All posts in category Reading recommendations

The dangers of targeting CPI rather than the GDP deflator – the case of the Czech Republic

It is no secret that Market Monetarists favour nominal GDP level targeting over inflation target. We do so for a number of reasons, but an important reason is that we believe that the central bank should not react to supply shocks are thereby distort the relative prices in the economy. However, for now the Market Monetarist quest for NGDP targeting has not yet lead any central bank in the world to officially switching to NGDP targeting. Inflation targeting still remains the preferred operational framework for central banks in the developed world and partly also in Emerging Markets.

However, when we talk about inflation targeting it is not given what inflation we are talking about. Now you are probably thinking “what is he talking about? Inflation is inflation”. No, there are a number of different measure of inflation and dependent on what measures of inflation the central bank is targeting it might get to very different conclusions about whether to tighten or ease monetary policy.

Most inflation targeting central banks tend to target inflation measured with some kind of consumer price index (CPI). The Consumer Price Index is a fixed basket prices of goods and services. Crucially CPI also includes prices of imported goods and services. Therefor a negative supply shock in the form of higher import prices will show up directly in higher CPI-inflation. Furthermore, increases in indirect taxes will also push up CPI.

Hence, try to imagine a small very open economy where most of the production of the country is exported and everything that is consumed domestically is imported. In such a economy the central bank will basically have no direct influence on inflation – or at least if the central bank targets headline CPI inflation then it will basically be targeting prices determined in the outside world (and by indirect taxes) rather than domestically.

Contrary to CPI the GDP deflator is a price index of all goods and services produced within the country. This of course is what the central bank can impact directly. Therefore, it could seem somewhat paradoxically that central banks around the world tend to focus on CPI rather than on the GDP deflator. In fact I would argue that many central bankers are not even aware about what is happening to the GDP deflator.

It is not surprising that many central bankers knowingly or unknowingly are ignorant of the developments in the GDP deflator. After all normally the GDP deflator and CPI tend to move more or less in sync so “normally” there are not major difference between inflation measured with CPI and GDP deflator. However, we are not in “normal times”.

The deflationary Czech economy

A very good example of the difference between CPI and the GDP deflator is the Czech economy. This is clearly illustrated in the graph below.

The Czech central bank (CNB) is targeting 2% inflation. As the graph shows both CPI and the GDP deflator grew close to a 2% growth-path from the early 2000s and until crisis hit in 2008. However, since then the two measures have diverged dramatically from each other. The consumer price index has clearly moved above the 2%-trend – among other things due to increases in indirect taxes. On the other hand the GDP deflator has at best been flat and one can even say that it until recently was trending downwards.

Hence, if you as a Czech central banker focus on inflation measured by CPI then you might be alarmed by the rise in CPI well above the 2%-trend. And this has in fact been the case with the CNB’s board, which has remained concerned about inflationary risks all through this crisis as the CNB officially targets CPI inflation.

However, if you instead look at the GDP deflator you would realise that the CNB has had too tight monetary policy. In fact one can easily argue that CNB’s policies have been deflationary and as such it is no surprise that the Czech economy now shows a growth pattern more Japanese in style than a catching-up economy. In that regard it should be noted that the Czech economy certainly cannot be said to be a very leveraged economy. Rather both the public and private debt in the Czech Republic is quite low. Hence, there is certainly no “balance sheet recession” here (I believe that such thing does not really exists…). The Czech economy is not growing because monetary policy is deflationary. The GDP deflator shows that very clearly. Unfortunately the CNB does not focus on the GDP deflator, but rather on CPI.

A easy fix for the Czech economy would therefore be for the CNB to acknowledge that CPI gives a wrong impression of inflationary/deflationary risks in the economy and that the CNB therefore in the future will target inflation measured from the GDP deflator and that it because it has undershot this measure of inflation in the past couple of years it will bring the GDP deflator back to it’s pre-crisis trend. That would necessitate an increase in level of the GDP deflator of 6-7% from the present level. There after the CNB could return to targeting growth rate in the GDP deflator around 2% trend level. This could in my view easily be implemented by announcing the policy and then start to implement it through a policy of buying of foreign currency. Such a policy would in my view be fully in line with the CNB’s 2% inflation target and would in no way jeopardize the long time nominal stability of the Czech economy. Rather it would be the best insurance against the present environment of stagnation turning into a debt and financial crisis.

Obviously I think it would make more sense to focus on targeting the NGDP level, but if the CNB insists on targeting inflation then it at least should focus on targeting an inflation measure it can influence directly. The CNB cannot influence global commodity prices or indirect taxes, but it can influence the price of domestically produced products so that is what it should be aiming at rather than to focus on CPI. It is time to replace CPI with the GDP deflator in it’s inflation target.

