit of other goals, such as bequests. A shift from a positive to a negative interest rate would reward borrowers who wish to consume more now and less later. Both their substitution and income effects on present consumption would be positive! In fact, spending by that segment might be the only unambiguously stimulative effect from negative rates. But individuals with low rates of time preference are more likely to spend less in the present, and save more, after the change. Two individuals with identical substitution effects in response to the shift to negative rates may well differ in their income effects: the largest saver of the two will suffer the largest negative income effect.

Ugly Intervention

These uneven impacts on saving are a testament to the pernicious effects of central bank intervention leading to negative rates. Savers are punished, while those who care little about self-reliance and planning for the future are rewarded. Of course, at an aggregate level, saving out of income is positive, so on balance, agents demonstrate  that they have sufficiently low rates of time preference to qualify for some degree of punishment via negative rates. After all, savers will unambiguously suffer a decline in lifetime income given the shift to negative rates.

The Necessity of Thrift

The fact that a standard macroeconomic treatment of saving ignores negative income effects at very low rates of interest is surprising given the very nature of thrift. Savers obviously view future consumption as something of a necessity, especially as they approach retirement. Present and future consumption are locally substitutable, but large substitutions come only with great pain, either now or later. Another way of saying this is that present and future consumption behave more like complements than substitutes. (A more technical treatment of this distinction is given in “Complementarity, Necessity and Preferences“, by Steven R. Beckman and W. James Smith.) This provides a basic rationale for a conflicting assumption often made in macroeconomic literature: that economic agents attempt to “smooth” their consumption over time. If present and future consumption are treated as strict complements, there is no question that the income effect of a shift to negative  rates will increase saving by those who already save.

This is not to imply that savers always respond to lower rates by saving more. In “Choice between Present Consumption and Future Consumption“, Supriya Guru asserts that empirical evidence for the U.S. suggests that the substitution effect dominates. However, extremely low or negative interest rates are a recent phenomenon, and empirical evidence is predominantly from periods of history with much higher rates. Moreover, the advent of very low rates is coincident with demographic shifts favoring more intense efforts to save. The aging populations in the U.S., Europe and Japan might reinforce the tendency to respond to negative rates by saving more out of current income.

Risk As a Relief Valve

Another complexity regarding the shape of preferences is that consumers might never be willing to substitute present consumption for less in the future. That is, their rate of time preference may be bounded at zero, even if the interest rate imposed by the central bank is negative. An earlier post on Sacred Cow Chips dealt with this issue. In that case, saving will increase with a shift to negative rates under two conditions: 1) there is a minimal level of future consumption deemed a necessity by consumers; and 2) that level exceeds the consumption that is possible without saving (endowed or received via transfers). That outcome represents a “corner solution”, however. Chances are that consumers, having been forced to accept an unacceptable tradeoff at negative “risk-free” rates, will lean more heavily on other margins along which they can optimize, such as risk and return.

That eventuality suggests another reason to suspect that very low or negative rates are not stimulative: savers face a range of vehicles in which to place their funds, not simply deposits and short-term money market funds earning low or negative yields. Some of these alternatives earn much higher returns, but only at significant risk. Nevertheless, the poor returns on safe alternatives will lead some savers to “reach for yield” by accepting high risks. That is a rational response to the conditions imposed by central banks, but it leads consumers to accept risk that is otherwise not desired, with a certain number of consumers suffering dire ex post outcomes. It also leads to an allocation of the economy’s capital that is riskier than would otherwise occur.

Furthermore, as mentioned in the WSJ article linked above, consumers might regard negative rates as a foreboding signal about the economic future. The negative rates are bad enough, but even reduced levels of future consumption might be under threat. Thus, risk aversion might lead to greater saving in the context of a shift to negative rates.

Corporate Saving and Capital Investment

A great deal of saving in the economy is done by corporate entities in the form of “undistributed corporate profits”, or retained earnings. It must be said that these flows are not especially dependent on short-term yields, even if those yields have a slight influence on corporate management’s view of the opportunity cost of equity capital. Rather, those flows are more dependent on the firm’s current profitability. To the extent that very low or negative interest rates discourage consumption, their effect on current profitability and the perceived profitability of new business capital projects cannot be positive. To the extent that very low or negative rates portend risk, their effect on capital investment decisions will be negative. Savings out of personal income and from retained earnings is likely to exceed the amount required to fund desired capital investment. The funds accumulated in this way will remain idle (excess working capital) or be put toward unproductive uses, as befits an environment in which real returns are negative.

