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Monetary Offset in a World with Automatic Stabilizers

January 4, 2014
the Economy: Home and the World
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Monetary offset has been on my mind for a while now. Scott Sumner (among other market monetarists) are running victory laps (and to an extent, rightfully so) considering the relatively healthy growth last year despite significant fiscal drag. There’s no doubt, as stock and bond market reactions prove, that monetary policy has been helpful. But both the theory and empirics behind a strong and automatic offset – as favored by market monetarists – is weak. I should preface this by noting I’m largely in agreement with the market monetarist argument for nominal income targeting.

Let’s imagine (for now) that the zero bound did not bind – whether that be through the efficacy of unconventional monetary tools, a higher inflation target, or a Herculean ability for the Fed to handcuff its own hands years into the future and convince the market that it threw away the key. Standard economic theory supposes that in this world fiscal policy does not determine the price level given an inflation-targeting central bank arguing that if the government increases its budget and hence aggregate demand, the central bank will increase rates to maintain credibility. Hence government spending cannot decrease unemployment.

If we’re talking about totally discretionary stimulus this may be true. But consider a government that offers generous unemployment insurance (UI) with reemployment credits or guarantees employment (either generally or in a recession). Soon after recession, the government institutes very long UI and, in doing so, increases its primary deficit from 2% to 10%. Let’s say hysteresis effects are minimal and expansionary policies don’t simultaneously increase aggregate supply. Expansionary spending then, by Law of the Excluded Middle, either increases the price level or it does not. Given an upward-sloping supply curve (depressed as the economy might be), the former case is more likely. Monetarists argue that an independent central bank offsets policy in one of the following ways:

  • By force of expectation, given its credibility to an inflation target.
  • By being more cautious with its stimulus programs (or halting them altogether, depending on relevant magnitudes) than the counterfactual without stimulus or deeper austerity.

It feels like the first point used to be more popular than it is now, given that the Fed has zilch credibility on its inflation target (by definition, if it had any credibility, long term expectations wouldn’t be as low as they are). The second point is pretty fragile given behavioral features, decentralization of central banking decisions, and the need to have a precise ability to estimate price level elasticity of aggregate supply if it is low (which it is in a weak economy).

So after the government promises insurance to layoffs and credits to employers who hire said layoffs the central bank estimates the effect this has on the price level and accordingly decreases the rate at which it purchases assets. This creates a new wave of unemployed workers – that, after all, is the core of monetary offset models – which would require even more deficit spending to finance the promised unemployed benefits. This would require an even greater offset, requiring even more stabilization.

In this case two things can happen. Either the value of a credit default swap on Treasuries increases, as the market starts loosing confidence that we can service future deficits, or prices rise as markets expect the Fed to monetize deficits in an effort to prevent default. In a world where bond yields and CDS values aren’t soaring, the only possible conclusion is that the Fed stops offsetting government spending.

In fact, to the extent the market knows the Fed would never let the government default, the Fed’s offset would be offset by expectations of its future relaxation of its offset. This sounds a lot like the fiscal theory of the price level, and in some sense it is, but the distinction is that there must be some mechanism in place that requires the government to increase its deficit in response to monetary contraction. If there was no such mechanism – i.e. fiscal policy was only a one time, discretionary cash hand out – monetary policy could offset austerity perfectly well. (A helicopter drop of money and cash hand out financed by bond buying is actually the same thing, so offset could be surgically precise, as both Keynesians and monetarists agree). The only way fiscal theories could work in this environment is a government that engages in discretionary policy every time the central bank tightens policy which is unrealistic and, by definition, not rules-based. So the possibility of hyperinflation from ARRA was well, nonexistent.

There are second order effects too. If the interest elasticity of government spending is higher than the interest elasticity of investment (and studies suggest that this is probably the case), much of the benefit from easier money comes from cheap finance to beneficiary governments, reducing net outlays. Therefore tighter policy would decrease both the government’s primary and non-primary balance. This, by the way, is not negligible – the United States may face $75 billion in increased debt servicing to finance the same level of operations.

