Category Archives: Financial Crises

Crowding Out

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Timothy Taylor writes,

Huntley describes the central estimate about the long-run effects of more government borrowing based on the review of the evidence like this: For each additional dollar of government budget deficit, private saving rises by 43 cents, and the inflow of foreign capital rises by 24 cents. Thus, [e]ach additional dollar of deficit leads to a 33 cent decline in domestic investment.

Jonathan Huntley works for the Congressional Budget Office. Taylor links to the full report. I like the way that Taylor explains the issue.

A few remarks:

1. A Keynesian would be quick to note that crowding out varies over the business cycle. When the economy is weak, there is excess saving, and there is no crowding out.

2. Larry Summers’ hypothesis of secular stagnation says that there has not been crowding out for two decades.

3. I have never heard a conservative economist complain about crowding out during a Republican Administration.

4. I have never heard a liberal economist complain about crowding out, ever. Complaining about (3) does not count.

This report comes out at a time in which the CBO has gotten an unusual amount of negative press. See this WaPo story, for example. Some remarks about this:

1. I think it is difficult for journalists or the general public to understand that some economic estimates are more unreliable than others. For example, estimating the cost of a government program is subject to some error, but most of the time you can get in the ballpark. There is more uncertainty about revenue from tax changes, because of behavioral responses, but one can still arrive at a reasonable range of estimates. On the other hand, estimating the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policy (the so-called multiplier) poses a much higher level of difficulty. You need a macroeconomic model. You need to take a position on the theory of monetary offset. When I was invited to give a lunch talk at CBO, I tried to emphasize that the difference between the uncertainty involved in macroeconomic forecasting and analysis on the one hand and the uncertainty in forecast and estimating the cost of a government program is a matter of kind, not just of degree. And I recommended that CBO should do something to emphasize this to the public. The crowding-out analysis is one that I would put in the high-uncertainty category.

2. It disturbs me that the press takes shots at the CBO only when the analysis raises doubts about progressive policies. If you are not going to raise doubts about CBO analysis of the stimulus, which is based on models that by now are far out of the mainstream, then you should not raise doubts about legitimately mainstream analysis of minimum wages, the employment effects of Obamacare, and, yes, crowding out.

3. Progressives who attack the CBO may be seeking a short-term gain in material at a long-term positional cost. Looking ahead a few moves, I do not think it helps progressives if they convince the public to distrust nonpartisan government experts.

Attribution to the Fed

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David Beckworth writes,

The figures below document this failure by the FOMC. The first figure shows the 5-year ‘breakeven’ or expected inflation rate. This is the difference between the 5-year nominal treasury yield and the 5-year TIPs yield and is suppose to reflect treasury market’s forecast for the average annual inflation rate over the next five years. The figure shows that prior to the September 16 FOMC meeting this spread declined from a high of 2.72 percent in early July to 1.23 percent on September 15. That is a decline of 1.23 percent over the two and half months leading up to the September FOMC meeting. This forward looking measure was screaming trouble ahead, but the FOMC ignored it.

He includes several charts. Read the whole thing. If you tell me that the expected inflation rate has declined from 2.72 percent to 1.23 percent, I think that this is somewhat bearish news. But it is not the end of the world.

See also Matt O’Brien‘s reading of the Fed minutes of 2008. It is quite stunning to consider Ben Bernanke’s behavior during September. On the one hand, he participated in the Paulson Panic, supporting TARP and going all out to save the banks. On the other hand he thought that the risks of inflation and recession were relatively balanced. It is consistent with my view of how the Fed looks at the world, which is through the eyes of the big NY financial institutions.

Still, the way I see it, the attempt to attribute the Great Recession to monetary policy seems forced. The people who believe it really believe it. And I cannot tell you that it is absolutely impossible that a small change in expected inflation can send the economy down the toilet. But I think that the human bias to try to find simple, single causes for things is something to correct for here.

Karl Smith’s Question

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As reported by Tyler Cowen.

Name the period or event in economic history where we looked backed and said “hmm, money was less important than we thought at the time

Of course, the trend over the past fifty years has been to assign a large role to money in economic history. I believe that this trend in thinking is wrong-headed.

Let me digress for a moment. A few days ago, I watched “Money for Nothing,” a documentary about the Fed that was sent to me to review. On the positive side, I would say that

1. It includes excerpts of interviews with an outstanding and diverse set of experts, including Allan Meltzer, Alan Blinder, and Janet Yellen.

2. Its rendition of the history of the Fed is well done.

On the negative side, I would say that I have never walked away from a documentary feeling satisfied. That is an understatement. Every documentary, regardless of whether I am sympathetic to its point of view, leaves me feeling swindled. I think the format is suited to leaving people with impressions and illusions, not with genuine understanding.

For example, “Money for Nothing” devotes about 15 seconds each to Brooksley Born and Ned Gramlich. If all you knew about them came from this documentary, then you would have not sense of the ambiguity that surrounds their alleged farsighted desire to increase regulation.