We Gotta Get Out of This Place

Central banks will be disappointed that the primary rationale for their reliance on negative interest rates lacks validity, and that the policy is counterproductive. Statements from Federal Reserve officials indicate that the next expected move in their interest rate target will be upward. However, they have not ruled out negative rates in the event that economic growth turns down. Perhaps the debate over negative rates is still raging inside the Fed. With any luck, and as evidence piles up from overseas on the futility of negative rates, those arguing for a “normalization” of rates at higher levels will carry the day.

Good Leaders Aren’t Trade Warriors

30 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by in Free Trade, Protectionism

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Protectionism

The protectionist foreign trade rhetoric issued by the major-party presidential candidates is intended to appeal to ignorant economic instincts. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders come to mind most readily, but Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton are jumping in with similar campaign positioning. The thrust of these populist, anti-trade appeals is that America is losing jobs to “unfair” foreign competition, an argument that distorts the very objective of trade: consumers take part in exchange in order to consume; they capture value from high quality, unique merchandise and competitive terms. Ultimately, producers engage in trade to gain the wherewithal to consume. Consumption is the real end-game.

It can be misleading to talk about “nations” engaging in trade with each other, despite the emphasis placed on trade agreements like NAFTA and TPP. In the first place, it is better to stress consumers and producers, rather than “nations”, because most foreign trade is private, cooperative activity, not national decision-making. But the candidates persist in characterizing trade as a “contest”. That misleading notion is what prompts governments to muck up the trade environment by imposing restrictions on the free flow of goods and services. Trade agreements have been heralded as great achievements, but they never approximate a regime of truly liberalized trade because the latter requires no formal agreement whatsoever, merely a hands-off approach by government. And trade agreements tend to entangle trade issues with other policy objectives, holding consumers hostage in the process.

We hear from opportunistic candidates that jobs are lost to trade with foreigners. But again, consumption, not “jobs” per se, is the real objective of economic activity. If domestic jobs are lost, it is generally because consumers judge the value produced inferior to what’s offered from abroad. American consumers should not be obliged to support inferior value, domestic market power unchecked by competition, monopoly prices and limited choices. Patriotic jingoism attempts to blind us from these economic imperatives.

The standard protectionist narrative is that foreign “nations” cheat on trade with the U.S. via currency manipulation, predatory pricing or “dumping”, “unfair” wages or other unfair labor practices. Do any of these objections to free trade hold water?

The “fairness” of foreign wages and labor practices is a matter of perspective. Wages cannot be considered unfair merely because they are low relative to U.S. wages. Wages paid to workers by foreign exporters tend to be consistent with the standard of living in those societies, and they are often some of the best income opportunities available there. This is economic dynamism that lifts masses from the grips of poverty. It’s absurd to caste it as “exploitation”.

Is it “unfair” to competitors in the U.S.? Not if they know how to compete and are allowed to do so. Unfortunately, government regulatory policies in the U.S. often present obstacles to the competitiveness of domestic producers. This is well-illustrated by Daniel J. Ikenson of The CATO Institute in “Crucifying Trade For The Sins Of Domestic Policy“. He emphasizes that trade promotes economic growth, but when it causes job losses for some workers, U.S. economic policies make it difficult for those workers to find new jobs.

“Incentivize businesses to hire people to train them in exchange for their commitment to work for the company for a period of time. Reform a corporate tax system that currently discourages repatriation of an estimated $2 trillion of profits parked in U.S. corporate coffers abroad, deterring domestic investment, which is needed for job creation. Curb excessive and superfluous regulations that raise the costs of establishing and operating businesses without any marginal improvements in social, safety, environmental, or health outcomes. Permanently eliminate imports duties on intermediate goods to reduce production costs and make U.S.-based businesses more globally competitive. Advocate the retirement of protectionist occupational licensing practices.“

So-called “dumping” by foreign producers, or selling below cost, is an unsustainable practice, by definition. Pricing below cost is difficult to prove, especially if local wages are low and raw inputs are plentiful. If dumping can be proven, retaliation might feel good but would punish American consumers. A foreign producer might be subsidized by its government as a matter of industrial policy and economic planning, an unhealthy policy to begin with, and possibly to facilitate a long-run market advantage in foreign trade. The U.S. itself is thick with subsidized industry, however, so arguing for retaliation on those grounds is more than a little hypocritical.