If the political situation is such that the government may only engage in a certain level of deficit spending (either by law as in Europe or institutional arrangement as in the US) offset would require the government itself to tighten its budget.

The point of the post so far is that monetary offset cannot be as theoretically sound as its proponents make it seem. There are multiple sources of positive and negative feedback, and actual results depend on the precise role of each which itself depends on the complex slew of automatic stabilizers, central bank learning mechanisms, and so forth. However, as outlined above, that economic conditions today resemble that setup seem unlikely given the preponderance of automatic stabilizers.

The empirical case for full monetary offset is stronger, but still wanting. Yes growth was a lot stronger than some Keynesian models suggested. That itself doesn’t mean anything, especially for anyone that (like me) believes in an at least approximate efficient market hypothesis. No model that can predict growth can exist. The question is whether growth today violates the Keynesian story. Perhaps a macroeconometrician will answer this better than I, but frankly the magnitudes don’t justify that explanation either. While fiscal drag was unfortunate, the United States certainly didn’t succumb to the same austerity as Europe and within the margin that it did plenty of other factors, including an improving supply side, can explain strong growth beyond monetary offset. As for Europe, where’s the offset?

Let me end this post with a final example which captures the point of the above reasoning. Imagine the government guaranteed employment at below market wage rates as a primary automatic stabilizer. In a recession, as deficits increase, monetary offset would force a growing number into government employment. The logical conclusion would be a huge deficit and huge government work force, but not unemployment by virtue of the government’s promise to employ. The only way total GDP would be affected would be a decreased output per worker, a supply-side phenomenon because the government makes for a bad employer. But supply-side concerns are not market monetarists’ concern. Is there any model with guaranteed employment monetary offset decreases total employment?

Of course, deficits would never get so out of hand before the central bank stopped offsetting. But even monetarists agree that monetary offset would not increase employment, only government deficit. By virtue of that transfer of liabilities, the private sector is allowed to deleverage which itself increases aggregate demand.

The feedback loops here are just way too complicated for the simple monetary offset story to be true.

Late Addendum: Scott Sumner comments on his blog (in response to another):

I’ve always argued that zero is a sort of benchmark, a starting point in the analysis. If the fiscal stimulus is large enough to bankrupt a country, then for fiscal theory of the price level reasons I’d expect a positive multiplier. In not (i.e. in the US) I expect the multiplier is zero on average, but may be above or below zero for the reasons you indicate. What matters is the expected multiplier, not the actual multiplier, and I see no reason to expect a multiplier that is significantly different from zero. In 2013 we saw about what I expected.

That’s fair enough. But the point here is bankruptcy conditions are non-negligible with automatic stabilizers. Not in general, but certainly if the offset is persistent (that is if the “expected multiplier” remains at or near zero).

The Return of Demand and End of Depression Economics

August 19, 2013
the Economy: Home and the World
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Macroeconomists have a big problem. There’s basically no way to quantitatively measure their most important metrics – aggregate demand and aggregate supply as a function. Most measurable quantities – like employment, labor force churn, or gross domestic product – fall under the influence of both, making it difficult to ascertain that important changes are dominated by one or the other. In practice, we know that the recent demand was most likely a result of a crash in demand, which (theoretically) governs the business cycle and is coincident with low inflation.

Since 2000, with the JOLTS dataset from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we have a deeper insight into both aggregate demand and supply. With such, there is reason to believe demand – unlike supply – has benefitted from relatively rapid growth and recovery to pre-recession normals. I have discussed the importance of structural factors before, but feel the need to stress the return of demand.

My analysis is predicated on some logical assumptions backed up by sound data. It is still important to  accept the limitations of such “assumptions”. The JOLTS data set provides us, among many other things, the level of openings and the level of hires. Here’s a graph of both, with the 2007 business cycle peak as base year:

Image

It is not a stretch to suggest that openings (blue) are highly correlated with aggregate demand for labor, whereas hires (red) are modulated by a mix of both demand and supply. While this is crude in many ways, a job opening is the most literal example of labor “demand”. (Since a lot of commenters mention, I will reiterate, the recruiting intensity – while correlated with the business cycle – does not change substantially in a downturn and, in any case, has recovered since 2009. Therefore arguments like “these are all fake openings requiring unreasonable perfection” are fine, but irrelevant as we’re talking about the change).