Born was fighting an unlikely turf war, attempting to get the dealer markets in financial derivatives to be overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has expertise in a very different area–standardized contracts traded on organized exchanges. Now, if you abolished the dealer market in derivatives and forced them onto an exchange, then you could place derivatives under the CFTC’s jurisiction. First, there has to be a debate over whether or not this is a good idea (in the wake of the crisis, many people think it would be a good idea. I do not.) But if we take as given the existing dealer market, Born’s claim of turf was untenable.

Gramlich was worried about consumer protection issues in mortgage lending. There were a lot of mortgage brokers behaving like old-time car salesmen, always trying to make customers pay more than necessary. As the housing boom accelerated, more and more borrowers were on the lower end of the scale in terms of income and sophistication, and the abuses and exploitation by lenders tended to increase. (Keep in mind, however, that down payments were so low that the bulk of the losses from the crash were born by investors, not borrowers. The phrase “predatory borrowing” is not unjustified.) To the best of my knowledge, what Gramlich was not doing was warning that the whole financial system was vulnerable because of what was going on in mortgage markets.

Also, the issue of how money affects the economy is too deep and controversial to be captured in a documentary. “Money for Nothing” appears to claim that both high interest rates and low interest rates are bad for investment. High interest rates choke off investment, while today’s low interest rates choke off saving–which is supposedly hurting investment. Maybe they do not mean to make the latter claim, but, again, it is a format that lends itself to leaving you with impressions, rather than helping you think through an issue. The documentary does not raise the issue of the distinction between short-term inter-bank interest rates (which the Fed can affect) from other interest rates (where the effect of the Fed is in doubt among many economists). It does not bring up the issue of the “zero bound,” which some economists (not me) make a big deal out of.

Finally, and this gets back to Karl Smith’s question, I think that “Money for Nothing” vastly overstates the Fed’s role in the economy. Going forward, the big issue is fiscal policy. Remember the ad from Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President where she played the role of Santa Claus, handing out gifts to various constituency groups? Well, going forward, given the excess of the government’s promises relative to its ability to pay, politicians are going to be playing a lot less Santa and a lot more Scrooge. That is going to cause a fraying of our politics, which is already taking place.

In the coming drama, the Fed is a bit player. If we end up with hyperinflation, it will be the result of a total breakdown on the fiscal side, in which the monetary authorities are given no choice but to try to meet the government’s revenue needs by collecting the inflation tax. Not the most likely outcome, and even if it were to take place, the fault would not lie with the Fed.

More broadly, my inclination in macroeconomics is to get away from aggregate supply and demand. I think that the obsession with money and the Fed is one huge attribution error. It is human nature to look for simple causes and scapegoats. I think we should lean against that.

So I would like to see us place less blame on the Fed for the Great Depression. I would like to see us assign less blame to Arthur Burns for the inflation of the 1970s and assign less credit to Paul Volcker for ending it. I think that we may be over-emphasizing the role of money in all of these cases.

Karl Smith is correct to imply that over time we have come to assign a greater role to money than contemporaries did at the time. That does not necessarily mean that we are wiser.

Scott Sumner on the Fed Transcripts

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He writes,

Note that on the very day of the September 16 meeting, the meeting at which the Fed refused to cut rates due to fear of “high inflation,” the TIPS spreads were showing only 1.23% inflation over the next 5 years, well below target. The Fed should have ignored its own worries about inflation, and instead relied on the wisdom of the crowds. The crowd is not always right, but they are more reliable than the Fed, especially when conditions are changing rapidly. Market participants saw the bottom dropping out of the economy using millions of pieces of highly dispersed information, while the clumsy Fed waited for macro data that comes in with long lags.

The idea of relying on market forecasts is what puts the “market” in market monetarism. An interesting question is how much the Fed would have had to do to cause both actual and expected inflation (or nominal GDP) to change. My inclination is to believe that a lot more M would have merely resulted in a lot less V.

Austerity

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Chris Edwards dissects it.

Transfers are the largest and fastest-growing activity. Since 2000, transfers have grown at an annual average rate of 6.7 percent, which compares to purchases at 6.0 percent, compensation at 5.5 percent, and aid to the states at 5.0 percent. Total federal spending grew at 5.5 percent during this period, while the consumer price index grew at just 2.4 percent.

The CBO on the Budget Outloook

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Director Elmendorf warns,

CBO estimates that federal debt held by the public will equal 74 percent of GDP at the end of this year and 79 percent in 2024 s. 4 (the end of the current 10-year projection period). Such large and growing federal debt could have serious negative consequences, including restraining economic growth in the long term, giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to unexpected challenges, and eventually increasing the risk of a fiscal crisis (in which investors would demand high interest rates to buy the government’s debt).

Some possibilities:

1. The CBO are Koch-funded austerians.

2. Just like the reduction in hours worked that the CBO forecasts for Obamacare, eventually increasing the risk of a fiscal crisis is actually a good thing.

