All posts in category Milton Friedman

The ECB has the model to understand the Great Recession – now use it!

By chance I today found an ECB working paper from 2004 – “The Great Depression and the Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis” by Christiano, Motto and Rostagno.

Here is the abstract:

“We evaluate the Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis that a more accommodative monetary policy could have greatly reduced the severity of the Great Depression. To do this, we first estimate a dynamic, general equilibrium model using data from the 1920s and 1930s. Although the model includes eight shocks, the story it tells about the Great Depression turns out to be a simple and familiar one. The contraction phase was primarily a consequence of a shock that induced a shift away from privately intermediated liabilities, such as demand deposits and liabilities that resemble equity, and towards currency. The slowness of the recovery from the Depression was due to a shock that increased the market power of workers. We identify a monetary base rule which responds only to the money demand shocks in the model. We solve the model with this counterfactual monetary policy rule. We then simulate the dynamic response of this model to all the estimated shocks. Based on the model analysis, we conclude that if the counterfactual policy rule had been in place in the 1930s, the Great Depression would have been relatively mild.”

It is interesting stuff and you would imagine that the model developed in the paper could also shed light on the causes and possible cures for the Great Recession as well.

Is it only me who is reminded about 2008-9 when you read this:

“The empirical exercise conducted on the basis of the model ascribes the sharp contraction of 1929-1933 mainly to a sudden shift in investors’ portfolio preferences from risky instruments used to finance business activity to currency (a flight-to-safety explanation). One interpretation of this finding could be that households . in strict analogy with commercial banks holding larger cash reserves against their less liquid assets . might add to their cash holdings when they feel to be overexposed to risk. This explanation seems plausible in the wake of the rush to stocks that occurred in the second half of the 1920.s. The paper also documents how the failure of the Fed in 1929-1933 to provide highpowered money needed to meet the increased demand for a safe asset led to a credit crunch which in turn produced deflation and economic contraction.”

The authors also answer the question about the appropriate policy response.

“We finally conduct a counterfactual policy experiment designed to answer the following questions: could a different monetary policy have avoided the economic collapse of the 1930s? More generally: To what extent does the impossibility for central banks to cut the nominal interest rate to levels below zero stand in the way of a potent counter-deflationary monetary policy? Our answers are that indeed a different monetary policy could have turned the economic collapse of the 1930s into a far more moderate recession and that the central bank can resort to an appropriate management of expectations to circumvent – or at least loosen – the lower bound constraint.

The counterfactual monetary policy that we study temporarily expands the growth rate in the monetary base in the wake of the money demand shocks that we identify. To ensure that this policy does not violate the zero lower-bound constraint on the interest rate, we consider quantitative policies which expand the monetary base in the periods a shock. By injecting an anticipated inflation effect into the interest rate, this delayed-response feature of our policy prevents the zero bound constraint from binding along the equilibrium paths that we consider. At the same time, by activating this channel, the central bank can secure control of the short-term real interest rate and, hence, aggregate spending.

The conclusion that an appropriately designed quantitative policy could have largely insulated the economy from the effects of the major money demand shocks that had manifested themselves in the   late 1920s is in line with the famous conjecture of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz (1963).”

So what policy rule are the authors talking about? Well, it is basically a feedback rule where the money base is expanded to counteract negative shocks to money-velocity in the previous period. This is not completely a NGDP targeting rule, but it is close – at least in spirit. Under NGDP level targeting the central bank will increase in the money base to counteract shocks to velocity to keep NGDP on a stable growth path. The rule suggested in the paper is a soft version of this. It could obviously be very interesting to see how a real NGDP rule would have done in the model.

Anyway, I can highly recommend the paper – especially to the members of the ECB’s The Governing Council and I see no reason that they should not implement a rule for the euro zone similar to the one suggested in the paper. If the ECB had such a rule in place then Spanish 10-year bond yields probably would not have been above 7% today.

PS Scott Sumner has been looking for a model for some time. Maybe the Christiano-Motto-Rostagno model would be something for Scott…


 

6 Comments
by Lars Christensen on June 18, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Anna Schwartz, Deflation, ECB, Economic and monetary history, euro crisis, Federal Reserve, Milton Friedman, MM Research agenda, Monetary policy rules, The Great Depression, The Great Recession
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Posted by Lars Christensen on June 18, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/06/18/the-ecb-has-the-model-to-understand-the-great-recession-now-use-it/

“Free to Choose” now republished in Danish

This is mostly for my Danish readers. The Danish translation of Milton Friedman’s classic “Free to Choose” (Det Frie Valg) has now been republished by the Danish Free Market think thank Cepos. I am honnored to have written the preface for the new edition of the book.