What we see is a “V-type” recession for openings. That is, they rapidly crashed during the deeps of the recession, but recovered at a pace proportional to the fall. On the other hand, hires evince a more “L-type” recession which is characterized by a quick fall without a similar recovery.

Of course, “openings” do not map perfectly onto demand. The level of recovery must be adjusted for desire to fill an opening. The best way to measure this would be to ask employers the maximum wage rate they are willing to pay for each opening. Some openings are fake – America’s ridiculously moronic immigration laws require employers to place an ad in the newspaper to “prove” no American can satisfy said needs. (My mom’s sponsor placed an ad so specific to her that by design no one else in the country could fill the job. There is no reason to believe this is an isolated practice.)

However, most jobs aren’t meant for immigrants, and most openings are honest. More importantly, errors are systematic rather than random. That is, even if there is a degree of false openings, we care not about the absolute levels, but rate of change thereof. In fact, some conclusive evidence shows that while “recruiting intensity” does fall during a recession, it only vacillates between 80 and 120% of the average, and we’ve made up most of that loss at this point.

Hires represent a natural amalgam of supply and demand. Each position filled requires a need for services rendered (demand) and ability for a newly employed person to productively serve that need (supply). If we accept that growth in aggregate demand is healthy due to the V-shape of openings, then supply-side problems in the labor force are worse than the L-shaped recovery in hires suggests because the curve is governed by both supply and demand, which means the little recovery we do see derives from a recovering demand on already existing supply.

At this point, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that the standard AS-AD framework is woefully inadequate to understand the current economic dynamic. On the one hand, if we consider Price Level and Employment (as in the textbook models), positive inflation with any level of demand suggests a contraction in supply that’s too deep to reconcile with slow but steady gains in productivity. If nothing else it suggests we are at capacity, which most commenters dispute.

A better framework – one implicitly accepted by most commenters – would consider Inflation and Growth Rates. In this case, extremely low inflation by any standard suggests either a fall in demand  – which, as argued above, is no longer supported by the data – or expansion in supply. But the increase in supply predicted by this model, while explaining unemployment through a labor-mismatch hypothesis, is far too great to square with low growth rates in productivity and income unless demand is highly inelastic, which then contradicts well-established presence of nominally sticky wages.

If demand is at capacity, there is no general configuration of the AS-AD model that even broadly captures the current state. The one exception may be rapidly rising supply coincident with rapidly falling demand. Unless job openings are a complete mirage this is unlikely to be the case. We may, of course, backward engineer a particularly contrived model which would fail to have any insight into necessary fiscal or monetary policy.

As I’ve argued before, the labor-mismatch hypothesis of unemployment is very appealing. The idea that fiscalism is the province of “demand-side” policies is a dangerous idea. Paul Krugman has probably never read my blog, but if he read this post I would surely be accused of VSP-ism – mentioning the preponderance of “structural issues” and saying little else. But if supply has increased it suggests demand, while recovering faster than Krugman would accept, demand is still slack.

In this case, there is a deep role the Federal government can play in moderating the unemployment from mismatched skills while elevating aggregate demand. Low interest rates suggest the United States government can bear far more debt than current deficits imply and with an appallingly high child poverty rate, there’s no reason we can’t vastly improve children’s health, education, and comfort at a national level. Now is a better time than ever to cancel payroll taxes indefinitely and to test a basic income.

Demand could be higher, but it is not nearly as low as it was in the troughs of the recession – compare Europe and the United States, for example. The end of depression economics does not mean the role of government is over, nor does it harken sunnier days for America’s lower-middle. I’m very confident that large scale stimulus will not spark hyperinflation, but less sure the role pure stimulus can have on long-term employment prospects for the poor without a well-thought Federal job guarantee.