I rarely quote Paul Krugman, but when I do, it’s from work he’s done as an actual economist, not as an agenda-driven pundit. So we have the following Krugman quote courtesy of Don Boudreaux:

“I believe that if the rhetoric that portrays international trade as a struggle continues to dominate the discourse, then policy debate will in the end be dominated by men like [James] Goldsmith, who are willing to take that rhetoric to its logical conclusion. That is, trade will be treated as war, and the current system of relatively open world markets will disintegrate because nobody but a few professors believes in the ideology of free trade.

And that will be a shame, because for all their faults the professors are right. The conflict among nations that so many policy intellectuals imagines prevails is an illusion; but it is an illusion that can destroy the reality of mutual gains from trade.“

David Harsanyi asks how American consumers will like more restrictive trade policy when forced to pay more for smart phones, laptops, HDTVs, cars, food, and any number of other goods. The usual anti-trade narrative is that foreign producers have harmed the manufacturing sector disproportionately, but in another article, Ikenson lays bare the fallacy that U.S. manufacturing has been victimized by trade.

The consequences of trade restrictions are higher prices, reduced production and reduced consumption, an undesirable combination of outcomes. This means higher prices of imported goods as well as domestic goods, whose producers will face less competition by virtue of the trade barriers. With reduced availability of imported goods, economic theory predicts that domestic producers will not fully meet the frustrated demands. This is a classic response of producers with monopoly power: restraint of trade. The negative consequences are compounded when foreign governments impose retaliatory measures against the U.S., harming American exporters.

A further misgiving expressed by politicians regarding free trade is that America’s trade deficit implies greater indebtedness to the rest of the world. This argument has been made by a few leftist economists who misunderstand the nature of direct investment, and who tend to think erroneously of economic outcomes as zero-sum. It’s true that foreign producers who receive dollars in exchange for goods often invest those proceeds in U.S. assets. A fairly small share of that investment is in debt issued by U.S. governments and private companies. But a much larger share is invested in U.S. equities and real assets, which are not U.S. debts. As Don Boudreaux points out, the domestic sellers of those assets generally reinvest in other U.S. assets, so private U.S. ownership of global capital is not diminished by increased foreign investment in the U.S.

An interesting aspect of the trade debate is that the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency implies that the U.S. must run a chronic trade deficit. The rest of the world uses dollars to trade goods and assets, but to acquire dollars, foreigners must sell things to holders of dollars in the U.S. This keeps the foreign exchange value of the dollar elevated, which makes imports cheaper to Americans and U.S. exports more costly to foreigners. Those dollars are a form of U.S. debt, but it is debt for which we should feel flattered, as long as confidence in the dollar remains. A diminished role for the dollar in world trade would lead to a surplus of dollars, undermining its value and promoting inflation in the U.S. Let’s hope for a gradual transition to that world.

Finally, the presidential candidates allege that foreign currency manipulation is another reason for American job losses. One prominent example occurred last year when China allowed the renminbi to decline to more realistic levels on foreign exchange markets. Donald Trump called this an unfair trade tactic, but apparently the People’s Bank felt that it couldn’t support the renminbi without undermining economic growth. The earlier dollar peg also helped to keep Chinese inflation in check. Contrary to Trump’s assertions, if China stopped manipulating its currency altogether, the renminbi would go even lower!

Beyond the opportunistic political arguments, the point is that central banks (including the U.S. Federal Reserve) manage their currencies to achieve a variety of objectives, not merely to promote exports. That is not an endorsement of such policies. It is an objective fact. Anyone can argue that a foreign currency is “too low” if their objective is to demonize a country and it’s exports to the U.S., but the assertion may not be grounded in facts as markets assess them.

The arguments against open trade policies are generally specious, hypocritical or grounded in a mentality of victimhood. Vibrant producers who are free of government restrictions should welcome the expanded markets available to them abroad and should not seek redress against competition via government protection. Liberalized trade has engendered tremendous economic benefits over the years, while protectionist policies have only brought severe contractions. Let’s be free and trade freely!

 

Central Banks Stumble Into Negative Rates, Damn the Savers

01 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by in Central Planning, Monetary Policy

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Dollar Cartoon

Should government actively manipulate asset prices in an effort to “manage ” economic growth? The world’s central bankers, otherwise at their wit’s end, are attempting just that. Hopes have been pinned on so-called quantitative easing (QE), which simply means that central banks like the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) buy assets (government and private bonds) from the public to inject newly “printed” money into the economy. The Fed purchased $4.5 trillion of assets between the last financial crisis and late 2014, when it ended its QE. Other central banks are actively engaged in QE, however, and there are still calls from some quarters for the Fed to resume QE, despite modest but positive economic growth. The goals of QE are to drive asset prices up and interest rates down, ultimately stimulating demand for goods and economic growth. Short-term rates have been near zero in many countries (and in the U.S. until December), and negative short-term interest rates are a reality in the European Union, Japan and Sweden.

