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L Street – Selgin’s prescription for Money Market reform

Yesterday, I wrote a post on George Selgin’s latest presentation on monetary reform at the Italian think tank the Bruno Leoni Institute. In his presentation George essentially outlines a tree step strategy for the privatisation of the supply of money.

I described these three steps in my post yesterday, but I would like to take a deeper look at the first reform George proposes – reform of the way the US Federal Reserve controls the US money base and more concretely reform of the US money markets.

He outlines these reforms in his paper “L Street: Bagehotian Prescriptions for a 21st-Century Money Market”.

L-Street is of course a wordplay on Lombard Street – the book in which Walter Bagehot outlined the famous proposal for central banks to act as lender of last resort – and on the address of the US Federal Reserve in Washington DC.

George of course is the world’s foremost expert on Free Banking Theory, but in L-Street George takes a more practical approach to the monetary issue and assume that central banks at least for now is with us. That said, George also clearly states that he see money market reform as a step in the direction of Free Banking. However, this in no way central to the understanding of George’s proposals and I think that George’s reform proposals have a lot of merit on its own and should be of interest also to those you are not in favour of abolishing central banks.

Here is the abstract from George’s paper:

“In Lombard Street Walter Bagehot offered some second-best suggestions, informed by the crisis of 1866, for reforming the Bank of England’s conduct during financial crises. Here I respond to the crisis of 2008 by proposing changes, in the spirit of Bagehot’s own, to the Federal Reserve’s operating framework. These changes are aimed at reducing the Fed’s interference with the efficient allocation of credit, as well as its temptation to treat certain financial institutions as Too Big to Fail, during crises. More fundamentally, they seek to ground Fed operations more firmly in the rule of law, and to thereby make them less subject to the whims of committees, by allowing a fixed but flexible operating framework to serve the Fed’s needs during financial crises as well as in normal times.”

The failure of Fed’s operating framework

George’s starting point is a critique the Federal Reserve’s reliance on so-called primary dealers in its general operating framework. I find his discussion of the role of the primary dealers in events of 2008 very interesting and insightful and his discussion clearly illustrates that structural flaws in Fed’s operating framework seriously hampered the Fed’s role of an effective lender of last reserve. Furthermore, it gives a “micro perspective” on some of the issues discussed by market monetarists likely Scott Sumner who normally tend to have a more macro perspective on the crisis. These “explanations” in my views complement each other perfectly well.

Here is George:

“Further consideration suggests, however, that the apparent need for direct lending during crises stems, not from the inadequacy of open market operations as such, but from the inadequacy of the Fed’s particular rules and procedures for conducting such operations, including its reliance upon the primary dealer system. In particular the Fed, by depending upon a small set of primary dealers, and on two clearing banks, for its open-market operations, risks a breakdown in the monetary transmission mechanism when these agents themselves become troubled. Consequently the Fed may be compelled, not merely to engage in direct lending, but also to depart from Bagehot’s principles by bailing out insolvent firms when their failure threatens to cause a breakdown in its operating framework. The Fed’s reliance upon primary dealers and tri-party repos thus contributes to the notion of the “Systemically Important Financial Institution” (SIFI), official recognition of which, according to former Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig (2011), poses a serious threat to the future of capitalism.”

I think George’s analysis fundamentally is right and it is also a good explanation why the Federal Reserve has been so preoccupied with saving (investment) banks rather than focusing on ensuring a stable nominal anchor for the US economy.

Market Monetarists including myself have tended to blame Fed chairman Bernanke’s Creditist views for the Fed’s intense focus on financial intermediation rather than on for example increasing nominal GDP. However, George’s discussion of the Fed’s operating framework also shows that the overreliance on the primary dealers in the day-to-day (and emergency) conduct of monetary policy basically “forced” the Fed in the direction of the Creditist position. Furthermore, as the system relied heavily on the primary dealers (and still do) the Fed basically had no other choice than to help bail out these institutions if it wanted to maintain its basic operating framework.

Selgin’s prescription: Abolish the Primary Dealer System

George’s solution to the problem of overreliance of the primary dealer system is simply to do away with it. Here is George:

“The most obvious operating system reform suggested by the crisis is to replace the primary dealer system with one in which numerous financial firms, and perhaps even some nonfinancial firm, take part in the Fed’s open market operations.

There are good reasons for the Fed to dispense with its primary dealer system even putting aside the dangers of relying upon it during crises. “In central banking terms,” as Chris Giles and Gillian Tett (2008) observe, despite its long pedigree the Fed’s primary dealer system “is decidedly old-fashioned,” having, as Bob Eisenbeis (2009: 2) explains, “evolved prior to the advent of electronics and computerization of the bid and auction process when institutions relied upon messengers to transmit paper bids to the [System Open Market] Desk.” Today, Eisenbeis goes on to observe, there’s no reason why a much larger number of qualified firms “could not take part in the daily Open Market transaction process through the System’s electronic bidding process.””