13 Comments
by Lars Christensen on May 14, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Czech Republic, Deflation, Inflation, Inflation Targeting, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy, Monetary policy rules, NGDP Targeting, Nominal Income Targeting, Price Level Targeting, Reading recommendations, The Great Recession
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on May 14, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/05/14/the-dangers-of-targeting-cpi-rather-than-the-gdp-deflator-the-case-of-the-czech-republic/

Forget about those black swans

It has become highly fashionable to talk about “black swans” since the crisis began in 2008 and now even Scott Sumner talks about it in his recent post “Don’t forget about those black swans”. Ok, Scott is actually not obsessed with black swans, but his headline reminded me how much focus there is on “black swans” these days – especially among central bankers and regulators and to some extent also among market participants.

What is a black swan? The black swan theory was popularized by Nassim Taleb in 2007 book “The Black Swan”. Taleb’s idea basically is that the financial markets underprice the risk of extreme events happening. Taleb obviously felt vindicated when crisis hit in 2008. The extreme event happened and it had clearly not been priced by the market in advance.

Lets go back to back to Scott’s post. Here he quotes Matt Yglesias:

Here’s a fun Intrade price anomaly that showed up this morning. The markets indicate that there’s more than a 3 percent chance that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney will win the presidential election. That’s clearly way too high.

Scott then counter Matt by saying that we should not forget “something unusual happening”:

1.  One of the two major candidates is assassinated, and the replacement is elected (as in Mexico’s 1994 election.)

2.  Ditto, except one pulls out due to health problems, or scandal.

3.  A third party candidate comes out of nowhere to get elected.

Scott is of course right. All this could happen and as a consequence it would obviously be wrong if the market had price a 100% chance that nobody else than Obama or Romney would become US president.

Scott and I tend to think that financial markets are (more or less) efficient and as a consequence we would not be gambling men. Scott nonetheless seem to think that the odds are good:

“But 3% is low odds.  It’s basically saying once in ever 130 years you’d expect something really weird to happen in US presidential politics during an election year.   That’s a long time!  Given all the weird things that have happened, how unlikely is it?  Some might counter that none of the three scenarios I’ve outlined have occurred in the US during an election year (my history is weak so I’m not certain.)  But mind-bogglingly unusual things have happened on occasion.  On November 10, 1972, what kind of odds would Intrade have given on neither Nixon nor Agnew being President on January 1 1975?”

Scott certainly have a good point, but I will not question the market on this one. The market pricing is the best assessment of risk we have. If not there would be money in street ready to pick up for anybody – and there is not. Obviously Taleb disagrees as he believe that markets tend to underprice risk. However, I fundamentally think that Taleb is wrong and I don’t see much evidence that market underprice black swan events. The fact that rare events happen is not evidence that the market on average underprice the likelihood of this events.

The fashion long-shot bias and central banks

In the evidence from betting markets seem to indicate that if anything bettors tend to have a favourite-longshot bias meaning that they tend to overprice the likelihood that the favourite will loose elections or sport games. Said in another way if anything bettors tend to overprice the likelihood of a black swan events. I happen to think that this is not a market problem in markets in general, but it nonetheless indicates that if anything the problem is too much focus on black swan events rather than too little focus on them.

This to a very large extent has been the case of the past 4 years – especially in regard to central banking and banking regulation. There seem to be a near-obsession among some policy makers that a new black swan could turn up. How often have we heard the talk about the major risk of bubbles if interest rates are kept too low too long and most of the new financial regulation being push through across the world these days is justified by reference to the risk of some kind of black swan event.

Media and policy makers in my view have become obsessed with extreme events happening – you will be reminded about that every time you go through the security check in any airport in the world.

The obsession with black swan events is highly problematic as the cost of policy makers obsessing about very unlikely events happening lead them to implement very costly regulation that lead to massive waste of resources. Again just think about how many hours you have spend waiting to get through airport security over the last couple of years and if you think that is bad just think of the cost resulting from excessive new regulation of the global financial markets. So my suggestion is clearly to forget about those black swans!

Finally three book recommendations:

Risk by Dan Gardner that tells about the “politics of fear” (of black swans).

The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan explains why democracy tend to lead to irrationality while market lead to rationality. Said in another way policy makers would be more prone to focus on black swans than market participants in free markets would be.

Risk, Uncertain and Profit – Frank Knight’s classic. If you are really interested in the issues of risk and uncertainty then there is no reason at all to read Taleb’s books (I have read both The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness – they are “fun” and something you can read while you are waitin in line at the security check in the airport, but it is certainly not Nobel prize material). Instead just read Knight’s classic. It is much more insightful. It is actually something that frustrates me a great deal about Taleb’s books – there is really nothing new in what he is saying, but he claims to have come up with everything himself.

4 Comments
by Lars Christensen on May 4, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Efficient-Market Hypothesis, Financial markets, Reading recommendations, Scott Sumner
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on May 4, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/05/04/forget-about-those-black-swans/

Nixon was a crook and Arthur Burns was a failed central banker

Back from my trip to Riga and Stockholm and two books had arrived in the mail from Amazon.