Does anyone really have to pay money to lend money, as indicated by a negative interest rate? Yes, if a bank “lends” to the Bank of Japan, for example, by holding reserves there. The BOJ is currently charging banks for the privilege. But does anyone really “earn” negative returns on short-term government or private debt? Not unless you buy a short-term bill and hold it till maturity. Central banks are buying those bills at a premium, usually from member banks, in order to execute QE, and that offsets a negative rate. But the notion is that when these “captive” member banks are penalized for holding reserves, they will be more eager to lend to private borrowers. That may be, but only if there are willing, credit-worthy borrowers; unfortunately, those are scarce.

Thus far, QE and zero or negative rates do not seem to be working effectively, and there are several reasons. First, QE has taken place against a backdrop of increasingly binding regulatory constraints. A private economy simply cannot flourish under such strictures, with or without QE. Moreover, government makes a habit of manipulating investment decisions, partly through regulatory mandates, but also by subsidizing politically-favored activities such as ethanol, wind energy, post-secondary education, and owner-occupied housing. This necessarily comes at the sacrifice of opportunities for physical investment that are superior on economic merits.

The most self-defeating consequence of QE and rate manipulation, be that zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) or negative interest rate policy (NIRP), is the distortion of inter-temporal tradeoffs that guide decisions to save and invest in productive assets. How, and how much, should individuals save when returns on relatively safe assets are very low? Most analysts would conclude that very low rates prompt a strong substitution effect toward consuming more today and less in the future. However, the situation may well engender a strong “income effect”, meaning that more must be saved (and less consumed in the present) in order to provide sufficient resources in the future. The paradox shouldn’t be lost on central bankers, and it may undermine the stimulative effects of ZIRP or NIRP. It might also lead to confusion in the allocation of productive capital, as low rates could create a mirage of viability for unworthy projects. Central bank intervention of this sort is disruptive to the healthy transformation of resources across time.

Savers might hoard cash to avoid a negative return, which would further undermine the efficacy of QE in creating monetary stimulus. This is at the root of central bank efforts to discourage the holding of currency outside of the banking system: the “war on cash“. (Also see here.) This policy is extremely offensive to anyone with a concern for protecting the privacy of individuals from government prying.

Another possible response for savers is to “reach for yield”, allocating more of their funds to high-risk assets than they would ordinarily prefer (e.g., growth funds, junk bonds, various “alternative” investments). So the supply of saving available for adding to the productive base in various sectors is twisted by central bank manipulation of interest rates. The availability of capital may be constrained for relatively safe sectors but available at a relative discount to risky sectors. This leads to classic malinvestment and ultimately business failures, displaced workers, and harsh adjustment costs.

With any luck, the Fed will continue to move away from this misguided path. Zero or negative interest rates imposed by central banks penalize savers by making the saving decision excessively complex and fraught with risk. Business investment is distorted by confusing signals as to risk preference and inflated asset prices. Central economic planning via industrial policy, regulation, and price controls, such as the manipulation of interest rates, always ends badly. Unfortunately, most governments are well-practiced at bungling in all of those areas.

 

 

 

Enduring A Dead-Weight Dominion

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Big Government, Macroeconomics

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government-intervention

If you hope for government to solve economic problems, try to maintain some perspective: the state has unique abilities to botch it, and its power to distort and degrade the economy in the process of “helping” is vast. Government spending at all levels copped about 18% of the U.S.  economy’s final output in 2014, but the public sector’s impact is far more pervasive than that suggests. Private fixed investment in new structures and equipment accounted for only about 16% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP); the nonresidential portion of fixed investment was less than 13% of GDP. I highlight these two components of GDP because no one doubts the importance of capital investment as a determinant of the economy’s productive capacity. But government is a larger share of spending, it can divert saving away from investment, and it creates a host of other impediments to productivity and efficient resource allocation.

The private economy is remarkable in its capacity to satisfy human wants. The market is a manifestation of spontaneous order, lacking the conscious design of any supreme authority. It is able to adjust to dynamic shifts in desires and resource constraints; it provides reliable feedback in the form of changing prices to modulate and guide the responses of participants through all stages of production. Most forms of government activity, however, are not guided by these signals. Instead, the state imposes binding and sometimes immediate constraints on the decisions of market participants. The interference takes a number of forms, including price controls, but they all have the power to damage the performance and outcomes of markets.