George continues:

“The Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee, of which Eisenbeis is a member, has recommended that the Fed take advantage of modern technology to adopt an approach similar to that of the ECB, which routinely conducts open-market operations “with more than 500 counterparties throughout the Euro Zone,” and which might deal with more than twice as many. Doing so, the committee maintains, “would increase the efficiency of the SOMA transaction process, lower costs, reduce dependence upon a geographically concentrated set of counter parties, and enhance the monetary policy transmission process” (Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee 2009). Electronic trading could also preserve the anonymity of firms seeking funds from the Fed.

Such improvements, it bears noting, would supply a rationale for doing away with the primary dealer system even if primary dealers’ soundness were never in doubt.

So far as outright open-market purchases are concerned there is no reason at all for the Fed to restrict the number of its counterparties, even by limiting participation in open-market operations to financial firms, since it doesn’t expose itself to counterparty risk in making outright purchases. The only risk it takes on is that connected with depreciation of the securities it acquires, which is of course a function, not of the counterparties it deals with, but of the securities it chooses to buy.”

I think George’s position makes a lot of sense and to me the main point in terms of the conduct of monetary policy must be that the central bank is as little dependent on any individual institution so the central bank will not be taken “hostage” of a single institution. That is effectively what happened during late 2008 and 2009.

The Fed as the market maker of last resort
Furthermore, Selgin suggests to get rid of the Federal Reserve’s “Treasuries only” policy for open–market operations and instead “broadening of the set of securities used in its temporary, if not in its permanent, open-market operations”.

Here is George:

“In particular, there are good reasons for having the Fed engage in temporary purchases of some of the private market securities it has traditionally accepted as collateral for discount window loans, provided that it subjects those securities to “haircuts” sufficient to both protect it against potential credit risk, while otherwise adhering to the classical rule of supplying credit only on relatively stiff terms.”

This proposal is similar to what Willem Buiter and Anne Seibert have called “the central bank as market marker of last resort”.

While I have a lot sympathy for this proposal I also think it is very important to stress that if the central bank acts as market maker of last resort then that does not mean that the central bank should try to manipulate the relative prices of financial assets. Sometimes it seems like especially the Fed has been trying to do exactly that. What George is suggesting is rather that the Federal Reserve expands the type of collateral that it will accept in the conduct of market operations. Here the condition for sufficient haircuts of course is key. Central banks should not be in the business of doing subsidized lending.

To avoid that open market operations lead to a distortion of relatively prices of financial assets Selgin suggests an auction system for liquidity:

“The procedure I have in mind, if only in the crudest of outlines, combines a set of reverse (single price) auctions for particular securities, with prospective counterparties allowed to submit multiple (but mutually-exclusive) bids involving different securities, with a multiple-yield (discriminatory price) auction that determines which securities the central bank actually ends up purchasing. The Fed would first have to decide what security types are eligible, favoring those for which holdings are sufficiently dispersed to provide for competitive bidding, and (to further discourage adverse selection) indicating maximum values of total and individual security purchases that it is prepared to make from a single participants. The list of such securities could be compiled, and regularly updated, using reports regularly submitted by prospective counterparties as one requirement for eligibility. Next the Fed would announce the total value of an intended purchase, along with reference prices (reflecting risk-based “valuation haircuts”) for particular securities. It would then hold simultaneous reverse (single-price) auctions, with descending prices expressed as reference-price percentages, for each security type, allowing individual counterparties to take part in any or all; but before actually completing any purchases it would first rank offers from the various auctions according to the percentage of the security reference prices involved, and then accept offers starting with those entailing the lowest percentage, progressing to higher percentages until the predetermined aggregate purchase is completed.”

George rightly conclude that if the Fed would act as market maker of last resort as he suggest the Fed would no longer need to act as a traditional lender of last resort through the so-called Discount Window and he therefore suggests that the Discount Window should be abolished. Fine with me, but don’t do it before you are sure that the other reforms suggested are working.

One can conclude that if the Fed moved in the direction of becoming market marker of last resort and got rid of the Discount Window then the Fed could effectively control the money base without any reliance of any particular institution and it would mean a minimum of distortion of relatively prices in the financial markets. This would be a huge step forward in the direction of a more market based monetary system.

Bernanke should have a look at Selgin’s prescriptions

Overall, I think that George Selgin’s L-street reforms make a lot of sense and if implemented likely would make the framework for conduct of US monetary policy a lot more transparent, but most important it would greatly insure against the kind of ad hoc policies measures that the Fed has had to resort to after the outbreak of the crisis in 2008.

In addition to Selgin’s proposal for L-street reform he also proposed NGDP targeting and finally the privatisation of the supply of money based on what he terms a “Quasi-Commodity Money” standard in his Bruno Leoni Institution presentation. As far as I understand George is in the process of finalizing papers on these two topics as well. I am surely looking forward to reading (and maybe reviewing) these papers as well.

PS To my American readers on this Super Bowl Sunday – Football is a sport where you kick the ball with your FEET and you are not allow to pick it up in the hands…anyway enjoy the game.

Update: See a presentation of Selgin’s reform ideas here.

Update (April 6 2012): Scott Sumner also comments on George’s paper here.