The first one “Inside The Nixon Administration – the Secret Diary of Arthur Burns 1969-1974” (Edited by Robert Ferrell, 2010). The second one is Larry White’s “Free Banking in Britain” (yes, dear readers believe it or not I did not read it before…).

Obviously I have not read the two books yet, but they are in some odd way complementary – the one is about how central banking can become hugely politicized and the second is about how to avoid that the monetary regime is politicized.

I did peak a little into the pages of the Burns diary. Burns who of course was Federal Reserve governor while Nixon was US president wrote a diary with notes from all its meetings with Nixon. I must admit that I am in total shock about how extreme the polarization of the US monetary policy was in the Nixon years. The man surely was a crook. One of the worst. However, from the little I have read Burns diary also clearly shows how misguided his views of monetary policy were. Again and again the diary mentions how he think price and wage controls are necessary to curb inflation, while Nixon at the same time is demanding money printing to be stepped up. Surely a bizarre duo – one a failed economist and one a crook. Very scary indeed.

So what is the lesson? Politics and money is a deadly cocktail and that is why you want to restrict both central bankers and a politicians when it comes to monetary policy.

If any of my readers have read these books I would be very happy to hear your opinion about them.

 

5 Comments
by Lars Christensen on April 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Free Banking, Larry White, Monetary institutions, Reading recommendations, Uncategorized
Tagged , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on April 19, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/04/19/nixon-was-a-crook-and-arthur-burns-was-a-failed-central-banker/

Is Market Monetarism just market socialism?

The short answer to the question in the headline is no, but I can understand if somebody would suspect so. I will discuss this below.

If there had been an internet back in the 1920s then the leading Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek would have had their own blogs and so would the two leading “market socialists” Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner and in many ways the debate between the Austrians and the market socialists in the so-called Socialist Calculation Debate played out as debate do today in the blogosphere.

Recently I have given some attention to the need for Market Monetarists to stress the institutional context of monetary institutions and I think the critique by for example Daniel Smith and Peter Boettke in their recent paper “Monetary Policy and the Quest for Robust Political Economy” should be taken serious.

Smith’s and Boettke’s thesis is basically that monetary theorists – including – Market Monetarists tend to be overly focused on designing the optimal policy rules under the assumption that central bankers acts in a benevolent fashion to ensure a higher good. Smith and Boettke argue contrary to this that central bankers are unlikely to act in a benevolent fashion and we therefore instead of debating “optimal” policy rules we instead should debate how we could ultimately limit central banks discretionary powers by getting rid of them all together. Said in another way – you can not reform central banks so they should just be abolished.

I have written numerous posts arguing basically along the same lines as Boettke and Smith (See fore example here and here). I especially have argued that we certainly should not see central bankers as automatically acting in a benevolent fashion and that central bankers will act in their own self-interests as every other individual. That said, I also think that Smith and Boettke are too defeatist in their assessment and fail to acknowledge that NGDP level targeting could be seen as step toward abolishing central banks altogether.

From the Smith-Boettke perspective one might argue that Market Monetarism really is just the monetary equivalent of market socialism and I can understand why (Note Smith and Boettke are not arguing this). I have often argued that NGDP targeting is a way to emulate the outcome in a truly competitive Free Banking system (See for example here page 26) and that is certainly a common factor with the market socialists of the 1920s. What paretian market socialists like Lerner and Lange wanted was a socialist planned economy where the allocation would emulate the allocation under a Walrasian general equilibrium model.

So yes, on the surface there as some similarities between Market Monetarism and market socialism. However, note here the important difference of the use of “market” in the two names. In Market Monetarism the reference is about using the market in the conduct of monetary policy. In market socialism it is about using socialist instruments to “copy” the market. Hence, in Market Monetarism the purpose is to move towards market allocation and about monetary policy not distorting relative market prices, while the purpose of market socialism is about moving away from market allocation. Market Monetarism provides an privatisation strategy, while market socialism provides an nationalisation strategy. I am not sure that Boettke and Smith realise this. But they are not alone – I think many NGDP targeting proponents also fail to see these aspects .

George Selgin – who certainly is in favour of Free Banking – in a number of recent papers (see here and here) have discussed strategies for central bank reforms that could move us closer to Free Banking. I think that George fully demonstrates that just because you might be favouring Free Banking and wanting to get rid of central banks you don’t have to stop reforms of central banking that does not go all the way.

This debate is really similar to the critique some Austrians – particular Murray Rothbard – had of Milton Friedman’s proposal for the introduction of school vouchers. Rothbard would argue that Friedman’s ideas was just clever socialism and would preserve a socialist system rather than break it down.

However, even Rothbard acknowledged in For a New Liberty that  Friedman’s school voucher proposal was “a great improvement over the present system in permitting a wider range of parental choice and enabling the abolition of the public school system” (I stole the quote from Bryan Caplan). Shouldn’t Free Banking advocates think about NGDP level targeting in the same way?