The productive base at each stage of the market process is a consequence of the interplay of perceived business opportunities and acts of saving or deferred consumption. The available flow of saving depends on its rewards, which are heavily influenced by taxes and government intervention in financial markets. It’s worth noting here that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world, as well as double taxation of corporate income paid out to owners. In addition, the tax system is used as a tool to manipulate the allocation of resources, drawing them into uses that are politically favored and punishing those in disfavor. The damaging impact is compounded by the fact that changes in taxes are often unknown ex ante. This adds a degree of political risk to any investment decision, thus discouraging capital spending and growth in the economy’s productive base.

The government is also a massive and growing regulator of economic activity. Over 100,000 new regulatory restrictions were added to the Code of Federal Regulations between 2008 and 2012. Regulation can have prohibitive compliance costs and may forbid certain efficiencies, often based on flimsy or nonexistent cost/benefit comparisons. It therefore damages the value and returns on embedded capital and discourages new investment. It is usually uneven in its effects across industries and it typically reduces the level of competition in markets because small firms are less capable of surviving the costs it imposes. Innovation is stifled and prices are higher as a result.

From a philosophical perspective, even the best cost/benefit comparisons are suspect as tools for evaluating government intervention. Don Boudreaux quotes Anthony de Jasay’s The State on this point:

“What could be more innocuous, more unexceptional than to refrain from intervening unless the cost-benefit comparison is favourable? Yet it treats the balancing of benefits and costs, good and bad consequences, as if the logical status of such balancing were a settled matter, as if it were technically perhaps demanding but philosophically straightforward. Costs and benefits, however, stretch into the future (problems of predictability) and benefits do not normally or exclusively accrue to the same persons who bear the costs (problems of externality). … Treating it as a pragmatic question of factual analysis, one of information and measurement, is tacitly taking the prior and much larger questions as having been somehow, somewhere resolved. Only they have not been.“

Poorly-executed and inappropriate stabilization policy is another way in which government distorts decisions at all stages of production. There are many reasons why these policies tend to be ineffective and potentially destructive, especially in the long run. Keynesian economics, based on ideas articulated by John Maynard Keynes, offers prescriptions for government action during times of instability. That means “expansionary” policy when the economy is weak and “contractionary” policy when it is strong.  At least that is the intent. This framework relies on the notion that components of aggregate demand determine the economy’s output, prices and employment.

The major components of GDP in the National Income and Product Accounts are consumer spending, private investment, government spending, and net foreign spending. In a Keynesian world, these are treated as four distinct parts of aggregate “demand”, and each is governed by particular kinds of assumed behavior. Supply effects are treated with little rigor, if at all, and earlier stages of production are considered only to the extent that their value added is included, and that the finished value of  investment (including new inventories) is one of the components of aggregate demand.

Final spending on goods and services (GDP) may be convenient because it corresponds to GDP, but that is simply an accounting identity. In fact, GDP represents less than 45% of all transactions. (See the end note below.) In other words, intermediate transactions for raw materials, business-to-business (B2B) exchange of services and goods in a partly fabricated state, and payments for distributional services are not counted, but they exceed GDP. They are also more variable than GDP over the course of the business cycle. Income is generated and value is added at each stage of production, not only in final transactions. To say that “value-added” is counted across all stages is a restatement of the accounting identity. It does not mean that those stages are treated behaviorally. Technology, capital, employees, and complex decision-making are required at each stage to meet demands in competitive markets. Aggregation at the final goods level glosses over all this detail.

The focus of the media and government policymakers in a weak economy is usually on “underconsumption”. The claim is often heard that consumer spending represents “over two-thirds of the economy”, but it is only about one-third of total transactions at all levels. It is therefore not as powerful an engine as many analysts assert. Government efforts to stimulate consumption are often thwarted by consumers themselves, who behave in ways that are difficult for models to capture accurately.

Government spending to combat weakness is another typical prescription, but such efforts are usually ill-timed and are difficult to reverse as the economy regains strength. The value of most government “output” is not tested in markets and it is not subject to competitive pressure, so as the government absorbs additional resources, the ability of the economy to grow is compromised. Programmatic ratcheting is always a risk when transfer payments are expanded. (Fixed programs that act as “automatic stabilizers”, and that are fiscally neutral over the business cycle, are less objectionable on these grounds, but only to the extent that they are not manipulated by politicians or subject to fraud.) Furthermore, any measure that adds to government deficits creates competition for the savings available for private capital investment. Thus, deficits can reduce the private economy’s productive capacity.