11 Comments
by Lars Christensen on February 5, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve, Free Banking, George Selgin, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, Reading recommendations
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on February 5, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/02/05/l-street-selgins-prescription-for-money-market-reform/

George Selgin outlines strategy for the privatisation of the money supply

I have earlier argued that NGDP targeting is a effectively emulating the outcome under a perfect Free Banking system and as such NGDP level targeting can be seen as a privatisation strategy. George Selgin has just endorsed this kind of idea in a presentation at the Italian Free Market think tank the Bruno Leoni Institute. The presentation is available on twitcam.

You can see the presentation here. You need a bit of patience if you are not Italian speaking, but George eventually switch to English. The presentation lasts around 45 minutes.

I will not go through all of George’s arguments – instead I recommend everybody to take a look at George’s presentation on your own. However, let me give a brief overview.

Basically George see a three step procedure for the privatisation of the money supply and how to go from the present fiat based monetary monopoly to what he calls a Free Banking system based on a Quasi Commodity Standard. Often Free Banking proponents tend to start out with some kind of gold standard – or at least assume that some sort of commodity standard is necessary for a Free Banking system to work. George does not endorse a gold standard. Rather he favours a privatisation strategy based on a NGDP targeting rule.

Essentially George spells out a three step procedure toward the privatisation of the money supply.

The first step (and this is especially directed towards the US Federal Reserve) is to move towards a much more flexible system provision of liquidity to the market than under the present US system where the Federal Reserve historically has relied on so-called primary dealers in the money market. George wants to abolish this system and instead wants the Fed to control the money base directly through open market operations. I fully endorse such a system. There is no reason why the monetary system and the banking system will have to be so closely intertwined as is the case in many countries. A system based on open market operations would also do away with the ad hoc nature of the many lending facilities that have been implemented in both the euro zone and the US since 2008.  George is essentially is saying what Market Monetarists have argued as well and that is that central banks should be less focused on “saving” the financial sector and more focused on ensuring the flow of liquidity (and yes, that is two very different things). George discusses these ideas in depth in his recent paper “L STREET:Bagehotian Prescriptions for a 21st-century Money Market”. I hope to return to a discussion of this paper at a later point.

The second step – and that should interest Market Monetarists – is that George comes out and strongly endorses NGDP targeting – or as George puts it a “stable rule for growth of aggregate (nominal) spending” and argues that central banks should do away with discretion in the conduct of monetary policy. George directly refers to Scott Sumner as he is making this argument. George’s preferred rate of growth of nominal spending is 2.5-3% – contrary to Scott’s suggestion of a 5% growth. That said, I am pretty sure that George would be happy if the Federal Reserve implemented Scott’s suggested rule. George is not religious about this. I on my part I am probably closer to George’s view than to Scott’s view, but again this is not overly important and practically a 5% growth rate would more or less be a return to the Great Moderation standard at least for the US. It should of course be noted that there is nothing new in the fact that George supports NGDP targeting – just read “Less than zero” folks! However, George in his presentation puts this nicely into the perspective of strategy to privatise the supply of money.

In arguing in favour of nominal spending targeting George makes it clear that it is not about indirectly ensuring some stable inflation rate in the long run, but rather “stability of (nominal) spending is the ultimate goal”. I am sure Scott will be applauding loudly. Furthermore – and this is in my view extremely important – a rule to ensure stability of nominal spending will ensure that there is no excuse for ad hoc and discretionary policy. With liquidity provision based on a flexible framework of open market operations and NGDP targeting the money supply will effectively be endogenous and any increase in money demand will always be met by an increase in the the money supply. So even if a financial crisis leads to a sharp increase in money demand there will be no argument at all for discretionary changes in the monetary policy framework. (Recently I have been talking about whether pro-NGDP targeting keynesians like Paul Krugman are saying the same as Market Monetarists. My argument is that they are not – Paul Krugman probably would hate the suggestion that monetary discretion should be given up).

Market Monetarists should have no problem endorsing these two first steps. However, the third step and that is the total privation of the supply on money will be more hard to endorse for some Market Monetarists. Hence, Scott Sumner has not endorsed Free Banking – neither has Nick Rowe nor has Marcus Nunes. However, I guess Bill Woolsey, David Beckworth and myself probably have some (a lot?) sympathy for the idea of eventually getting rid of central banks altogether.

This, however, is a rather academic discussion and at least to me the discussion of NGDP targeting and changing of central bank operating procedures for now is much more important. That said, George discusses a privatisation of the money supply based on what he calls a Quasi Commodity Standard (QCS). QCS is inspired by the technological development of the so-called Bitcoins. I will not discuss this issue in depth here, but I hope to return to the discussion once George has spelled out the idea in a paper.

Once again – have a look at George’s presentation.

HT Blake Johnson

8 Comments
by Lars Christensen on February 4, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Bill Woolsey, Blake Johnson, David Beckworth, Federal Reserve, Free Banking, George Selgin, Gold Standard, Marcus Nunes, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, NGDP Targeting, Nominal Income Targeting, Reading recommendations, Scott Sumner
Tagged , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on February 4, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/02/04/george-selgin-outlines-strategy-for-the-privatisation-of-the-money-supply/

Don’t forget the ”Market” in Market Monetarism

As traditional monetarists Market Monetarists see money as being at the centre of macroeconomic discussion. To us both inflation and recessions are monetary phenomena. If central banks print too much money we get inflation and if they print to little money we get recession or even depression.