3. More government debt gives the Fed more debt to buy, which in turn makes the stock market happy.

What I’m Reading

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I finished Gregory Clark’s new book. I put it in the must-read category. I hope to publish a review on line in the next few months.

I am now reading Fragile by Design by Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber. I posted a few months ago on an essay they wrote based on the book. I also attended yesterday an “econtalk live,” where Russ Roberts interviewed the authors in front of live audience for a forthcoming podcast. You might look forward to listening–the authors are very articulate and they speak colorfully, e.g. describing the United States as being “founded by troublemakers” who achieved independence through violence, as opposed to the more boring Canadians.

I think it is an outstanding book, although in my opinion it is marred by their focus on CRA lending as a cause of the recent financial crisis. This is a flaw because (a) they might be wrong and (b) even if they are right, they will turn off many potential readers who might otherwise find much to appreciate in the book. Everyone, regardless of ideology, should read the book. It offers a lot of food for thought.

I am only part-way through it. The story as far as I can tell is this:

1. There is a lot of overlap between government and banking. Governments, particularly as territories coalesced into nation states, needed to raise funds for speculative enterprises, such as wars and trading empires. Banks need to enforce contracts, e.g., by taking possession of collateral in the case of a defaulted loan. Government needs the banks, and the banks need government.

2. If the rulers are too powerful, they may not be able to credibly commit to leaving banks assets alone, so it may be hard for banks to form. But if the government is not powerful enough, it cannot credibly commit to enforcing debt contracts, so that it may be hard for banks to form.

3. Think of democracies as leaning either toward liberal or populist. By liberal, the authors mean Madisonian in design, to curb power in all forms. By populist, the authors mean responsive to the will of popular coalitions of what Madison called factions.

4. If you are lucky (as in Canada), your banking policies are grounded in a liberal version of democracy, meaning that the popular will is checked, and regulation serves to implement a stable banking system. If you are unlucky (as in the U.S.), your banking policies are grounded in the populist version of democracy. Banking policy reflects a combination of debtor-friendly interventionism and regulations that favor rent-seeking coalitions who shift burdens to taxpayers. The result is an unstable system.

I may not be stating point 4 in the most persuasive way. I am not yet persuaded by it. In fact, I think libertarians will be at least as troubled as progressives are by some of the theses that the authors promulgate.

The CBO’s Economic Outlook

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The Congressional Budget Office, a Koch-funded organization known to be affiliated with the Tea Party, writes,

CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor—given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.

They also write,

Federal revenues are expected to grow by about 9 percent this year, to $3.0 trillion, or 17.5 percent of GDP—just above their average percentage of the past 40 years…

Federal outlays are expected to increase by 2.6 percent this year, to $3.5 trillion, or 20.5 percent of GDP—their average percentage over the past 40 years. CBO projects that under current law, outlays will grow faster than the economy during the next decade and will equal 22.4 percent of GDP in 2024.

These right-wing nut cases do not acknowledge that the real problem that we face is austerity.

The Next Financial Crisis

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Tyler Cowen writes,

When the U.S. real estate bubble burst in the late 1980s, there was a downturn in output and employment but no financial crisis. No capital markets froze up for instance and risk premia never deviated much from normal in the first place. And if that late 1980s-like path is what someone is predicting for the Nordics, Canada, or Singapore, well maybe so. I’m not predicting it myself but I certainly can see that within the realm of the plausible.

Much is within the realm of the plausible. Too much.

If you are a creditor of a government or of a large bank, your thoughts are probably along the lines of, “All of the governments and regulators of the world are doing everything that they can to prevent me from suffering from a default. So I’ll just hang in there.”

That is one equilibrium. But it is easy to transition to another equilibrium. Suppose that, in spite of all the best efforts of the same folks who were not able to stop the financial crisis of 2008, there is a large painful default by any one of the countries on Tyler’s list. If that happens, then a likely scenario is that all of the rest will go down very quickly.

The current policy approach perhaps reduces the probability of any one nation or one bank going under. However, it increases the probability of a huge, horrible, systemic collapse. A benefit of reducing government budget deficits is that it helps to reduce the probability of this Armageddon scenario. Even if you believe that reducing government deficits is painful austerity, from my perspective the benefit exceed the costs.

Laurence Kotlikoff on the U.S. Budget

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In a podcast with Russ Roberts, he says,

I think we are probably in worse fiscal shape and any developed country. The reason, Russ, is we’ve been piling up debts for over 6 decades; and when I say ‘we’ I’m referring to Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses. And we’ve been hiding them. We’ve been keeping them off the books and using economic labels, words, to pretend that they are not real liabilities of the government…we have all these obligations to something like 30-40 million current retirees and close to 80 million baby boomers who are about to start collecting Social Security benefits if they haven’t already. All those obligations are not reported as part of the government’s debt, so we are missing those off-the-book obligations.

But the real economic emergency is inequality. Or austerity. Or something.