Government investment in infrastructure is a common refrain, but infrastructure spending should be tied to actual needs, not to the business cycle. Using public infrastructure spending for stabilization policy creates severe problems of timing. Few projects are ever “shovel-ready”, and rushing into them is a prescription for poor management, cost overruns and low quality.

Historically, economic instability has often been a consequence of poorly-timed monetary policy actions. Excessive money growth engineered by the Federal Reserve has stimulated excessive booms and inflation in the prices of goods and assets. These boom episodes were followed by market busts and recessions when the Fed attempted to course-correct by restraining money growth. Booms tend to foster misjudgments about risk that end in over-investment in certain assets. This is especially true when government encourages risk-taking via implicit “guarantees” (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and “too-big-to-fail” promises, or among individuals who can least afford it, such as low-income homebuyers.

Given a boom-and-bust cycle inflicted by monetary mismanagement, attempts to stimulate demand are usually the wrong prescription for a weak economy. Unemployed resources during recessions are a direct consequence of the earlier malinvestment. It is better to let asset prices and wages adjust to bring them into line with reality, while assisting those who must transition to new employment. The best prescription for instability is a neutral stance toward market risks combined with stable policy, not more badly-timed countercyclical efforts. The best prescription for economic growth is to shrink government’s absorption of resources, restoring their availability to those with incentives to use them optimally.

The more that central authorities attempt to guide the economy, the worse it gets. The torpid recovery from the last recession, despite great efforts at stimulus, demonstrates the futility of demand-side stabilization policy. The sluggishness of the current expansion also bears witness to the counterproductive nature of government activism. It’s a great credit to the private market that it is so resilient in the face of long-standing government economic and regulatory mismanagement. A bureaucracy employing a large cadre of technocrats is a “luxury” that only a productive, dynamic economy can afford. Or can it?

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A Note On Output Measures

More complete aggregations of economic activity than GDP are gross output (GO) and gross domestic expenditures (GDE). These were developed in detail by economist Mark Skousen in his book “The Structure of Production“, published in 1990. GO includes all final transactions plus business-to-business (B2B) transactions, while GDE adds the costs of wholesale and retail distribution to GO. Or as Skousen says in this paper:

“GDE is defined as the value of all transactions (sales) in the production of new goods and services, both finished and unfinished, at all stages of production inside a country during a calendar year.“

GO and GDE show the dominance of business transactions in economic activity. GDE is more than twice as large as GDP, and B2B transactions plus business investment are twice the size of consumer spending. According to Skousen, GDE varies with the business cycle much more than GDP. Many economic indicators focus on statistics at earlier stages of production, yet real final spending is often assumed to be the only measure of transactions that matters.

 

ZIRP: Zero Interest Retirement Poverty

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Macroeconomics

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seniors

Far be it from me to make a Keynesian economic argument, but I will play devil’s advocate and do so at the risk of alienating any Austrian friends in the audience. They might or might not appreciate the point before I’m done. Writing in Barron’s, Randall Forsyth argues that a zero or negative real interest rate, or specifically a zero interest rate policy (ZIRP), will backfire on central banks precisely because low rates add to the pressure on consumers to save. If that is the case, in the Keynesian paradigm, the policy would undermine consumer demand and lead to weaker growth.

I find it plausible that savers might react to extremely low interest rates by increasing saving. With an aging population and baby boomers fast approaching their retirement years, low interest rates mean diminished opportunities to build on existing assets. The only way to bring more assets into retirement safely is to save more. There has been much said about the impact of quantitative easing and ZIRP on asset values, and the tendency of investors to “reach” for higher, but risker, returns. However, a decent, safe return is hard to come by.

This kind of saving behavior is easy enough to demonstrate for a consumer who must choose between present and future consumption. Present consumption is limited by what the consumer can earn now. Future consumption is limited by what the consumer saves now (does not consume) and the real return or interest rate that can be earned on that saving. The consumer maximizes well being by choosing the most-preferred “bundle” of present consumption and future consumption attainable. But when the interest rate falls to zero, for example, the consumer must reallocate the bundle.

