Jim Glass sent me a very good piece by Greg Ip of the WSJ:
The U.S. economy has downshifted rather abruptly in the last few months, prompting new discussion within the Federal Reserve about delaying its first interest-rate increase. Yet the growth deceleration should not come as a surprise, because the Fed has already tightened.
True, the Fed’s interest-rate target remains close to zero. But the Fed tightens through its words, not just its actions, and the drumbeat of chatter from the Fed in the last year has made it clear that officials plan to start raising rates sometime this year.
That chatter has made itself felt in stock, bond, and most important foreign exchange markets. The dollar’s sharp rise in the last six months is not due not just to the European Central Bank’s dramatic easing of monetary policy through quantitative easing (QE, the purchase of bonds with newly created money), but to the juxtaposition of the ECB’s action against anticipation that the Fed will soon tighten.
. . .
This is a reminder of something investors and Fed officials routinely forget: Markets discount the Fed’s actions long before they actually occur, in ways that are not obvious at the time. We saw that with the 2013 “taper tantrum” that sent mortgage rates up sharply and soon produced a notable slowing in housing and other interest-sensitive parts of economic growth.
The Fed should therefore respond to this in one of two ways. First, the tightening in financial conditions has already done much of the work that its first interest-rate increase was supposed to accomplish. This is a good reason to either delay the start of tightening, tighten more slowly, or both.
Second, if Fed officials feel the tightening in financial conditions is excessive, they should change how they talk. The dovish message of the March Fed meeting arrested the rise in the dollar, and more officials are expressing concern about the tone of recent data.
Some economists think of the stance of monetary policy as the future path of the target rate, relative to the future path of the Wicksellian equilibrium rate. But it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that changes in the stance of monetary policy generally involve changes in the future path of the Wicksellian rate far more than changes in the future path of the actual rate.
Here’s a good piece by Tim Worstall:
Much as I enjoy seeing people shouting at the EU and the ECB for the near idiot manner in which they have conducted monetary policy in the past few years, for I yield to no one except Scott Sumner in my estimation that their performance has been terrible, I can’t let this from Paul Krugman pass. For he appears to be rewriting economic history on the hoof over this idea of expansionary austerity.
. . .
That the ECB and the EU Commission screwed up I’ll accept, even fervently endorse. But that’s not the same as being able to show that expansionary austerity doesn’t work: because the EU and the ECB didn’t actually try it. For the poster child for expansionary austerity is actually my native UK in the 1930s. Yes, it involves reducing the deficit and it can thus be described as austerity. But what is really being done is that austere fiscal policy along with a riproaringly expansionary monetary policy. Rather like, umm, doing QE in fact. What Britain did in the 1930s was to come off the gold standard and devalue the pound by 25% or so. We thus got the expansion through that monetary policy and it worked: two years later we were back above pre-recession levels of output. The other examples of the idea also had significant devaluations of the currency in question. Such a devaluation being an important part of the overall policy.
All of the successful examples of expansionary austerity that I know of involve monetary stimulus. And that includes the massive $500 billion decline in the US budget deficit between calendar 2012 and 2013, which was accompanied by a speed up in GDP growth, a speed up in job creation, and a speed up in the rate of decline in the unemployment rate. Of course in early 2013 Paul Krugman thought the austerity would slow the recovery.
In early 2014 Krugman suggested that we would soon get a test of the hypothesis that extended unemployment benefits had raised the unemployment rate, as the benefits were being scaled back. More recently, he seems to have gone quiet about that test, just as he did after the 2013 test of market monetarism. The Economist explains why supply-side economics matters, even at the zero bound:
A research paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimates that, if real wage growth had followed its historical relationship with the unemployment rate, by mid-2014 it would have been 3.6 percentage points higher than it actually was. Three big things, though, have held back pay: changes to America’s unemployment-insurance system, the behaviour of firms, and the persistence of labour-market “slack”.
America’s unemployment-insurance system underwent a big change at the end of 2013. Before then, the average American could get 53 weeks’ worth of unemployment benefits; in three states they could get 73 weeks’ worth. Congress then decided to make benefits stingier: the average limit dived to 25 weeks, cutting off 1.3m Americans immediately. With nothing to fall back on, the wage expectations of many unemployed people fell, says Iourii Manovskii of the University of Pennsylvania. Employers in some sectors quickly took advantage of this newly cheap pool of workers. A big chunk of the 3m extra jobs created during 2014 were in poorly paid industries (see chart 3).
And here’s one on Neo-Fisherism in Turkey:
Mr Erdogan claims—against all the evidence and in complete contradiction to orthodox economics—that cutting rates will somehow lower inflation. As a devout Muslim, he may also be uncomfortable with usury; he says a rate of zero is the ideal. And the small businessmen who are loyal AK voters tend to borrow domestically in liras, not abroad in dollars.
If Mr. Erdogan thinks zero is ideal, then he presumably regards Switzerland as having the West’s most Islamic financial system. On the other hand, given the speed at which the Turkish lira is losing value, I wouldn’t look for zero rates in Istanbul anytime soon.