—-

Posts on central bank as (or not) central planning:

Maybe Scott should talk about Hayek instead of EMH
It’s time to get rid of the ”representative agent” in monetary theory
Guest blog: Central banking – between planning and rules
When central banking becomes central planning

18 Comments
by Lars Christensen on April 11, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Daniel Smith, Free Banking, George Selgin, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, Peter Boettke, Reading recommendations
Tagged , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on April 11, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/04/11/is-market-monetarism-just-market-socialism/

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…

15 Comments
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
Tagged , , , , , ,

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/

Long and variable leads and lags

Scott Sumner yesterday posted a excellent overview of some key Market Monetarist positions. I initially thought I would also write a comment on what I think is the main positions of Market Monetarism but then realised that I already done that in my Working Paper on Market Monetarism from last year – “Market  Monetarism – The  Second  Monetarist  Counter-­revolution”. 

My fundamental view is that I personally do not mind being called an monetarist rather than a Market Monetarist even though I certainly think that Market Monetarism have some qualities that we do not find in traditional monetarism, but I fundamentally think Market Monetarism is a modern restatement of Monetarism rather than something fundamentally new.

I think the most important development in Market Monetarism is exactly that we as Market Monetarists stress the importance of expectations and how expectations of monetary policy can be read directly from market pricing. At the core of traditional monetarism is the assumption of adaptive expectations. However, today all economists acknowledge that economic agents (at least to some extent) are forward-looking and personally I have no problem in expressing that in the form of rational expectations – a view that Scott agrees with as do New Keynesians. However, unlike New Keynesian we stress that we can read these expectations directly from financial market pricing – stock prices, bond yields, commodity prices and exchange rates. Hence, by looking at changes in market pricing we can see whether monetary policy is becoming tighter or looser. This also has to do with our more nuanced view of the monetary transmission mechanism than is found among mainstream economists – including New Keynesians. As Scott express it:

Like monetarists, we assume many different transmission channels, not just interest rates.  Money affects all sorts of asset prices.  One slight difference from traditional monetarism is that we put more weight on the expected future level of NGDP, and hence the expected future hot potato effect.  Higher expected future NGDP tends to increase current AD, and current NGDP.

This is basically also the reason why Scott has stressed that monetary policy works with long and variable leads rather than with long and variable lags as traditionally expressed by Milton Friedman. In my view there is however really no conflict between the two positions and both are possible dependent on the institutional set-up in a given country at a given time.

Imagine the typical monetary policy set-up during the 1960s or 1970s when Friedman was doing research on monetary matters. During this period monetary policy clearly was missing a nominal anchor. Hence, there was no nominal target for monetary policy. Monetary policy was highly discretionary. In this environment it was very hard for market participants to forecast what policies to expect from for example the Federal Reserve. In fact in the 1960s and 1970s the Fed would not even bother to announce to market participant that it had changed monetary policy – it would simply just change the policy – for example interest rates. Furthermore, as the Fed was basically not communicating directly with the markets market participant would have to guess why a certain policy change had been implemented. As a result in such an institutional set-up market participants basically by default would have backward-looking expectations and would only gradually learn about what the Fed was trying to achieve. In such a set-up monetary policy nearly by definition would work with long and variable lags.

Contrary to this is the kind of set-up we had during the Great Moderation. Even though the Federal Reserve had not clearly formulated its policy target (it still hasn’t) market participants had a pretty good idea that the Fed probably was targeting the nominal GDP level or followed a kind of Taylor rule and market participants rarely got surprised by policy changes. Hence, market participants could reasonably deduct from economic and financial developments how policy would be change in the future. During this period monetary policy basically became endogenous. If NGDP was above trend then market participant would expect that monetary policy would be tightened. That would increase money demand and push down money-velocity and push up short-term interest rates. Often the Fed would even hint in what direction monetary policy was headed which would move stock prices, commodity prices, the exchange rates and bond yields in advance for any actual policy change. A good example of this dynamics is what we saw during early 2001. As a market participant I remember that the US stock market would rally on days when weak US macroeconomic data were released as market participants priced in future monetary easing. Hence, during this period monetary policy clear worked with long and variable leads.

In fact if we lived in a world of perfectly credible NGDP level targeting monetary policy would be fully automatic and probably monetary easing and tightening would happen through changes in money demand rather than through changes in the money base. In such a world the lead in monetary policy would be extremely short. This is the Market Monetarist dream world. In fact we could say that not only is “long and variable leads” a description of how the world is, but a normative position of how it should be.