First, the “effective price” of present consumption has declined, since less future consumption must be sacrificed in order to to consume now. So there is a tendency to reallocate the bundle toward more present consumption as a pure “substitution effect”. However, the consumer’s lifetime income has declined precisely because the real rate at which present saving can be transformed into future consumption has decreased. The bundles available for the consumer to choose from are now unambiguously less preferred than the original bundle. Faced with this worsened constraint, the consumer may choose to divide the sacrifice between present consumption and future consumption. The negative income effect on present consumption may well outweigh the substitution effect.

This is standard economics, but relatively little has been said about the possibility. Instead, it is widely assumed that ZIRP must reduce saving, but there have been a few writers making the argument that saving may increase. In 2010, the Buttonwood column in The Economist made this argument in a piece entitled “Another Paradox of Thrift“. In 2012, the Trust Your Instincts blog ran this interesting piece on ZIRP and saving behavior in which the possibility is discussed. For the same reason, Phoenix Capital Management asserted that “QE and ZIRP Are Deflationary“, And the same thing is mentioned in EconoMonitor.

Continuing to indulge Forsyth’s possibility, it does not imply that increased saving from ZIRP will be channeled into productive investment. That’s because governments continue to absorb private saving by running historically large deficits. But I must note that the possibility of increased saving in response to ZIRP may contradict a couple of points made in an earlier post on Sacred Cow Chips: “Taking The Air Out of the Deflation Scare“. That post quotes Thorsten Polliet in support of the notion that the rate of time preference underlying consumer behavior cannot be zero or negative. Does that conclusion change when consumers order bundles rationally with a budget constraint that implies a negative return? In fact, the macroeconomic concept of a time preference “parameter” appears to be inconsistent with the normal micro theory of consumer utility maximization.

Increased saving from ZIRP leads to a second apparent contradiction of Polliet, who says:

“Should a central bank really succeed in making all market interest rates negative in real terms, savings and investment would come to a shrieking halt: as time preference and the originary interest rate are always positive, “capitalistic saving” — the accumulation of goods designed for improving the production process — would come to an end.”

But again, the possibility that saving may increase does not imply that capital investment will increase as well, as long as the government is absorbing the increased saving. In fact, the adoption of ZIRP policies around the developed world seems in large part intended to accommodate large government deficits by keeping interest costs low.

The evidence that ZIRP encourages saving is mixed. Japanese saving rates tended to edge up over the country’s many years of ZIRP (since 1999). More recent experience in the EU seems mixed. In the U.S., saving rates increased during the financial crisis even before ZIRP began, moved down during the recovery, but have since returned to relatively high levels. The Federal Reserve claims that consumers continue to unwind the excessive leverage that built up prior to the recession, and of course that is saving. Paying down debt certainly carries a higher and safer return than many other options. ZIRP cannot be counted upon to encourage consumer spending, and it may well do the opposite.

Taking The Air Out Of The Deflation Scare

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Macroeconomics

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Deflation is not the evil so many journalists have been taught to believe. The historical evidence does not support the contention that deflation is always a consequence of “underconsumption”, that it leads to a self-reinforcing spiral, or that it is destructive in and of itself. A new academic paper on the costs of deflation is reviewed here by John Cochrane, who reproduces some of the interesting evidence from the paper showing that deflation is not correlated with output growth historically. Cochrane quotes the paper’s authors:

“‘The almost reflexive association of deflation with economic weakness is easily explained. It is rooted in the view that deflation signals an aggregate demand shortfall, which simultaneously pushes down prices, incomes and output. But deflation may also result from increased supply. Examples include improvements in productivity, greater competition in the goods market, or cheaper and more abundant inputs, such as labour or intermediate goods like oil. Supply-driven deflations depress prices while raising incomes and output.’”

The Science Times has a succinct review of the same paper:

“After analyzing figures going back to 1870 from 38 countries, Borio [one of the co-authors] concludes that declines in consumer prices are not actually the problem. He argues that the negative effects associated with deflation are in reality caused by huge declines in real estate prices and equity values. All this time, he posits, economists have been deceived by the fact that prices for goods and services have at times decreased at the same time that asset prices have gone down, especially during the Great Depression.”

An earlier op-ed on deflation by Cochrane was the subject of this Sacred Cow Chips post a few months ago, which noted an unfortunate tendency among traditional Keynesian economists related to the statist agenda they often support:

“Quick to blame insufficient private demand for economic ills, they propose to ratchet government to higher levels to make up for the supposed shortfall. That diagnosis is often debatable; the prescription may be a palliative at best and destructive at worst.”

Deflation is usually a symptom of other, more primary economic phenomena. Whether it can be taken as a sign of economic malaise depends on the underlying cause. Certainly, as noted above, deflation is quite welcome when it results from supply-driven growth of output, especially if wages are supported by advances in labor productivity.