This is often at the centre of the arguments made by Market Monetarists. However, we are exactly Market Monetarists because we have a broader view of monetary policy than traditional monetarists. We deeply believe in markets as the best “information system” – also about the stance of monetary policy. Even though we certainly do not disregard the value of studying monetary supply numbers we believe that the best indicator(s) of monetary policy stance is market pricing in currency markets, commodity markets, fixed income markets and equity markets. Hence, we believe in a Market Approach to monetary policy in the tradition of for example of “Manley” Johnson and Robert Keheler.

In fact we want to take out both the “central” and “banking” out of central banking and ideally replace monetary policy makers with the power of the market. Scott Sumner has suggested that the central banks should use NGDP futures in the conduct of monetary policy. In Scott’s set-up monetary policy ideally becomes “endogenous”. I on my part have suggested the use of prediction markets in the conduct of monetary policy.

Sometimes the Market Monetarist position is misunderstood to be a monetary version of (vulgar) discretionary Keynesianism. However, Market Monetarists are advocating the exact opposite thing. We strongly believe that monetary policy should be based on rules rather than discretion. Ideally we would prefer that the money supply was completely market based so that velocity would move inversely to the money supply to ensure a stable NGDP level. See my earlier post “NGDP targeting is not a Keynesian business cycle policy”

Even though Market Monetarists do not necessarily advocate Free Banking there is no doubt that Market Monetarist theory is closely related to the thinking of Free Banking theorist such as George Selgin and I have early argued that NGDP level targeting could be see as “privatisation strategy”. A less ambitious interpretation of Market Monetarism is certainly also possible, but no matter what Market Monetarists stress the importance of markets – both in analysing monetary policy and in the conduct monetary policy.

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See also my earlier post from today on a related topic.

13 Comments
by Lars Christensen on January 13, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Free Banking, George Selgin, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy, Monetary policy rules, NGDP Targeting, Nominal Income Targeting, Scott Sumner
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on January 13, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/01/13/dont-forget-the-market-in-market-monetarism/

The Economist comments on Market Monetarism

The Economist has an interesting article on Market Monetarists as well as would the magazine calls “Heterodox economics” – Market Monetarism, Austrianism and “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT).

I am happy to see this:

“Mr Sumner’s blog not only revealed his market monetarism to the world at large (“I cannot go anywhere in the world of economics…without hearing his name,” says Mr Cowen). It also drew together like-minded economists, many of them at small schools some distance from the centre of the economic universe, who did not realise there were other people thinking the same way they did. They had no institutional home, no critical mass. The blogs provided one. Lars Christensen, an economist at a Danish bank who came up with the name “market monetarism”, says it is the first economic school of thought to be born in the blogosphere, with post, counter-post and comment threads replacing the intramural exchanges of more established venues.” (Please have a look at my paper on Market Monetarism)

There is no doubt that Scott is at the centre of the Market Monetarist movement. To me he is the Milton Friedman of the day – a pragmatic revolutionary. Scott does not always realise this but his influence can not be underestimated. Our friend Bill Woolsey is also mentioned in the article. But I miss mentioning of for example David Beckworth.

One thing I would note about the Economist’s article is that the Austrianism presented in the article actually is quite close to Market Monetarism. Hence, Leland Yeager (who calls himself a monetarist) and one of the founders of the Free Banking school Larry White are quoted on Austrianism. Bob Murphy is not mentioned. Thats a little on unfair to Bob I think. I think that both Yeager’s and White’s is pretty close to MM thinking. In fact Larry White endorses NGDP targeting as do other George Mason Austrians like Steven Horwitz. I have written the GMU Austrians about earlier. See here and here.

And see this one:

“Austrians still struggle, however, to get published in the principal economics journals. Most economists do not share their admiration for the gold standard, which did not prevent severe booms and busts even in its heyday. And their theory of the business cycle has won few mainstream converts. According to Leland Yeager, a fellow-traveller of the Austrian school who once held the Mises chair at Auburn, it is “an embarrassing excrescence” that detracts from the Austrians’ other ideas. While it provides insights into booms and their ending, it fails to explain why things must end quite so badly, or how to escape when they do. Low interest rates no doubt helped to inflate America’s housing bubble. But this malinvestment cannot explain why 21.8m Americans remain unemployed or underemployed five years after the housing boom peaked.”

Market Monetarists of course provide that insight – overly tight monetary policy – and it seems like Leland Yeager agrees.

It would of course have been great if the Economist had endorsed Market Monetarism, but it is great to see that Market Monetarism now is getting broad coverage in the financial media and there is no doubt that especially Scott’s advocacy is beginning to have a real impact – now we can only hope that they read the Economist at the Federal Reserve and the ECB.