It was our responsibility to stimulate the economy far more than we did. It was our responsibility to engage in monetary easing far sooner than we did. The depression of demand lasted far longer than it ought to have under any half-smart policy. But now that we’ve crawled our way out of the hole, it is not clear that demand is lacking.

Perhaps the role of government is more important than it ever was.

An Inquiry Into the Efficacy of Ricardo’s Helicopter (Wonkish with a Cherry on Top?)

August 11, 2013
the Economy: Home and the World
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Update: I just came across this fantastic post from Nick Rowe explaining why exactly fiat money isn’t a liability to the central bank.

Paul Krugman has a new, mostly-great post on the Pigou Effect. I have one pretty big quibble:

One way to say this — which Waldmann sort of says — is that even a helicopter drop of money has no effect in a world of Ricardian equivalence, since you know that the government will eventually have to tax the windfall away. Of course, you can invoke various kinds of imperfection to soften this result, but in that case it depends very much who gets the windfall and who pays the taxes, and we’re basically talking about fiscal rather than monetary policy. And it remains true that monetary expansion carried out through open-market operations does nothing at all.

Now, Krugman has said this before. Brad DeLong called him out on the fact that fortunately we don’t believe in Ricardian equivalence. But let’s say we do. Let’s say we are operating in a world of rational expectations without any ad hoc “imperfections to soften this result”. Krugman claims that a drop is effectively a lump-sum tax cut, and representative agents would save it all in expectation of future financing efforts.

A common refrain across blogosphere holds that Treasuries are effectively high-powered money at the zero lower bound. There is a cosmetic difference – redeemability – that plays in important role within the highly stylized, unrealistic, thought experiments that are representative agent models.

Fiat money is a final transaction. Even when the coupon rate is zero, the principal on the outstanding liability must be “redeemed” by the government. Therefore, outstanding government debt does not constitute net wealth in either the government’s or household’s budget constraint.

I’ve been toying with this distinction in my head for a while now, but Willem Buiter got there almost a decade ago. In this little-cited (according RePEc it has only self-citations, which is odd given the important result) paper, Buiter shows that a helicopter drop does not function as a tax cut. The result derives from the pithy, contradictory, but fair assumption that fiat monies are are an asset to the private holder but not – meaningfully – a liability to the public issuer.

Therefore, an dissonance between the household and government perception of the net present value (NPV) of terminal fiat stock results in discordant budget constraints in the model. In this sense, the issuance of money can increase the household’s budget constraint in a way open-market operations cannot, increasing consumption and transitively aggregate demand.  (For those interested, the math is presented in the previously linked paper as well as, in better font, this lecture). The so-called “real balances effect” is, for lack of a better word, real.

We don’t have to assume any sort of friction or “imperfection” that mars the elegance of the model to achieve this result, but Krugman is right: it very much is about who gets the windfall and who pays the taxes. For every liability there does not exist an asset.

Without resorting entirely to irrational expectations (what some might term, “reality”) there is a further game theoretic equilibrium in which helicopter drops have expansionary effects. Douglas Hofstadter (whose name I can never spell) coined the idea of “super-rationality”. It’s very much an unconventional proposition in the game theoretic world. But it’s very useful. Wikipedia synopsizes it as:

Superrationality is an alternative method of reasoning. First, it is assumed that the answer to a symmetric problem will be the same for all the superrational players. Thus the sameness is taken into accountbefore knowing what the strategy will be. The strategy is found by maximizing the payoff to each player, assuming that they all use the same strategy. Since the superrational player knows that the other superrational player will do the same thing, whatever that might be, there are only two choices for two superrational players. Both will cooperate or both will defect depending on the value of the superrational answer. Thus the two superrational players will both cooperate, since this answer maximizes their payoff. Two superrational players playing this game will each walk away with $100.

Superrationality has been used to explain voting and charitable donations – where rational agents balk that their contribution will not count; but superrational agents look at the whole picture. They endogenize into their utility functions the Kantian Universal Imperative, if you will.

