If monetary policy is credible and strictly rules based who is running the central bank has little importance. However, if the central bank has not established full credibility then who is running the show will actually be important. Therefore, last week’s news that Yutaka Harada has been nominated for Bank of Japan’s board should certainly be noticed.

I personally have little knowledge of Professor Harada, but I of course have noticed that he has been both described as a “reflationist” and a “monetarist”.

Furthermore, it is notable that he is said to favour fiscal consolidation and structural reforms for Japan. This of course is as Scott Sumner notices the unique market monetarist “policy cocktail” that would be the right one for Japan in the present situation.

Harada’s monetarist insights

As I previously had not even heard of Harada I have done a bit of research on his views. Doing that I came across a paper – “Using Monetary Policy to End Stagnation” – he authored back in 2010. I am not sure Harada would describe himself as a monetarist, but his 2010 paper is certainly quite monetarist. Here is a few quotes…

First on the BOJ’s “restrictive policy”:

Compared with a growth strategy with indeterminate effects, stabilizing the value of the yen would produce quick results. Why has the yen become strong? The reason is a restrictive monetary policy. How can we say that policy has been tightened when interest rates remain so low? To answer this, we need to look at not interest rates but the money supply to see how much money is being fed into the economy.

Japan’s bias toward restrictive monetary control was excessive even in the wake of the global financial crisis…

…The BOJ argues that other countries needed to expand the monetary base in order to absorb the shock to their financial systems from the emergence of vast quantities of bad debts, and that Japan had no such need because domestic banks were not burdened by a heavy load of nonperforming loans. It is true that bad debts did not hobble Japan’s banks. Nonetheless, the global recession dealt a sharp shock to external demand, and the rising yen delivered a follow-up blow.

So we got a Hetzelian/Sumnerian explanation for the weak Japanese recovery after the “Lehman shock” in 2008 – the Japanese recovery in 2009-10 was weak because monetary policy was tight. The markets – the yen – is telling us that and low rates is not a sign a sign that monetary policy is easy.

So the crisis is one of weak demand, but Harada is skeptical that fiscal policy can be used to solve the problem:

Using fiscal policy to generate demand means stepping up government spending, which has to be paid for by either issuing government bonds or hiking taxes. Both of these funding methods involve collecting money from the public. Basically the government just takes money out of citizens’ right pockets and puts it back in their left pockets. Monetary policy works in a different way. A central bank is capable of expanding the money supply without limit. It can, for instance, buy government bonds and supply the market with funds. These are not funds it collects from the public, and so it can put money in citizens’ left pockets without taking anything from their right pockets.”

So Harada welcomes quantitative easing, but it needs to be done within a rule-based framework:

“Of course, adopting such a policy over an extended period of time would invite criticism, since it would trigger inflation and could wind up causing the kind of hyperinflation Zimbabwe has been suffering from. A policy of significantly expanding the money supply must therefore be left in place only for a while, after which the central bank must redirect its aim at a modest inflation rate of, say, 2%. This would be a policy of inflation targeting, and it provides one way of terminating more aggressive monetary relaxation.

Harada goes on to take on the traditional deflationist views of the BoJ (you could easily replace BoJ with ECB):

Although Japan’s prewar elite had some outstanding members, notably Takahashi Korekiyo, these days everyone seems to have swallowed the nonsensical line of the BOJ. Monetary policy, the bank argues, is not involved in the ongoing deflation. It points instead to such factors as inexpensive imports from China and other low-wage countries, price markdowns due to streamlining in distribution and deregulation, a sustained wage decline, and a lowering of growth expectations. Deflation is structural factor, the BOJ says, and no amount of money supply expansion would bring it to a stop.

We need to note, however, that whereas China is exporting low-priced goods around the world, it is only in Japan that prices are falling. Distribution streamlining and deregulation may well cause prices to drop, but they should also be expected to speed up the economy’s growth rate, and that has not occurred. Wages are indeed in the midst of a downward trend, but that is because of the ongoing deflation and business slump, which have been caused by the BOJ’s passive policy stance. Companies are hardly likely to hike wages at a time of falling prices and slim profits. An expectation of slower growth in the future is a certainly a cause of diminished demand, since many people will tighten their purse strings, but that does not automatically make it a deflationary factor. Slower growth would also cause future supply to diminish, and that would be an inflationary factor. Supply and demand factors are both involved in price movements, and we would need to know which is larger before calling lowered expectations a deflationary force.

And finally echoing Milton Friedman Harada explains the relationship between the stance of monetary policy and the level of interest rates:

“Here we should note that interest rates are low today not because the BOJ has adopted a policy of easy money but because it is sticking to a policy that is fostering deflation. If the BOJ had acted in the same way the Bank of Korea did when it expanded the monetary base to deal with the global financial crisis, probably the yen would not have appreciated, exports would not have dropped so far, and employment would not have been cut back so sharply. Japanese production would have recovered in tandem with the recovery of the world economy, and prices would not have fallen. With output expanding, profits would have improved, and both real and nominal GDP would have increased. All this would have set the stage for expectations of an upturn, and short- and long-term interest rates would have risen.”

We will see how Yutaka Harada actually performs on the BoJ’s board, but I think it is fair to say that the BoJ will take a step further in a monetarist direction with the nomination of Yutaka Harada to the BoJ board.