See the English translation of the preface here.

2 Comments
by Lars Christensen on June 4, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Milton Friedman, Reading recommendations
Tagged ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on June 4, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/06/04/free-to-choose-now-republished-in-danish/

Jens Weidmann, do you remember the second pillar?

Today the ECB is very eager to stress it’s 2% inflation target. However, a couple of years ago the ECB in fact had two targets – the so-called two pillars of monetary policy. The one was the inflation target and the other was a money supply target – the so-called reference value for the growth rate of M3.

The second pillar in many ways made a lot of sense – at least as a instrument for monetary analysis. The second pillar was put into the ECB tool box by the Bundesbank which insisted that monetary analysis was as important as a pure inflation target. Read for example former ECB chief economist and Bundesbanker Otmar Issing’s defense of the two-pillar set-up here.

The starting point for calculating the reference value for M3 was the equation of exchange:

(1) MV=PY

or in growth rates:

(2) m+v=p+y

(2) of course can be re-written to:

(2)’ m=p+y-v

If we assume trend real GDP growth (y) is 2% you can calculate the reference value for m that will ensure 2% inflation over the medium term. You of course also have to make an assumption about velocity. ECB used to think that trend growth in v was -0.5 to -1%.

This give us the following reference growth rate for M3 (m-target):

(3) m-target=2+2-(-1)=5% (4.5% if you assume velocity growth of -0.5%)

Said in another way if the ECB keeps M3 growing at 5% year-in and year-out then inflation should be around 2% in the medium term. An yes, this is of course exactly what Milton Friedman recommend long ago.

2.5% M3 growth is hardly inflationary

Today we got the latest M3 numbers for the euro zone. The calvinists should be happy – M3 decelerated sharply to 2.5% y/y in April. Half of what should be the reference growth rate for M3 – and that is ignoring the fact that velocity has collapsed.

What does that tells us about the inflationary risks in the euro zone? Well, there are no inflationary risks – there are only deflationary risks.

Using the assumptions above we can calculate the long-term inflation if M3 keeps growing by 2.5% – from (2)’ we get the following:

(4) p=m-y+v

(4)’ p=2.5-2+(-1)=-0.5%

So it is official! Monetary analysis as it used to be conducted in the Bundesbank is telling you that we are going to have deflation in the euro zone in the medium term! And don’t tell me about monetary overhang – the ECB is in the business of letting bygones be bygones (otherwise the ECB would target the NGDP LEVEL or the price LEVEL) and by the way the ECB spend lots of time in 2004-7 to explain why money supply growth overshot the target.

Jens Weidmann – monetarist or calvinist?

The Bundesbank brought in monetary analysis and a money supply focus to the ECB so I think it is only fair to ask whether Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann still believe in monetary analysis? If he is true to the strong monetarist traditions at the Bundesbank then he should come out forcefully in favour of monetary easing to ensure M3 growth of at least 5% – in fact it should be much higher as velocity has collapsed, but at least to bring M3 back to 5% would be a start.

I hope the Bundesbank will soon refind it’s monetarist traditions…please make Milton Friedman and Karl Brunner proud!

PS I of course still want the ECB to introduce a NGDP level target, but less would make me happy – a 5-10% target range for M3 (the range prior to the crisis) and a minimum price on European inflation linked bonds would would clearly be enough to at least avoid collapse.

7 Comments
by Lars Christensen on May 30, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in ECB, euro crisis, Jens Weidmann, Milton Friedman, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy, Monetary policy rules, MV=PY, NGDP Targeting, Nominal Income Targeting
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on May 30, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/05/30/jens-weidmann-do-you-remember-the-second-pillar/

Tight money = low yields – also during the Great Recession

Anybody who ever read anything Milton Friedman said about monetary policy should know that low interest rates and bond yields mean that monetary policy is tight rather than easy. And when bond yields drop it is normally a sign that monetary policy is becoming tighter rather than easier.

Here is Friedman on what he called the interest rate fallacy in 1997:

“After the U.S. experience during the Great Depression, and after inflation and rising interest rates in the 1970s and disinflation and falling interest rates in the 1980s, I thought the fallacy of identifying tight money with high interest rates and easy money with low interest rates was dead. Apparently, old fallacies never die.”