In this case, superrational agents note that the provision of helicopter money will not be expansionary if everyone saves their cheque, and note the Kaldor-Hicks efficient solution would be for everyone to spend the cheque, thereby increasing prices and aggregate demand.

This may be too rich an argument – in a superrational world we would not have the Paradox of Thrift, for example – but is more robust against imperfections. For example, as an approximately superrational agent who understands the approximately superrational nature of my friends, I know that they will probably spend their money (I mean they’ve been wanting that new TV for so long). I know that will create an inflationary pressure, and while I would like to save my money, I know they will decrease its value and I’d rather get there before everyone else.

I see this as a Nash Equilibrium in favor of the money-print financed tax cut.

Paul Krugman, though, is worried that accepting the existence of Pigou’s Effect undermines the cause for a liquidity trap:

What caught me in the Waldmann piece, however, was the brief discussion of the Pigou effect, which supposedly refuted the notion of a liquidity trap. The what effect? Well, Pigou claimed that even if interest rates are up against the zero lower bound, falling prices will be expansionary, because the rising real value of the monetary base will make people wealthier. This is also often taken to mean that expansionary monetary policy also works, because it increases money holdings and thereby increases wealth and hence consumption.

And that’s where I came in (pdf). Looking at Japan in 1998, my gut reaction was similar to those of today’s market monetarists: I was sure that the Bank of Japan could reflate the economy if it were only willing to try. IS-LM said no, but I thought this had to be missing something, basically the Pigou effect: surely if the BoJ just printed enough money, it would burn a hole in peoples’ pockets, and reflation would follow.

What Krugman wants to say, is that the liquidity trap cannot be a rational expectations equilibrium, if monetary policy can reflate the economy at the zero lower bound. In New Keynesian models, if the growth rate of money supply exceeds the nominal rate of interest on base money, a liquidity trap cannot be a rational expectations equilibrium. The natural extension of this argument is that if the central bank commits any policy of expanding the monetary base at the zero lower bound, we cannot experience a liquidity trap (as we undoubtedly are).

It’s crucial to note this argument – while relevant to rational expectations – has nothing to do with Ricardian Equivalence. In short, the government may want to do any number of things with the issuance of fiat currency – like a future contraction – but it is not required under its intertemporal budget constraint to do anything. This is fundamentally different from the issuance of bonds where the government is required to redeem the principal even at a zero coupon rate. Therefore, in the latter scenario, Ricardian Equivalence dictates that deficits are not expansionary.

The argument follows as the NPV of terminal money stock is infinite under this rule, which implies consumption exceeds the physical capacity of everything in this world. Therefore, rational agents would expect that the central bank will commit to a future contraction to keep the money stock finite. They do not know when and to what extent, but by the Laws of Nature and God are bounded from being rational.

In this world of bounded rationality, we must think of agents as Bayesian-rational rather than economic-rational. That means there is a constant process of learning where representative agents revise their beliefs that the central bank will not tighten prematurely. In fact, the existence of a liquidity trap is predicated on the prior distribution of the heterogenous agents along with their confidence that a particular move by the central bank signals future easing or tightening.

Eventually, beliefs concerning the future growth of the monetary base must (by Bayes’ Law) be equilibrated providing enough traction to escape the liquidity trap. But enough uncertainty on part of the market and mismanaged messaging on part of the central bank can sufficiently tenure the liquidity trap.

This is all a rather tortuous thought experiment. Unless one really believes that all Americans will save all of the helicopter drop, this conversation is an artifact. More importantly, a helicopter drop is essentially fiscal policy that doesn’t discredit the Keynesian position against market monetarism to begin with.

Ultimately, there is one thought experiment that trumps. Helicopter a bottomlessly large amount of funding into real projects – infrastructure, education, energy, and manufacturing. Build real things. Either we’re blessed with inflation, curtailing the ability to monetize further expansionary fiscal spending or we’ve found a free and tasty lunch. Because if we can keep printing money, buying real things, without experiencing inflation, we are unstoppable.