February 11, 2013 – World Economic Forum: “The Future of the American Public Sector”: 

Larry Summers in conversation with Chrystia Freeland:

Chrystia Freeland: [Tell us about the United States]

Larry Summers: Look I think people have counted the US out before. John Kennedy died believing that the Soviet Union would surpass the US by 1995. […] People make that mistake now with respect to our economy and with respect to our politics. I think if we seize the moment we have huge and unique opportunity in the world. This is a moment for broad renewal that corrects all the deficits we have […]

If we can in our public life, corporate life, and individual life turn our attention more to the future away from the present, this can be a profoundly important moment for the US.

CF: [Are you moving into the PK Camp?]

LS: I don’t know if I’m going to do camps. In 1993, here’s what the situation was. Capital costs were really high. The trade deficit was really big. And if you looked at a graph average wages and productivity of American workers, those two graphs laid on top of each other. Reducing capital costs and raising productivity growth was the right strategy. That was what Bob Rubin told Bill Clinton. That’s what Bill Clinton did. They were right. Today the long-term interest rate is negligible. The constraint is lack of demand. Productivity has vastly outstripped wage growth. And the syllogism reduce the deficit and you’ll get more wages does not work the same way. But, if you don’t get the deficit under control you will eventually get a macroeconomic catastrophe. […]

CF: Following on from your focus on growth, there is an argument that I hear more and more people taking seriously advanced maybe most boldly by Tyler Cowen that growth maybe innovation and productivity growth is over. The low hanging fruit has been picked and we’re in a stagnant period. Do you buy any of it?

LS. Not a bit of it. Everyone in this room here was required to turn off their device in this room a couple of minutes ago. The device you were required to turn off had more power than the Apollo project, it has better access to information than the Library of Congress and in terms of reaching people around the planet, you would trade JFK’s communication system for your iPhone. And in 5 years from now 5 billion people will have it. So I don’t know how anyone can say we are making fundamental progress.

The prophets of doom cannot have it both way. You cannot both say that the [robots are taking your jobs] and say nothing is happening that’s important for productivity growth. And in between those two if you want to have a dystopian idea, I think the must more fundamental idea is what technology is doing for the middle-skilled.

[Talk about inequality].

I think that is a much more serious problem than the idea that somehow there is nothing new. One other thing, I see my friend Francis Collins sitting here and he knows infinitely more about this than I do. But perhaps the wisest aphorisms I learned in grad school was [Rudi] who told us that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you think they could. It was famously observed that the computers were everywhere but the productivity statistics. And then you saw what happened. [I think the same thing will happen with genomics].

Larry Summers believes deficits pose an important problem and hence negative interest rates are not yet on his radar. Larry Summers refuses to accept Paul Krugman’s comparison of the United States to Japan. Also, an odd choice of boots.

November 8, 2013 – The International Monetary Fund:

Larry Summers:

There is I think another aspect of the situation that I think warrants our close attention that receives insufficient attention. The share of men, women, and adults that are working today is essentially the same as four years ago. Four years ago the financial panic had been arrested. TARP money had been paid back. Credit spreads had normalized. There was no panic in the air. That was a great achievement. But in those four years the share of adults who were working has not improved at all. GDP has fallen further behind potential as we would have defined it in the fall of 2009. The American experience in this regard and this experience is not unique as RR has documented in the wake of a financial crisis. Japan’s real GDP today is about half of what we [the Washington Consensus] believed it would be. It is a central pillar of both classical and Keynesian models that it is all about fluctuations and what you need is less volatility. I wonder if a set of older ideas (that I have to say were pretty firmly rejected in [Stan’s class]) that went under the phrase secular stagnation that are now profoundly important in understanding Japan and may be relevant to the United States today. […]

If you go back and you study the economy prior to the crisis. There’s something a little bit odd. Many people believe monetary policy was too easy. Everybody agrees there was a vast amount of imprudent lending going on. Almost everyone agrees wealth as it was experienced by households was in excess of its reality. Too easy money, too much borrowing, too much wealth. Was there a boom? Growth was not high, unemployment was not too low, and inflation was quiescent. Somehow even a great bubble was not enough to create an excess in aggregate demand. Now think about after the crisis.