Unfortunately the old fallacy is still not dead and it is still very common to associate low interest rates and low bond yields with easy monetary policy. Just think of the ECB’s insistence that it’s monetary policy stance is “easy”.

In my previous post I demonstrated that all the major changes in the S&P500 over the past four years can be explained by changes in monetary policy stance from either the ECB or the Federal Reserve (and to some extent also PBoC). Hence, it is not animal spirits, but rather monetary policy failure that can explain the volatility in the markets over the past four years.

What holds true for the stock market holds equally true for the bond market and the development in the US fixed income markets over the past four years completely confirms Milton Friedman’s view that tighter monetary policy is associated with lower bond yields. See the graph below. Green circles are monetary easing. Red circles are monetary tightening. (See more on each “event” in my previous blog post)

I think the graph very clearly shows that Friedman was right. Every time either the ECB or the Federal Reserve have moved to tighten monetary policy long-term US bonds yields have dropped and when the same central banks have moved to ease monetary policy yields have increased.

Judging from the level of US bond yields – and German bond yields for that matter – monetary policy in the US (and the euro zone) can hardly be said to be  easy. In fact it is very clear that monetary policy remains excessively tight in both the US and the euro zone. Unfortunately neither the Fed nor the ECB seem to acknowledge as they still seem to be of the impression that as long interest rates are low monetary policy is easy. I wonder what Friedman would have said? Well, I fact I am pretty convinced that he would have been very clear and would have been arguing with the Market Monetarists that monetary disorder is to blame for this crisis and we only will move out of the crisis once the Fed and the ECB move to fundamentally ease monetary conditions and adopt a rule based monetary policy rather than the present zig-zagging.

PS See also my early post on the connection between monetary policy and the bond market: Understanding financial markets with MV=PY – a look at the bond market
Update: Scott Sumner just made me aware of one of his post addressing the same topic. See here.

Update 2: Jason Rave has kindly reminded me of this Milton Friedman article, which also deals with the interest rate fallacy.

26 Comments
by Lars Christensen on May 27, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in ECB, euro crisis, Federal Reserve, Milton Friedman
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on May 27, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/05/27/tight-money-low-yields-also-during-the-great-recession/

Allen Sanderson on Milton Friedman

Allen Sanderson has collected a number of anecdotes and stories about Milton Friedman. I most admit reading stories like this about Milton Friedman always make me smile.

But please take a look for yourself. Here is Remembering Milton. 

HT Marcus Nunes.

1 Comment
by Lars Christensen on April 28, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Milton Friedman
Tagged ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on April 28, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/04/28/allen-sanderson-on-milton-friedman/

Glasner on “Friedman and Schwartz on James Tobin”

David Glasner is a very nice and friendly person, but I have to admit that David always scares me a bit – especially when I disagree with him. For some reason when David is saying something I am inclined to agree with him even if I think he is wrong. There are two areas where David and I see things differently. One the “hot potato” theory of money and two our view of Milton Friedman. I tend to think that the way Nick Rowe – inspired by Leland Yeager – describes the monetary disequilibrium theory make a lot of sense. David disagrees with Nick. Similiarly I have an (irrational?) love of Milton Friedman so I tend to think he is right about everything. David on the other hand is much more skeptical about Friedman.

Now David has post in which he makes the argument that Friedman nearly had the same view as James Tobin on the hot potato theory of money – which of course is stark opposition to Nick’s view. So now I have a problem – if he is right I must either betray uncle Milt or revise my view of the hot potato theory of money. Ok, that is not entirely correct, but you get the drift.

Anyway I don’t have a lot of time to write a long post and David’s discussion is much more interesting than what I can come up with. So have a look for yourself here.

I will be traveling quite a bit in the coming weeks so I am not sure how much blogging I will have time for. I will be in Riga, Stockholm, London, Dublin, Moscow and New York in the next couple of weeks so I might run into some of my local readers.

PS David sent me Tobin’s article long ago and I must admit that I have not read it carefully enough to be able to argue strongly for or against it.

1 Comment
by Lars Christensen on April 16, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in David Glasner, Milton Friedman, Nick Rowe
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Posted by Lars Christensen on April 16, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/04/16/glasner-on-friedman-and-schwartz-on-james-tobin/

Remember the mistakes of 1937? A lesson for today’s policy makers

Since the ECB introduced it’s 3-year LTRO on December 8 the signs that we are emerging from the crisis have grown stronger. This has been visible with stock prices rebounding strongly, long US bond yields have started to inch up and commodity prices have increased. This is all signs of easier monetary conditions globally.