Concluding there is no conflict between whether monetary policy works with long and variable leads or lags, but rather this is strictly dependent on the monetary policy regime and how monetary policy is implemented. A key problem in both the ECB’s and the Fed’s present policies today is that both central banks are far from clear about what nominal targets they have and how to achieve it – in some ways we are back to the pre-Great Moderation days of policy uncertainty. As a consequence market participants will only gradually learn about what the central bank’s real policy objectives are and therefore there is clearly an element of long and variable lags in monetary policy. However, if the Fed tomorrow announced that it would aim to increase NGDP by 15% by the end of 2013 and it would try to achieve that by buying unlimited amounts of foreign currency I am pretty sure we would swiftly move to a world of instantaneously working monetary policy – hence we would move from a quasi-Friedmanian world to a Sumnerian world.

Without rules we live in Friedmanian world – with clear nominal targets we live live in Sumnerian world.

PS Today is a Sumnerian day – hints from both the Fed and the ECB about possible monetary tightening is leading to monetary policy tightening today. Just take a look at US stock markets…(Ok, Greek worries is also playing apart, but that is passive monetary tightening as dollar demand increases)

15 Comments
by Lars Christensen on March 6, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in ECB, Economic and monetary history, Efficient-Market Hypothesis, Federal Reserve, Financial markets, Milton Friedman, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy, Monetary policy rules, NGDP Targeting, Nominal Income Targeting, Reading recommendations, Scott Sumner, The Great Moderation, The Great Recession, Transmission mechanism
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on March 6, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/03/06/long-and-variable-leads-and-lags/

Exchange rates and monetary policy – it’s not about competitiveness: Some Argentine lessons

I think Rob who is one my readers hit the nail on the head when he in a recent comment commented that one of the things that is clearly differentiating Market Monetarism from other schools is our view of the monetary transmission mechanism. In my reply to his comment I promised Rob to write more on the MM view of the monetary transmission mechanism. I hope this post will do exactly that.

It is well known that Market Monetarists see a significantly less central role for interest rates in the monetary transmission mechanism than New Keynesians (and traditional Keynesians) and Austrians. As traditional monetarists we believe that monetary policy works through numerous channels and that the interest rate channel is just one such channel (See here for a overview of some of these channels here).

A channel by which monetary policy also works is the exchange rate channel. It is well recognised by most economists that a weakening of a country’s currency can boost the country’s nominal GDP (NGDP) – even though most economists would focus on real GDP and inflation rather than at NGDP. However, in my view the general perception about how a weakening the currency impacts the economy is often extremely simplified.

The “normal” story about the exchange rate-transmission mechanism is that a weakening of the currency will lead to an improvement of the country’s competitiveness (as it – rightly – is assumed that prices and wages are sticky) and that will lead to an increase in exports and a decrease in imports and hence increase net exports and in traditional keynesian fashion this will in real GDP (and NGDP). I do not disagree that this is one way that an exchange rate depreciation (or devaluation) can impact RGDP and NGDP. However, in my view the competitiveness channel is far from the most important channel.

I would point to two key effects of a devaluation of a currency. One channel impacts the money supply (M) and the other the velocity of money (V). As we know MV=PY=NGDP this should also make it clear that exchange rates changes can impact NGDP via M or V.

Lets start out in a economy where NGDP is depressed and expectations about the future growth of NGDP is subdued. This could be Japan in the late 1990s or Argentina in 2001 – or Greece today for that matter.

If the central bank today announces that it has devalued the country’s currency by 50% then that would have numerous impacts on expectations. First of all, inflation expectations would increase dramatically (if the announcement is unexpected) as higher import prices likely will be push up inflation, but also because – and more important – the expectation to the future path of NGDP would change and the expectations for money supply growth would change. Take Argentina in 2001. In 2001 the Argentinian central bank was dramatically tightening monetary conditions to maintain the pegged peso rate against the US dollar. This send a clear signal that the authorities was willing to accept a collapse in NGDP to maintain the currency board. Naturally that lead consumers and investors to expect a further collapse in NGDP – expectations basically became deflationary.  However, once the the peg was given up inflation and NGDP expectations spiked. With the peso collapsing the demand for (peso) cash dropped dramatically – hence money demand dropped, which of course in the equation of exchange is the same as an increase in money-velocity. With V spiking and assuming (to begin with) that  the money supply is unchanged NGDP should by definition increase as much as the increase in V. This is the velocity-effect of a devaluation. In the case of Argentina it should of course be noted that the devaluation was not unexpected so velocity started to increase prior to the devaluation and the expectations of a devaluation grew.

Second, in the case of Argentina where the authorities basically “outsourced” the money policy to the Federal Reserve by pegging the peso the dollar. Hence, the Argentine central bank could not independently increase the money supply without giving up the peg. In fact in 2001 there was a massive currency outflow, which naturally lead to a sharp drop in the Argentine FX reserve. In a fixed exchange rate regime it follows that any drop in the foreign currency reserve must lead to an equal drop in the money base. This is exactly what happened in Argentina. However, once the peg was given up the central bank was free to increase the money base. With M increasing (and V increasing as argued above) NGDP would increase further. This is the money supply-effect of a devaluation.

The very strong correlation between Argentine M2 and NGDP can be seen in the graph below (log-scale Index).