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See also the comments on the Economists from Scott Sumner, Marcus Nunes, David Beckworth, Luis Arroyo (in Spanish) and Tyler Cowen.

1 Comment
by Lars Christensen on December 30, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Austrian economics, Bill Woolsey, Bob Murphy, Free Banking, Larry White, Leland Yeager, Milton Friedman, MM Research agenda, NGDP Targeting, Nominal Income Targeting, Scott Sumner, Steven Horwitz
Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on December 30, 2011

https://marketmonetarist.com/2011/12/30/the-economist-comments-on-market-monetarism/

How I would like to teach Econ 101

Recently our friend Nick Rowe commented on what he considers to be wrong arguments by Joseph Stiglitz and Bryan Caplan. Nick obviously is a busy bee because he had time to write his comment in between exams (you might have noticed that the blogging among the Market Monetarist econ professors has gone down a bit recently – they have all been busy with exams I guess…). Nick’s comment and the fact that he was busy with exams inspired me to write this comment.

The purpose of my comment is not to comment on Nick’s view of Stiglitz and Caplan – Nick is of course right as usual so there no reason to try to disagree. However, something Nick said nonetheless is worthwhile commenting on. In his comment Nick states: “Macro is not the same as micro.”

That made me think – and this not to disagree with Nick but rather he inspired me to think about this – that maybe it is exactly the problem that the “normal” view is that macro and micro is not the same thing.

The fact is that when I started studying economics more than 20 years ago at the University of Copenhagen we where taught Micro 101 and Macro 101. There was basically no link between the two. In Micro with learned all the basic stuff – marginalism, general equilibrium, Walras’ Law and the Welfare theorems etc. In Macro 101 there was (initially) no mentioning of what we learned in Micro, but we instead started out with some Keynesian accounting: Y=C+I+G+X-M. Then we moved on to the IS-LM model. The AD-AS model did not get much attention at that time as far as I remember. Then we were told about some “crazy” people who thought that money matters, but that did not really fit into the models because we didn’t really differentiate between real and nominal. Why should we? Prices where fixed in our models. As a consequence most students of my time chose either to specialise in the highly technical and mathematically demanding microeconomic theory (that seemed very far away from the real world) or you focused on real world problems and specialised in macroeconomics which at that time was quite old school Keynesian. Things have since changed with the New Keynesian revolution and macroeconomics have now adopted a lot of the mathematical lingo and rational expectations have been introduced, but it is my feeling that most economics students both in Europe and the US to a very large degree still study Micro and Macro as very separated disciplines and that I think is a huge problem for how the average economist come to see the world.

While macroeconomics as discipline undoubtedly today has much more of a micro foundation than use to be the case the starting point often still is Y=C+I+G+X+M. So yes, we might have a micro foundation for how C (and I for that matter) is determined but we still end up adding up C (and I) with the other variables on the right hand side of the equation – leaving the impression that the causality runs from the right hand side of the equation to the left hand side of the equation. The next thing we do is to come up with some theory for inflation and then we add that on top of Y to get nominal GDP, but again this is rarely discussed. The world is just real to most econ students (and their professors). That then leave the impression that real GDP determines inflation (most often via a Phillips curve of some kind).

So what would I do differently? Well nothing much in terms of microeconomics. I guess that is more or less fine (To my Austrian friends: Maybe if somebody could elaborate on the entrepreneur and give a Nobel prize to Israel Kirzner for that then that could be part of Micro 101 as well). For the purpose of moving from micro the macro I think the most important thing is to understand general equilibrium and that in Arrow-Debreu world there are no recessions. Prices clear all markets. There are never over or under supply of goods and services.

“And then we move on to macroeconomics” the professors says. And instead of telling about Y=C+I+G+X-M he instead says…

“You remember that we had n goods and n prices and that one agent’s income was another person’s consumption/expenditure. Well, that is still the case in macroeconomics, but in the macroeconomy we also have something we call money!”

Lets assume we maintain the assumption that prices are flexible (wages are also prices). Then the professors tells about aggregation so instead we can aggregate prices into one price index P and all goods into one index Y.

And then professor smiles and says “its time to hear about the equation of exchange”:

(1) MV=PY

“Wauw!” screams the students. “You have just introduced money to the Arrow-Debreu World! Amazing!”. Did we just go from micro to macro? Yes we did!

The professor explains to the students that (1) can be rearranged into

(1)’ P=MV/Y

The professor tells the students that we call (1)’ the AD curve and that we can write a AS curve Y=f(K,L) (“you remember production functions from Micro 101” the professors notes).

The students are obviously very impressed, but they also think it is completely logical.

The professor has now introduced the AD-AS model (and the dynamic AD-AS model). Since AD is just (1)’ the professor has not started to talk about fiscal policy (what multiplier??). In his head the AD curve can be shifted by shocks to M or V, but that has nothing to do with fiscal policy. In “his” AD-AS model fiscal policy does really not exist, as it is basically a micro phenomenon – fiscal policy might have an impact on relative prices, but it has no impact on the PY aggregate and fiscal policy might impact the supply side of the economy, but not the AD-curve? No, of course not.