We are now a couple of months into the market recovery and especially the recovery in commodity prices should soon be visible in US and European headline inflation and will likely soon begin to enter into the communication of central bankers around the world. This has reminded me of the “recession in the depression” in 1937. After FDR gave up the gold standard in 1933 the global economy started to recover and by 1937 US industrial production had basically returned to the 1929-level. The easing of global monetary conditions and the following recovery had spurred global commodity prices and by 1937 policy makers in the US started to worry about inflationary pressures.

However, in the second half of 1936 US economic activity and the US stock market went into a free fall and inflationary concerns soon disappeared.

There are a number of competing theories about what triggered the 1937 recession. I will especially like to highlight three monetary explanations:

1) Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their famous Monetary History highlighted the fact that the Federal Reserve’s decision to increase reserve requirements starting in July 1936 was what caused the recession of 1937.

2) Douglas Irwin has – in an excellent working paper from last year – claimed that it was not the Fed, but rather the US Treasury that caused the the recession as the Treasury moved aggressively to sterilize gold inflows into the US and thereby caused the US money supply to drop.

3) While 1) and 2) regard direct monetary actions the third explanation regards the change in the communication of US policy makers. Hence, Gauti B. Eggertsson and Benjamin Pugsley in an extremely interesting paper from 2006 argue that it was the communication about monetary and exchange rate policy that caused the recession of 1937. As Scott Sumner argues monetary policy works with long and variables leads. Eggertson and Pugsley argue exactly the same.

In my view all three explanations clearly are valid. However, I would probably question Friedman’s and Schwartz’s explanation on it’s own as being enough to explain the recession of 1937. I have three reasons to be slightly skeptical about the Friedman-Schwartz explanation. First, if indeed the tightening of reserve requirements caused the recession then it is somewhat odd that the market reaction to the announcement of the tightening of reserve requirements was so slow to impact the stock markets and the commodity prices. In fact the announcement of the increase in reserve requirements in July 1936 did not have any visible impact on stock prices when they were introduced. Second, it is also notable that there seems to have been little reference to the increased reserve requirement in the US financial media when the collapse started in the second half of 1937 – a year after the initial increase in reserve requirements. Third, Calomiris, Mason and Wheelock in paper from 2011 have demonstrated that banks already where holding large excess reserves and the increase in reserve requirements really was not very binding for many banks. That said, even if the increase in reserve requirement might not have been all that binding it nonetheless sent a clear signal about the Fed’s inflation worries and therefore probably was not irrelevant. More on that below.

Doug Irwin’s explanation that it was actually the US Treasury that caused the trouble through gold sterilization rather than the Fed through higher reserve requirements in my view has a lot of merit and I strongly recommend to everybody to read Doug’s paper on Gold Sterilization and the Recession 1937-38 in which he presents quite strong evidence that the gold sterilization caused the US money supply to drop sharply in 1937. That being said, that explanation does not fit perfectly well with the price action in the stock market and commodity prices either.

Hence, I believe we need to take into account the combined actions of the of the US Treasury (including comments from President Roosevelt) and the Federal Reserve caused a marked shift in expectations in a strongly deflationary direction. In their 2006 paper Eggertsson and Pugsley “The Mistake of 1937: A General Equilibrium Analysis” make this point forcefully (even though I have some reservations about their discussion of the monetary transmission mechanism). In my view it is very clear that both the Roosevelt administration and the Fed were quite worried about the inflationary risks and as a consequence increasing signaled that more monetary tightening would be forthcoming.

In that sense the 1937 recession is a depressing reminder of the strength of the of the Chuck Norris effect – here in the reserve form. The fact that investors, consumers etc were led to believe that monetary conditions would be tightened caused an increase in money demand and led to an passive tightening of monetary conditions in the second half of 1937 – and things obviously were not made better by the Fed and US Treasury actually then also actively tightened monetary conditions.

The risk of repeating the mistakes of 1937 – we did that in 2011! Will we do it again in 2012 or 2013?