On the other hand, deflation may be a demand-side symptom of weakness engendered by restrictive monetary policy, fragile confidence among consumers or employers, trade restrictions, excessive taxation, over-regulation, or adjustments to a binge of malinvested capital. It does not follow, however, that a resulting deflation is unhealthy. Quite the opposite: Downward price adjustments help to clear the economy of excesses and pave the way for renewal, as excess goods, capital and other resources are repriced to levels at which purchases become gainful. This may involve more severe declines in some relative prices due to specific excesses, such as real estate. Some recent examples of deflation and reversals of economic weakness are discussed in this post at The Mises Daily.

One consequence of expected deflation is that market interest rates are driven below “real” interest rates, or the rates at which economic agents are indifferent between present and future consumption (abstracting from risk and liquidity premia). The latter is sometimes called the rate of time preference, the natural interest rate, or the originary interest rate. Recently, some short-term market interest rates in Europe have been negative, prompting some to offer arguments that the natural rate may have turned negative. This post by Thorsten Polliet reveals these arguments as nonsense:

“If the originary interest rate was near-zero [let alone negative], it means that you prefer two apples available in, say, 1,000 years over one apple available today. A truly zero originary interest rate implies that the actor’s planning horizon or “period of provision” is infinitely long, which is another way of saying that he would never act at all but would continually push the attainment of his goals into the future.”

Polleit discusses the fact that market real interest rates may be negative, but that is a consequence of central bank manipulation of nominal market rates, including the Federal Reserve’s so called ZIRP, or zero interest-rate policy. Polleit has this to say about the destructive consequences of this kind of behavior, albeit in extreme form:

“Should a central bank really succeed in making all market interest rates negative in real terms, savings and investment would come to a shrieking halt: as time preference and the originary interest rate are always positive, “capitalistic saving” — the accumulation of goods designed for improving the production process — would come to an end.”

While Keynesians imagine that expansive government policy can rescue the economy from the ravages of weak private demand, they also know that accumulation of public debt is an unavoidable by-product. That reveals an underlying motive for policies such as ZIRP, as Polite explains:

“It is an actually perfidious policy for debasing the real value of outstanding debt; and it is a recipe for wreaking havoc on the economy.”

An otherwise innocuous supply-side deflation, or a deflation corrective of demand-side forces, may well be accompanied by intervention by an activist central bank. The ostensible purpose would be to stimulate the demand for goods, but a more direct consequence is a reduction in the government’s interest costs. If the policy succeeds in pushing real market interest rates to zero or below, the intervention may well undermine capital formation and economic growth.

Mortgage Mania at the Fed

09 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

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The Federal Reserve has no business distorting incentives by dabbling with billions in markets for private debt. Kudos to two officials at the Richmond Fed for making this point forcefully in the Wall Street Journal** today.

Normally, the Fed conducts monetary policy by buying or selling Treasury debt, which is thought to be neutral with respect to relative private interest rates. In other words, the Fed’s impact on the Treasury market, whatever that might be, does not encourage investment in housing at the expense of factory investment or vice versa. Since 2009, however, the Fed has attempted to support the housing and mortgage markets via massive purchases  of mortgage securities originally issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This has the effect of reducing mortgage interest rates relative to rates on other kinds of private debt. It also constitutes a form of bailout for mortgage investors, who tend to receive favorable bids from the Fed for these assets. Free money! And more free money is dolled out by the Fed when it pays banks interest on the new reserve balances these transactions ultimately create.

One might object that the struggling mortgage market needed the Fed’s support in the wake of the housing crash. I do not accept that view because the mortgage and housing markets needed to unwind their excesses and monetary stimulus did not require mortgage purchases. But this also begs the question: what gave rise to the crisis? Over-investment in housing and a home price bubble fueled by tax-deductible interest, easy Fed monetary policy, regulatory capital standards that favored mortgage lending, prospective bailouts in case of failure, and loose bank credit standards. Those should all sound familiar. Now, the Fed believes it’s necessary to re-inflate the mortgage market via continuing asset purchases.

The Fed’s policies can be criticized on other grounds, but interfering in private debt markets should be avoided. It is an example of industrial policy that is clearly not even part of the Fed’s so-called mandate, and it ultimately means a continuing massive misallocation of resources into housing at the expense of other forms of investment.

** The article at the link should be ungated. If not, try Googling “wsj Fed’s Mortgage Favoritism.”