The students are of course eager to hear what their new tool “money” can be used for and a clever student asks “Professor, what is the optimal monetary policy?”.

The professors answers “Do you remember the welfare theorems?”.

Student: “Yes, of course professor”.

Professor: “Good, then it is simple – we need a monetary policy that ensures a Pareto optimal allocation of consumption between different goods (including capital goods) and periods”.

Student: “But professor in the Arrow-Debreu world the market (relative prices) took care of that”.

Professor: “Exactly! So we should ‘emulate’ that in the macro world – how do we do that?”

Student: “That’s easy! We just fix MV!”

Professor: “Correct – you are absolutely right. In the world of monetary policy we call that Nominal Income Targeting or NGDP level targeting. It is one of the oldest ideas in monetary theory”.

Student: “Wauw that is cool. So when we fix that we don’t really have to think about aggregation and the macroeconomy anymore – correct?”

Professor: “Correct – and we could easily move back to Micro now”

That is of course not the whole story – the professor will of course introduce rigid prices and rational expectations. And of course when the NGDP targeting is sorted out then the students realise that generating wealth and prosperity is about increasing productivity – and of course they will learn about the supply side, but again they learned about production functions and savings and investments in Micro 101. But there is no need to introduce Y=C+I+G+X-M. Obviously it still holds formally, but it is not really interesting in the sense of understanding macroeconomics.

So Nick is not totally correct – macro and micro is basically the same thing if we have NGDP targeting. Where things go wrong is when we mess up things with another monetary policy rule (for example inflation targeting), but that kind of imperfects we will introduce in the next semester!

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PS The very clever student might ask “who produces money?” – Professor Selgin would answer “that is up to the market” and the student will reply “that makes sense – the market produces and allocates other goods very well so why not money?”.

21 Comments
by Lars Christensen on December 23, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Economic and monetary history, Free Banking, General economic theory, George Selgin, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy, Monetary policy rules, NGDP Targeting, Nick Rowe, Nominal Income Targeting
Tagged

Posted by Lars Christensen on December 23, 2011

https://marketmonetarist.com/2011/12/23/how-i-would-like-teach-econ-101/

Schuler on money demand – and a bit of Lithuanian memories…

Here is Kurt Schuler over at freebanking.org:

“During the financial crisis of 2008-09, many central banks expanded the monetary base. In some countries, the base remains high; in the United States, for instance it is roughly triple its pre-crisis level. Such an expansion, unprecedented in peacetime, has convinced many observers that a bout of high inflation will occur in the near future. That leads us to the lesson of the day:

To talk intelligently about the money supply, you must also consider the demand for money. Starting from a situation where supply and demand are in balance, the supply can triple, but if demand quadruples, money is tight. Similarly, the supply can fall in half, but if demand is only one-quarter its previous level, money is loose.

In normal times, it is a fairly safe assumption that demand is roughly constant or changing predictably, but in abnormal times, it is a dangerous assumption. No high inflation occurred in any country that expanded the monetary base rapidly during the financial crisis. Evidently, demand expanded along with supply. In fact, Scott Sumner and other “market monetarists” think supply did not keep up with demand. Similarly, nobody should be perplexed if a case arises where the monetary base is constant or even falling but inflation is rising sharply. Absent a natural disaster or some other nonmonetary event, it is evidence that demand for the monetary base is falling but supply is not keeping pace.”

Kurt is of course very right – the way to see whether monetary policy is tight or loose is to look at the money supply relative to the money demand. Since, we can not observe the difference between the money supply and the money demand directly Market Monetarists recommend to look at asset prices. We know that tight money (stronger money demand growth than the money supply growth) leads to a drop in equity prices, lower bond yields (due to lower inflation expectations), a stronger currency and for large economies like the US or China lower commodity prices.

One thing Kurt did not mention – and I a bit puzzled about that as it is a very important argument for Free Banking – is that in a world with Free Banking the total privatisation of the money supply means that the money supply (ideally?) is perfectly elastic and that any increase in money demand is meet by a equally large increase in the money supply. The same will be the case in a world with central banks targeting the NGDP level. With a perfectly elastic money supply crisis like the Great Depression and the Great Recession is likely to be much more unlikely.

PS I am writing this while I am in Lithuania – a country where Kurt’s (and George Selgin’s) work played a key role nearly 20 years ago in the introduction of the country’s currency board system. See more on this here.

4 Comments
by Lars Christensen on November 24, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Free Banking, Kurt Schuler, MM Research agenda, NGDP Targeting, Nominal Income Targeting
Tagged , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on November 24, 2011

https://marketmonetarist.com/2011/11/24/schuler-on-money-demand-and-a-bit-of-lithuanian-memories/

NGDP targeting is not a Keynesian business cycle policy

I have come to realize that many when they hear about NGDP targeting think that it is in someway a counter-cyclical policy – a (feedback) rule to stabilize real GDP (RGDP). This is far from the case from case and should instead be seen as a rule to ensure monetary neutrality.

The problem is that most economists and none-economists alike think of the world as a world more or less without money and their starting point is real GDP. For Market Monetarist the starting point is money and that monetary disequilibrium can lead to swings in real GDP and prices.