So why is all this important? Because we risk repeating the mistakes of 1937. In 1937 US policy makers reacted to rising commodity prices and inflation fears by tightening monetary policy and even more important created uncertainty about the outlook for monetary policy. At the time the Federal Reserve failed to clearly state what nominal policy rule it wanted to implemented and as a result caused a spike in money demand.

So where are we today? Well, we might be on the way out of the crisis after the Federal Reserve and particularly the ECB finally came to acknowledged that a easing of monetary conditions was needed. However, we are already hearing voices arguing that rising commodity prices are posing an inflationary risk so monetary policy needs to be tighten and as neither the Fed nor the ECB has a very clearly defined nominal target we are doomed to see continued uncertainty about when and if the ECB and the Fed will tighten monetary policy. In fact this is exactly what happened in 2011. As the Fed’s QE2 pushed up commodity prices and the ECB moved to prematurely tighten monetary policy. To make matters worse extremely unclear signals about monetary policy from European central bankers caused market participants fear that the ECB was scaling back monetary easing.

Therefore we can only hope that this time around policy makers will have learned the lesson from 1937 and not prematurely tighten monetary policy and even more important we can only hope that central banks will become much more clear regarding their nominal targets. Any market monetarist will of course tell you that central bankers should not fear overdoing their monetary easing if they clearly define their nominal targets (preferably a NGDP level target) – that would ensure that monetary policy is not tightened prematurely and a well-timed exist from monetary easing is ensured.

PS I have an (very unclear!) idea that the so-called Tripartite Agreement from September 1936 b the US, Great Britain and France  to stabilize their nations’ currencies both at home and in the international FX markets might have played a role in causing a change in expectations as it basically told market participants that the days of “currency war” and competitive devaluations had come to an end. Might this have been seen as a signal to market participants that central banks would not compete to increase the money supply? This is just a hypothesis and I have done absolutely no work on it, but maybe some young scholar would like to pick you this idea?

14 Comments
by Lars Christensen on March 22, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Chuck Norris Effect, Commodity prices, Douglas Irwin, ECB, Economic and monetary history, Exchange rate policy, Federal Reserve, Gold Standard, Milton Friedman, Monetary policy, The Great Depression
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on March 22, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/03/22/remember-the-mistakes-of-1937-a-lesson-for-todays-policy-makers/

Understanding financial markets with MV=PY – a look at the bond market

Recently I have been thinking whether it would be possible to understand all financial market price action through the lens of the equation of exchange – MV=PY. In post I take a look at the bond market.

The bond market – its about PY expectations

A common misunderstanding among economic commentators is to equate easy monetary conditions with low bond yields. However, Milton Friedman long ago told us that bond yields are low when monetary policy have been tight – and not when it has been loose. Any Market Monetarist will tell you that monetary conditions are getting easier when nominal GDP growth is accelerating and and getting tighter when NGDP growth is slowing. So with this Friedmanite and market monetarist insight in mind there should be a relationship between higher bond yields and higher nominal GDP growth. Hence, when market participants expect MV to increase then we should also see bond yields increase.

The graph above shows the correlation between 10-year US bond yields and US NGDP growth. The graph illustrates that there is a fairly close correlation between the two series. Higher bond yields and higher NGDP hence seem to go hand in hand and as we know MV=PY we can conclude that higher bond yields is an indication of looser monetary policy. Furthermore, we should expect to see bond yields to increase – rather than decrease – when monetary policy is eased. Or said in another way – any monetary action that does not lead to an increase in bond yields should not be considered to be monetary easing. 

Therefore, given the present slump we are in we should not be worried that rising bond yields will kill off the recovery – rather we should rejoice when long-term bond yields are rising because that is the best indictor that monetary conditions are becoming easer and that that will push up nominal GDP.

The brief discussion above in my view confirms some key market monetarist positions. First, financial markets are good indicators of the stance of monetary policy. Second, monetary policy works through expectations – with long and variable leads. Third low bond yields is an indication that monetary policy has been tight and not that it is loose.

UPDATE: In my original post I had used some wrong data. Clare Zempel kindly notified me about the mistake(s). I am grateful for the help. As a consequence of the wrong data I have revised part of the original text.

UPDATE 2: David Beckworth has an excellent post arguing the exactly the same as me: “the recent rise in long-term yields can be interpreted as the bond market pricing in a rise in the expected growth of aggregate demand.”. And take a look at David’s graph showing the relationship between expected NGDP growth and 10-year bond yields. Great stuff!