[Insert Larry Summers analogy of choice]

You’d imagine that once things normalize you’d get more GDP than you would have had. Not that four years later you’d still be having substantially less. So there’s something odd about financial normalization if that was what the whole problem was and then continued slow growth. So what’s an explanation that would fit both of these observations? Suppose that the short term real interest rate that was consistent with full employment had fallen to negative 2 or negative 3 percent sometime in the middle of the last decade. Then what would happen? Even with artificial stimulus to demand coming from all this financial imprudence, you would not see any excess demand. And even with a relative resumption of normal credit conditions, you’d have a lot of difficulty getting back to full employment. Yes, it has been demonstrated that panics are terrible and that monetary policy can contain them when the interest rate is zero. It has been demonstrated less conclusively but presumptively that when short term interest rates are zero monetary policy can affect other asset prices to plausibly impact demand. But imagine a situation where natural and equilibrium interest rates have fallen significantly below zero. Then conventional macroeconomic thinking leaves us in a very serious problem because we all seem to agree that whereas you can keep the FFR in a low rate forever, it is very hard to do extraordinary measures for ever beyond that. […] This may all be madness and I may not have this right at all, but it does seem to me four years after the successful combating of crisis with no evidence of growth that is restoring equilibrium one has to be concerned about a policy agenda that is doing less with monetary policy than has been done before that is doing less with fiscal policy than has been done before and is taking steps whose basic purpose is for there to be less lending, borrowing than before. So my lesson from this crisis which the world has under internalized is that it is not over until it is over and that is not right now and cannot be judged relative to the extent of financial panic. And, we may well need in the years ahead to think about how we manage an economy in which the zero nominal interest rate is a chronic and systemic inhibitor of economic activity holding our economies back holding us back from our potential.

About face.

Note, I am not accusing Summers of hypocrisy in this case. Too few intellectuals – especially those of this prestige – change their mind. I’d be thrilled to hear Summers detail the revision of his priors. That is always an interesting process. I will add it does not seem to me – at least within the intellectual confines of a twenty minute video for Davos – that Summers really gets Tyler Cowen’s argument right. It is very easy to “have it both ways”, as Summers puts it. In fact, his latest at the IMF is provides precisely this reconciliation. Certainly Summers does not now believe that the iPhone will not reach the masses of Africa, that genomics will stop in its tracks, or that 3D printing will fail (any more than it would have in January of this year, at least). But suddenly that does not matter. In fact, that is precisely why this is interesting – everything Summers said in 2011 holds true and could still be argued today. It seems, given that the facts have not changed, that Summers is interpreting them through a different model.

There is also the possibility that Larry Summers judged that the audience at the Fourteenth Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference at the International Monetary Fund in honor of Stan Fischer is a lot, lot more sophisticated than jet setters at the Munk Debate or Davos.

Count me as eager to see whether Summers as successfully sheds his Keynesian-Classical (deficits matter in the long run) worldview as Paul Krugman. So long as the growth rate is above the interest rate, and he sure seems to think that will be the case, he cannot be saying something like:

But, if you don’t get the deficit under control you will eventually get a macroeconomic catastrophe.

It is not that his underlying model of the world is wrong. Just that the parameters that were always true, that no one really thought about, don’t matter anymore.

This deserves a post on its own, but there seem to be a few schools of thought on stagnation:

• Cyclical demand shortfall (Larry Summers, Munk + Davos).
• Secular demand shortfall (Larry Summers today, Paul Krugman).
• Innovative constraints (Michael Mandel).
• Other structural factors. Or an amalgam of the above. Or something else. (Tyler Cowen).

First of all, talking about “low demand” without reference to a given level of supply is stupid. Aggregate demand in Eurozone is really low right now. But if South India + Maharashtra (approximately the same population) had the same level of demand relative to their supply India would be, well, indescribable. I make this explicit because it is very important to distinguish between “demand” in Summers’ first two videos to that in his last. In the former two he is extolling America’s supply-side potentials. It is unclear to me the way he models supply with his new interpretation of the world. I am looking forward to reading many more posts on this hypothesis.

By the way, this is something I’ve been saying for a few months now, but most clearly detail in a post a few days before the conference:

• Inflation – Not Just Now, but Forever
• High Inflation and the Supply Side

I am glad others are thinking along the same lines. Hopefully central bankers consider a higher inflation target seriously.