The starting point for the traditional Taylor rule is basically a New Keynesian Phillips curve and the “input” in the Taylor rule is inflation and the output gap, where the output gap is measured as RGDP’s deviation from some trend. The Taylor rule thinking is basically the same as old Keynesian thinking in the sense that inflation is seen as a result of excessive growth in RGDP. For Market Monetarists inflation is a monetary phenomenon – if money supply growth outpaces money demand growth then you get inflation.

Our starting point is not the Phillips curve, but rather Say’s Law and the equation of exchange. In a world without money Say’s Law holds – supply creates it’s own demand. Said in another way in a barter economy business cycles do not exist. It therefore follows logically that recessions always and everywhere is a monetary phenomenon.

Monetary policy can therefore “create” a business cycle by creating a monetary disequilibrium, however, in the absence of monetary disequilibrium there is no business cycle.

So while economists often talk of “money neutrality” as a positive concept Market Monetarists see monetary neutrality not only as a positive concept, but also as a normative concept. Yes, money is neutral in that sense that higher money supply growth cannot increase RGDP in the long run, but higher money supply growth (than money demand growth) will increase inflation and NGDP in the long run.

However, money is not neutral in the short-run due to for price and wage rigidities and therefore money disequilibrium and monetary disequilibrium can therefore create business cycles understood as a general glut or excess supply of goods and labour. Market Monetarists do not argue that the monetary authorities should stabilize RGDP growth, but rather we argue that the monetary authorities should avoid creating a monetary disequilibrium.

So why so much confusing?

I believe that much of the confusing about our position on monetary policy has to do with the kind of policy advise that Market Monetarist are giving in the present situation in both the US and the euro zone.

Both the euro zone and the US economy is at the presently in a deep recession with both RGDP and NGDP well below the pre-crisis trend levels. Market Monetarists have argued – in my view forcefully – that the reason for the Great Recession is that monetary authorities both in the US and the euro zone have allowed a passive tightening of monetary policy (See Scott Sumner’s excellent paper on the causes of the Great Recession here) – said in another way money demand growth has been allowed to strongly outpaced money supply growth. We are in a monetary disequilibrium. This is a direct result of a monetary policy mistakes and what we argue is that the monetary authorities should undo these mistakes. Nothing more, nothing less. To undo these mistakes the money supply and/or velocity need to be increased. We argue that that would happen more or less “automatically” (remember the Chuck Norris effect) if the central bank would implement a strict NGDP level target.

So when Market Monetarists like Scott Sumner has called for “monetary stimulus” it NOT does mean that he wants to use some artificial measures to permanently increase RGDP. Market Monetarists do not think that that is possible, but we do think that the monetary authorities can avoid creating a monetary disequilibrium through a NGDP level target where swings in velocity is counteracted by changes in the money supply. (See also my earlier post on “monetary stimulus”)

I have previously argued that when a NGDP target is credible market forces will ensure that any overshoot/undershoot in money supply growth will be counteracted by swings in velocity in the opposite direction. Similarly one can argue that monetary policy mistakes can create swings in velocity, which is the same as to say hat monetary policy mistakes creates monetary disequilibrium.

Therefore, we are in some sense to blame for the confusion. We should really stop calling for “monetary stimulus” and rather say “stop messing with Say’s Law, stop creating a monetary disequilibrium”. Unfortunately monetary policy discourse today is not used to this kind of terms and many Market Monetarists therefore for “convenience” use fundamentally Keynesian lingo. We should stop that and we should instead focus on “microsovereignty”

NGDP level targeting ensures microsovereignty

A good way to structure the discussion about monetary policy or rather monetary policy regimes is to look at the crucial difference between what Larry White has termed a “macroinstrumental” approach and a “microsovereignty” approach.

The Taylor rule is a typical example of the macroinstrumental approach. In this approached it is assumed that it is the purpose of monetary policy to “maximise” some utility function for society with includes a “laundry list” of more or less randomly chosen macroeconomic goals. In the Taylor rule this the laundry list includes two items – inflation and the output gap.

The alternative approach to choose a criteria for monetary success (as Larry White states it) is the microsovereignty approach – micro for microeconomic and sovereignty for individual sovereignty.

The microsovereignty approach states that the monetary regime should ensure an institutional set-up that allows individuals to make decisions on consumption, investment and general allocation without distortions from the monetary system. More technically the monetary system should ensure that individuals can “capture” Pareto improvements.

Therefore an “optimal” monetary regime ensures monetary neutrality. Larry White argues that Free Banking can ensure this, while Market Monetarists argue that given central banks exist a NGDP level targeting regime can ensure monetary neutrality and therefore microsovereignty.

This is basically a traditional neo-classical welfare economic approach to monetary theory. We should choose a monetary regime that “maximises” welfare by ensuring individual sovereignty.

A monetary regime that ensures microsovereignty does not have the purpose of stabilising the business cycle, but it will nonetheless be the likely consequence as NGDP level targeting removes or at least strongly reduces monetary disequilibrium and as recessions is a monetary phenomenon this will also strongly reduce RGDP and price volatility. This is, however, a pleasant consequence but not the main objective of NGDP level targeting.