I believe that the combined impact of velocity and money supply effects empirically are much stronger than the competitiveness effect devaluation – especially for countries in a deflationary or quasi-deflationary situation like Argentina was in in 2001. This is also strongly confirmed by what happened in Argentina from 2002 and until 2005-7.

This is from Mark Weisbrot’s and Luis Sandoval’s 2007-paper on “Argentina’s economic recovery”:

“However, relatively little of Argentina’s growth over the last five years (2002-2007) is a result of exports or of the favorable prices of Argentina’s exports on world markets. This must be emphasized because the contrary is widely believed, and this mistaken assumption has often been used to dismiss the success or importance of the recovery, or to cast it as an unsustainable “commodity export boom…

During this period (The first six months following the devaluation in 2002) exports grew at a 6.7 percent annual rate and accounted for 71.3 percent of GDP growth. Imports dropped by more than 28 percent and therefore accounted for 167.8 percent of GDP growth during this period. Thus net exports (exports minus imports) accounted for 239.1 percent of GDP growth during the first six months of the recovery. This was countered mainly by declining consumption, with private consumption falling at a 5.0 percent annual rate.

But exports did not play a major role in the rest of the recovery after the first six months. The next phase of the recovery, from the third quarter of 2002 to the second quarter of 2004, was driven by private consumption and investment, with investment growing at a 41.1 percent annual rate during this period. Growth during the third phase of the recovery – the three years ending with the second half of this year – was also driven mainly by private consumption and investment… However, in this phase exports did contribute more than in the previous period, accounting for about 16.2 percent of growth; although imports grew faster, resulting in a negative contribution for net exports. Over the entire recovery through the first half of this year, exports accounted for about 13.6 percent of economic growth, and net exports (exports minus imports) contributed a negative 10.9 percent.

The economy reached its pre-recession level of real GDP in the first quarter of 2005. As of the second quarter this year, GDP was 20.8 percent higher than this previous peak. Since the beginning of the recovery, real (inflation-adjusted) GDP has grown by 50.9 percent, averaging 8.2 percent annually. All this is worth noting partly because Argentina’s rapid expansion is still sometimes dismissed as little more than a rebound from a deep recession.

…the fastest growing sectors of the economy were construction, which increased by 162.7 percent during the recovery; transport, storage and communications (73.4 percent); manufacturing (64.4 percent); and wholesale and retail trade and repair services (62.7 percent).

The impact of this rapid and sustained growth can be seen in the labor market and in household poverty rates… Unemployment fell from 21.5 percent in the first half of 2002 to 9.6 percent for the first half of 2007. The employment-to-population ratio rose from 32.8 percent to 43.4 percent during the same period. And the household poverty rate fell from 41.4 percent in the first half of 2002 to 16.3 percent in the first half of 2007. These are very large changes in unemployment, employment, and poverty rates.”

Hence, the Argentine example clearly confirms the significant importance of monetary effects in the transmission of a devaluation to NGDP (and RGDP for that matter) and at the same time shows that the competitiveness effect is rather unimportant in the big picture.

There are other example out there (there are in fact many…). The US recovery after Roosevelt went of the gold standard in 1933 is exactly the same story. It was not an explosion in exports that sparked the sharp recovery in the US economy in the summer of 1933, but rather the massive monetary easing that resulted from the increase in M and V. This lesson obviously is important when we today are debate whether for example Greece would benefit from leaving the euro area or whether one or another country should maintain a pegged exchange rate regime.

A bit on Danish 1970s FX policy

In my home country of Denmark it is often noted that the numerous devaluations of the Danish krone in the 1970s completely failed to do anything good for the Danish economy and that that proves that devaluations are bad under all circumstances. The Danish example, however, exactly illustrate the problem with the “traditional” perspective on devaluations. Had Danish policy makers instead had an monetary approach to exchange rate policy in 1970s then the policies that would have been implemented would have been completely different.

Denmark – as many other European countries – was struggling with stagflation in the 1970s – both inflation and unemployment was high. Any monetarist would tell you (as Friedman did) that this was a result of a negative supply shock (and general structural problems) combined with overly loose monetary policy. The Danish government by devaluating the krone (again and again…) tried to improve competitiveness and thereby bring down unemployment. However, the high level of unemployment was not due to lack of demand, but rather due to supply side problems. The Danish economy was not in a deflationary trap, but rather in a stagflationary trap. That is the reason the devaluations did not “work” – well it worked perfectly well in terms of increasing inflation, but it did not bring down unemployment as the problem was not lack of demand (contrary to what is the case most places in Europea and the US today).

Conclusion – it’s not about competitiveness

So to conclude, the most important channels of exchange rate policy is monetary – the velocity effect and the money supply – the competitiveness effect is nearly as irrelevant as interest rates is. Countries that suffer from too tight monetary policy can ease monetary policy by announcing a credible devaluation or by letting the currency float. Argentina is a clear example of that. Countries that suffer from supply side problems – like Denmark in 1970s – can not solve the fundamental problems by devaluation.