19 Comments
by Lars Christensen on March 20, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Economic and monetary history, Efficient-Market Hypothesis, Financial markets, Milton Friedman, MV=PY
Tagged ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on March 20, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/03/20/understanding-financial-markets-with-mvpy-a-look-at-the-bond-market/

How (un)stable is velocity?

Traditional monetarists used to consider money-velocity as rather stable and predictable. In the simple textbook version of monetarism V in MV=PY is often assumed to be constant. This of course is a caricature. Traditional monetarists like Milton Friedman, Karl Brunner or Allan Meltzer never claimed that velocity was constant, but rather that the money demand function is relatively stable and predictable.

Market Monetarists on the other hand would argue that velocity is less stable than traditional monetarists argued.  However, the difference between the two views is much smaller than it might look on the surface. The key to understanding this is the importance of expectations and money policy rules.

In my view we can not think of money demand – and hence V – without understanding monetary policy rules and expectations (Robert Lucas of course told us that long ago…). Therefore, the discussion of the stability of velocity is in some way similar to the discussion about whether monetary policy whether monetary policy works with long and variable leads or lags.

Therefore, V can said to be a function of the expectations of future growth in M and these expectations are determined by what monetary policy regime is in place. During the Great Moderation there was a clear inverse relationship between M and V. So when M increased above trend V would tend to drop and vice versa. The graph below shows this very clearly. I use the St. Louis Fed’s so-called MZM measure of the money supply.

This is not really surprising if you take into account that the Federal Reserve during this period de facto was targeting a growth path for nominal GDP (PY). Hence, a “overshoot” on money supply growth year one year would be counteracted the following year(s). That also mean that we should expect money demand to move in the direct opposite direction and this indeed what we saw during the Great Moderation. If the NGDP target is 100% credible the correlation between growth in M and growth in V to be exactly -1. (For more on the inverse relationship between M and V see here.)

The graph below shows the 3-year rolling correlation growth in M (MZM) and V in the US since 1960.

The graph very clearly illustrates changes in the credibility of US monetary policy and the monetary policy regimes of different periods. During the 1960 the correlation between M or V was highly unstable. This is during the Bretton Woods period, where the US effectively had a (quasi) fixed exchange rate. Hence, basically the growth of M and V was determined by the exchange rate policy.

However, in 1971 Nixon gave up the direct convertibility of gold to dollars and effectively killed the Bretton Woods system. The dollar was so to speak floated. This is very visible in the graph above. Around 1971 the (absolute) correlation between M and V becomes slightly more stable and significant higher. Hence, while the correlation between M and V was highly volatile during the 1960s and swung between +0 and -0.8 the correlation during the 1970s was more stable around -0.6, but still quite unstable compared to what followed during the Great Moderation.

The next regime change in US monetary policy happened in 1979 when Paul Volcker became Fed chairman. This is also highly visible in the graph. From 1979 we see a rather sharp increase in the (absolute) correlation between money supply growth and velocity growth.  Hence, from 1979 to 1983 the 3-year rolling correlation between MZM growth and velocity growth increased from around -0.6 to around -0.9. From 1983 and all through the rest of the Volcker-Greenspan period the correlation stayed around -0.8 to -0.9 indicating a very credible NGDP growth targeting regime. This is rather remarkable given the fact that the Fed never announced such a policy – nonetheless it seems pretty clear that money demand effectively behaved as if such a regime was in place.

It is also notable that there is a “pullback” in the correlation between M and V during the three recessions of the Great Moderation – 1990-91, 2001-2 and finally in 2008-9. This is rather clear indication of the monetary nature of these recessions.

The discussion above illustrates that the relationship between M and V to a very large degree is regime dependent. So while it might have been perfectly reasonable to assume that there was little correlation between M and V during the 1950s and 1960s that changed especially after Volcker defeated inflation and introduced a rule based monetary policy.

MV=PY is still the best tool for monetary analysis

So while V is far from as stable as traditional monetarists assumed the correlation between M and V is highly stable if monetary policy is credible and there is a clearly defined nominal target. Therefore MV=PY still provides the best tool for understanding monetary policy – and macroeconomics for that matter – as long as we never forget about the importance of monetary policy rules and expectations.

However, the discussion above also shows that we should be less worried about maintaining a stable rate of growth in M than traditional monetarists would argue. In fact the market mechanism will ensure a stable development in MV is the central bank has a credible target for PY. If we have a credible NGDP targeting regime then the correlation between M and V will be pretty close to -1.