—–

Marcus Nunes has a similar discussion here.

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UPDATE: There are two follow up article to this post:

“Be right for the right reasons”

“Roth’s Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability”

28 Comments
by Lars Christensen on November 12, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Chuck Norris Effect, Free Banking, Larry White, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy rules, NGDP Targeting, Nominal Income Targeting, Reading recommendations, Say's Law, Scott Sumner
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on November 12, 2011

https://marketmonetarist.com/2011/11/12/ngdp-targeting-is-not-a-keynesian-business-cycle-policy/

Selgin is right – Friedman wanted to abolish the Fed

I guess George Selgin is right  – Milton Friedman at the end of his life had come to the conclusion that the Federal Reserve should be abolished. See for yourself here. This is six months before his death in 2006.

See George’s excellent paper “Milton Friedman and the Case against Currency Monopoly”.

6 Comments
by Lars Christensen on November 8, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Free Banking, George Selgin, Milton Friedman
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on November 8, 2011

https://marketmonetarist.com/2011/11/08/selgin-is-right-friedman-wanted-to-abolish-the-fed/

George Selgin on Bernanke and NGDP targeting

Bill Woolsey has comment on Fed governor Ben Bernanke’s comment’s yesterday regarding NGDP targeting.

Here is what Bernanke said:

“So the fed’s mandate is, of course, a dual mandate. We have a mandate for both employment and for price stability. And we have a framework in place that allows us to communicate and to think about the two sides of that mandate. We talked yesterday about nominal GDP as an indicator, as an information variable, something to add to the list of variables that we think about. And it was a very interesting discussion. However, we think that within the existing framework that we have, which looks at both sides of the mandate, not just some combination of the two, we can communicate whatever we need to communicate about future monetary policy. So we are not contemplating at this time any radical change in framework. We are going to stay within the dual mandate approach that we’ve been using until this point.”

George Selgin who is one of the pioneers of NGDP targeting – even though we all know George prefers Free Banking – has a comment on Bill’s blog. I think George’s comment make a lot of sense:

“Right. BB doesn’t get it: nominal spending isn’t an indicator to be used in helping the Fed to regulate P and y. It is itself the very thing the Fed ought to regulate. The idea that Py is some sort of composite of two more “fundamental” variables, where the Fed is supposed to be concerned with the stability of each, is a crude fallacy. Neither stability of y nor that of P is desirable per se. Stability of Py, on the other hand–which is to say stability of nominal aggregate demand–is desirable in itself.”

Right on George! (for those not schooled in econ lingo P is prices and y is real GDP and Py obviously is nominal GDP).

9 Comments
by Lars Christensen on November 3, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Federal Reserve, Free Banking, George Selgin, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy, Monetary policy rules, NGDP Targeting, Nominal Income Targeting
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on November 3, 2011

https://marketmonetarist.com/2011/11/03/george-selgin-on-bernanke-and-ngdp-targeting/

M-pesa – Free Banking in Africa?

A number of my readers have an interest in monetary reform and especially in Free Banking. In that regard developments in Kenya are in fact very interesting, but I guess little known to Free Banking theorists.

Since 2007 a new “currency” has come to live in Kenya. It is the so-called m-pesa. M for mobile and pesa is money in Swahili.

Here is how M-pesa is described on Wikipedia:

“M-PESA is the product name of a mobile-phone based money transfer service for Safaricom, which is a Vodafone affiliate…The initial concept of M-PESA was to create a service which allowed microfinance borrowers to conveniently receive and repay loans using the network of Safaricom airtime resellers. This would enable microfinance institutions (MFIs) to offer more competitive loan rates to their users, as there is a reduced cost of dealing in cash. The users of the service would gain through being able to track their finances more easily. But when the service was trialled, customers adopted the service for a variety of alternative uses; complications arose with Faulu, the partnering microfinance institution (MFI). M-PESA was re-focused and launched with a different value proposition: sending remittances home across the country and making payments.”

Today, it is common to pay for services and goods around Kenya with M-pesa and as such the it has developed in to payment form, which is commonly accepted and trusted – some would say even more than the local currency – Kenyan shilling. In fact the Kenyan government will now even accept taxes paid with M-pesa.

I don’t know enough about M-pesa, but I don’t think it is a real currency at the moment and one cannot say that the M-pesa system is a Free Banking system. However, in my view would it could be developing in that direction.

I would be very interested in hearing what your views are on these developments and whether it can teach us anything in terms of monetary theory.

For more on M-pesa see this interesting NBER Working Paper.

PS for those interested in Kenyan monetary policy should note that the Kenyan central bank hiked its key policy rate by 550bp to 16.50% from 11.50%.

PPS when I started this blog I promised that it would not be US centric – I hope this post confirms this.

20 Comments
by Lars Christensen on November 2, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Free Banking, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy
Tagged , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on November 2, 2011

https://marketmonetarist.com/2011/11/02/m-pesa-free-banking-in-africa/

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