PS the discussion above is not an endorsement of general economic policy in Argentina after 2001, but only meant as an illustration of the exchange rate channel for monetary policy. Neither is it an recommendation concerning what country XYZ should should do in terms of monetary and exchange rate policy today.

PPS Obviously Scott would remind us that the above discussion is just a variation of what Lars E. O. Svensson is telling us about the fool proof way out of a liquidity trap…

Update – some related posts:

The Chuck Norris effect, Swiss lessons and a (not so) crazy idea
Repeating a (not so) crazy idea – or if Chuck Norris was ECB chief
Argentine lessons for Greece

23 Comments
by Lars Christensen on February 22, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Economic and monetary history, Exchange rate policy, Exchange rates, MM Research agenda, Monetary institutions, MV=PY, Reading recommendations, Transmission mechanism
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on February 22, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/02/22/exchange-rates-and-monetary-policy-its-not-about-competitiveness-some-argentine-lessons/

Guest post: GDP-Linked Bonds (by David Eagle)

Guest post: GDP-Linked Bonds, Another Whole Literature to Synthesize into Market Monetarism

by David Eagle

As Dale Domian and I have been frustrated at our continuous attempts to publish our quasi-real indexing research, I have kept reminding myself of one thing and that is that we were the first to design quasi-real indexing (Eagle and Domian, 1995. “Quasi-Real Bonds–Inflation-Indexing that Retains the Government’s Hedge Against Aggregate-Supply Shocks,” Applied Economic Letters).  However, I have recently encountered some good news and some bad news concerning quasi-real indexing.

First, the bad news: It turns out that Dale and I were not the first to come up with the notion of quasi-real indexing.  Somebody actually beat us by two years.  The reference is is Robert Shiller’s “Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society’s Largest Economic Risks”.

Actually, Shiller did not use the term “quasi-real indexing.”  Instead, he used “GDP-linked bonds.”  Shiller shares the same origins for these bonds as Dale and I do.  We all started thinking about government bonds.  At the time of our 1995 paper, the U.S. government was considering inflation-indexed bonds.  Instead, we proposed an alternative bond that would be safer for the government.  Unfortunately, the U.S. government decided to issue TIPS, an inflation-indexed bond, rather than either Shiller’s proposal or Dale’s and my proposal.

Now the good news: A significant literature has evolved concerning GDP-linked bonds.  The existence of this literature provides the market monetarists another literature to bring into the Market Monetarism literature.  In particular, I have come to recognize that quasi-real indexing basically provides insurance against the central bank not meeting its nominal GDP target even if the central bank is not targeting GDP.  If those in the GDP-linked-bond literature can recognize that that is what their GDP-linked bonds do, they will then realize that George Selgin was right in Less than Zero about how risk on loans should be shared between borrowers and lenders.  Also, they should realize that nominal bonds will achieve the same effect as GDP-linked bonds as long as the central bank successfully targets nominal GDP.

You can find GDP-linked bonds in Wikipedia; unfortunately, you cannot find “quasi-real indexing” there (yet).  More recently Professor Shiller joined Mark Kamstra in a paper proposing “Trills,” which are a GDP-linked bond.  Other literature concerning GDP-linked bonds include:

Mark Kamstra and Robert J. Shiller: “The Case for Trills: Giving Canadians and their Pension Funds a Stake in the Wealth of the Nation.”

Kruse, Susanne, Matthias Meitner and Michael Schroder, “On the pricing of GDP-linked financial products.” Applied Financial Economics 15: 1125-1133, 2005.

Griffith-Jones, Stephany, and Krishnan Sharma, “GDP-Indexed Bonds: Making It Happen.” DESA Working Paper No. 21, 2006.

Schröder, Michael; Heinemann, Friedrich; Kruse, Susanne; Meitner, Matthias; “GDP-linked Bonds as a Financing Tool for Developing Countries and Emerging Markets”

Travota, Alexandra “On the Feasibility and Desirability of GDP-Indexed Concessional Lending,”

Also, some blog posts exist on GDP-linked bonds:

Jonathan Ford: The Case for GDP Bonds

: GDP-Linked Securities

Also, a very recent blog post in the WSJ.com just covered Robert Shiller’s proposal of these GDP-linked bonds:

“Worried About U.S. Debt? Shiller Pushes GDP-Linked Bonds”

I myself am still reading these other papers, books, and blog posts.

The reality is that if not only the U.S. government issued quasi-real bonds or GDP-linked bonds, but also European governments issued them as well, then the European sovereign debt crisis would not be at all as serious a problem as it is today.  Also, as most market monetarists know, if the European Central Banks had been targeting nominal GDP successfully, then the European sovereign debt crisis would be of a much smaller magnitude than it has become.  Paul Krugman has noted how the increase in European sovereign debt coincided with the beginning of the last recession.  I hope that Professor Krugman will look into the GDP-linked-bond and quasi-real-indexing literatures to learn how these types of bonds would have prevented this increase to happen.