—-

PS This discussion of course is highly relevant for what happened to US monetary policy in 2008, but the purpose of this post is to discuss the general mechanism rather than what happened in 2008. I would however notice that the correlation between growth in M and V dropped in 2008, but still remains fairly high. One should of course note here that this is the correlation between the growth of M and V rather than the level of M and V.

PPS In my discussion and graph above I have used MZM data rather than for example M2 data. The results are similar with M2, but slightly less clear. That to me indicates that MZM is a much better monetary indicator than M2. I am sure William Barnett would agree and maybe I would try to do the same exercise with his Divisia Money series.

13 Comments
by Lars Christensen on March 18, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Milton Friedman, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy, Monetary policy rules, MV=PY, NGDP Targeting, Nominal Income Targeting, The Great Moderation, Velocity, William Barnett

Posted by Lars Christensen on March 18, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/03/18/how-unstable-is-velocity/

Expectations and the transmission mechanism – why didn’t anybody think of that before?

As I was writing my recent post on the discussion of the importance of expectations in the lead-lag structure in the monetary transmission mechanism I came think that is really somewhat odd how little role the discussion of expectations have had in the history of the theory of transmission mechanism .

Yes, we can find discussions of expectations in the works of for example Ludwig von Mises, John Maynard Keynes and Frank Knight. However, these discussions are not directly linked to the monetary transmission mechanism and it was not really before the development of rational expectations models in the 1970s that expectations started to entering into monetary theory. Today of course New Keynesians, New Classical economists and of course most notably Market Monetarists acknowledge the central role of expectations. While most monetary policy makers still seem rather ignorant about the connection between the monetary transmission mechanism and expectations. And even fewer acknowledge that monetary policy basically becomes endogenous in a world of a perfectly credible nominal target.

A good example of this disconnect between the view of expectations and the view of the monetary transmission mechanism is of course the works of Milton Friedman. Friedman more less prior to the Muth’s famous paper on rational expectation came to the conclusion that you can’t fool everybody all of the time and as consequence monetary policy can not permanently be use to exploit a trade-off between unemployment and inflation. This is of course was one of things that got him his Nobel Prize. However, Friedman to his death continued to talk about monetary policy as working with long and variable lags. However, why would there be long and variable lags if monetary policy was perfectly credible and the economic agents have rational expectations? One answer is – as I earlier suggested – that monetary policy in no way was credible when Friedman did his research on monetary theory and policy. One can say Friedman helped develop rational expectation theory, but never grasped that this would be quite important for how we understand the monetary transmission mechanism.

Friedman, however, was not along. Basically nobody (please correct me if I am wrong!!) prior to the development of New Keynesian theory talked seriously about the importance of expectations in the monetary transmission mechanism. The issue, however, was not ignored. Hence, at the centre of the debate about the gold standard in the 1930s was of course the discussion of the need to tight the hands of policy makers. And Kydland and Prescott did not invent Rules vs Discretion. Henry Simons of course in his famous paper Rules versus Authorities in Monetary Policy from 1936 discussed the issue at length. So in some way economists have always known the importance of expectations in monetary theory. However, they have said, very little about the importance of expectation in the monetary transmission mechanism.

Therefore in many ways the key contribution of Market Monetarism to the development of monetary theory might be that we fully acknowledge the importance of expectations in the transmission mechanism. Yes, New Keynesian like Mike Woodford and Gauti Eggertsson also understand the importance of expectations in the transmission mechanism, but their view of the transmission mechanism seems uniformly focused in the expectations of the future path of real interest rates rather than on a much broader set of asset prices.

However, I might be missing something here so I am very interested in hearing what my readers have to say about this issue. Can we find any pre-rational expectations economists that had expectations at the core of there understand of the monetary transmission mechanism? Cassel? Hawtrey? Wicksell? I am not sure…

PS Don’t say Hayek he missed up badly with expectations in Prices and Production…

PPS I will be in London in the coming days on business so I am not sure I will have much time for blogging, but I will make sure to speak a lot about monetary policy…

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by Lars Christensen on March 12, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Efficient-Market Hypothesis, General economic theory, Hayek, Milton Friedman, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy, Monetary policy rules, Reading recommendations, Transmission mechanism
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Posted by Lars Christensen on March 12, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/03/12/expectations-and-the-transmission-mechanism-why-didnt-anybody-think-of-that-before/

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