Actually, Argentina has recently issued some GDP-linked bonds as one of the above blogs points out.

In economics, we have a lot of unconnected literatures that needs to be brought together. Obviously, Dale and my “quasi-real indexing” needs to be synthesized into the GDP-linked bond literature.  However, synthesizing both of these literatures along with the wage-indexation literature and the nominal GDP targeting literature leads to the incredible conclusions: (1) Much of the Pareto-efficiency associated with complete markets can be achieved either through quasi-real indexing of all contracts or by the central bank (successfully) targeting nominal GDP, (2) Most of the negative economic effects of the business cycle would be eliminated either through quasi-real indexing  or nominal GPD targeting.

I hope this post encourages those involved in the GDP-linked bond literature, wage indexation literature, and the literature on NGDP targeting to work on synthesizing all of their literatures together.

© Copyright (2012) by David Eagle

2 Comments
by Lars Christensen on February 21, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in David Eagle, Guest blog, Guest post, Quasi-Real Indexing, Reading recommendations, Robert Shiller
Tagged , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on February 21, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/02/21/guest-post-gdp-linked-bonds-by-david-eagle/

Clark Warburton: A much overlooked monetarist pioneer

When I started this blog it was my plan to write a lot about Clark Warburton. I must admit I have failed to do this, but I still hope to be able to give Clark Warburton the attention he deserves.

Nearly no economists know of Clark Warburton and everybody knows about Milton Friedman. However, the fact is that a lot of what Milton Friedman said about monetary policy had been said by Clark Warburton 10-20 years earlier. Unfortunately nobody wanted to listen to Warburton.

In the introduction to Milton Friedman’s and Anna Schwartz’s “Monetary History” they wrote:

“We owe especially heavy debt to Clark Warburton. His detailed and valuable comments on several drafts have importantly affected the final version. In addition, time and again, as we came to some conclusion that seemed to us novel and original, we found he had been there before.”

Said in another way – Warburton might has well have written “Monetary History” – and to some extent he did.

In the articles “The Volume of Money and The Price Level Between the World Wars” (1944) and “Monetary Theory, Full Production and the Great Depression” (1945) Warburton basically presented the monetarist explanation of the Great Depression – almost 20 years before Friedman and Schwartz (1963).

Scott Sumner has recently tried to argue why the fiscal multiplier is zero if the central bank is targeting any nominal target. For those interested in this discussion should read Warburton’s 1945 article on “The Monetary Theory of Deficit Spending”. Read it and you should pretty fast become convinced that Scott is right – of course Warburton knew that in 1945. My own view that there is no such thing as fiscal policy (and everything is monetary policy) is also clearly inspired by Warburton.

Warburton’s main contribution to American monetary history and theory are collected in the book “Depression, Inflation and Monetary Policy” (including the above mentioned articles). Anyone who wants to understand monetary theory should read this book. The book, along with Leland Yeagers “The Fluttering Veil” are the two most important books in relation to the understanding of the monetarist branch, we could call disequilibrium monetarism (DM). DM is in many ways between the Austrian school and more traditional monetarists like Milton Friedman, Karl Brunner and Allan Meltzer. DM has undoubtedly had a major influence on Free Banking theorist such as George Selgin, but also on modern Austrian economists like Steven Horwitz. As such DM pioneers like Leland Yeager and Clark Warburton are also important from Market Monetarist perspective.

I hope to write more on Warburton in the future. He work surely deserves a lot more attention.

For a good introduction to Warburton’s work see Michael Bordo’s and Anna Schwartz’s article “Clark Warburton: Pioneer Monetarist”

7 Comments
by Lars Christensen on February 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Clark Warburton, Leland Yeager, Reading recommendations, Scott Sumner
Tagged , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on February 19, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/02/19/clark-warburton-a-much-overlooked-monetarist-pioneer/

Christopher Adolph on the politics of central banking

Yesterday I put out a post about central bankers as Niskanen style bureaucrats. I decided that I would look a bit more into the topic. In my browsing for more on this topic a ran into a (revised?) Ph.D. dissertation by Christopher Adolph who is now an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington, Seattle.The title of the disserttion is “The Dilemma of Discretion: Career Ambitions and the Politics of Central Banking”

I have not yet had time to read it all, but my initial impression is that Adolph provides some very interesting insides to what motivates central bankers, but have a look for yourselves.

Adolph also has new book in the pipeline: “The Myth of Neutrality: Bankers, Bureaucrats, and Central Bank Politics” which will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Leave a comment
by Lars Christensen on February 17, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Monetary institutions, Public Choice Theory, Reading recommendations
Tagged

Posted by Lars Christensen on February 17, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/02/17/christopher-adolph-on-the-politics-of-central-banking/

« Older Posts
Newer Posts »