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Asymmetrical shocks in a currency union, the Crime of 1873 and the of a guy called Sven Persson

I have never been particularly interested in genealogy, however, that has changed after my dad recently sent me a picture of Sven Persson. Sven Persson was my great-great grandfather.

I had seen the picture before and I knew that I have Swedish family roots – Sven was born in Hjärsås, Skåne, Sweden on July 26 1861 – but I have not really thought much about it before, but seeing the picture of Sven (and his family) again triggered something in me probably because I realized that the story of Sven is closely related to some key historical economic and monetary events in Scandinavia and indeed in the world.

Sven og familie

I must admit that I have not done a lot of research (yet) into Sven’s story, but I know enough to tell the story of the economic realities he lived under and I believe his life to a very large extent was shaped by these events. In this post I will try to tell that story – in the light of economic and monetary events in the world and Scandinavia during the years Sven lived.

Sven – The typical immigrant from Skåne (Scania) 

I think what triggered me to look into Sven’s story was his immigrant background and particularly the fact that I pretty fast realized that Sven likely came to Denmark in the early 1880s. I already knew that during that period a lot of Swedes came to Denmark to work.

In fact in the early 1880s nearly 10% of the population in Copenhagen where Swedish. So while many Danes today would say that the level of immigration to Denmark is unprecedented in size that is not really true. 130 years ago the story was much the same as today and the discussions about immigration was quite similar – the Swedes are stealing the jobs from Danes, they push down salaries and they are more criminal than Danes. Not much have changed in that sense regarding the debate over immigration.

So why did Sven come to Denmark? Well, we of course don’t know, but if Sven was a normal Skåning (a inhabitant of Skåne in Southern Sweden) then he would have come for economic reasons.

Research (see here) done on Swedish emigration to USA during the 1880s shows that both “pull” and “push” factors were important for the decision of Swedes to emigrate to the US. Hence, Swedes both ran away from poverty in Sweden and for economic opportunities in the US. It hard not to believe that the same factors motivated Swedes – including my great-great grandfather – who emigrated to Denmark in the 1880s.

This is what the Danish economic historian Richard Willerslev has to say about number of Swedish immigrants to Denmark (my translation from Danish, cf. page 228):

After some years of stagnation the immigration to Denmark once again picked up and remained steady at a very high level from the mid-1870s and toward 1890.

Now compare that with the relative development in real GDP in Denmark and Sweden.

Sweden Denmark relative GDP 1870

(S0urce: Angus Maddison’s “Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development”)

It is fairly easy to see that there was a sharp relative decline in the level of  Swedish real GDP compared to Denmark. This of course coincides with the sharp increase in Swedish immigration to Denmark. Sweden’s relative decline came to an end in 1882-1883 – coinciding with the stagnation in the Swedish emigration levels (at a high level).

So what I about Sven? I am not entirely sure when Sven emigrated to Denmark, but public records show that he left his native city of Hjärsås in 1880. The public record I have found on Sven is that he married the Dane Bertine Kirstine Frederiksen on November 14 1890. Hence, we can conclude that Sven came to Denmark between 1880 and 1890 and most likely in the early 1880s.

This makes Sven into a very “average” immigrant. He was in his early twenties and an unskilled labourer with a poor background (his farther Per Jeppsson was an unskilled farm worker).

Currency union and the asymmetrical shock to the Swedish economy after 1873

So how do we explain Sweden’s relative decline compared to Denmark in mid-1870s? We need two explanations – one for the absolute decline in real GDP growth and one for the relative decline in real GDP.

Around 1871-73 a massive transformation of the global monetary system started and the process that lasted only a few years meant the end of bimetalism as a monetary standard and the total global domination of the gold standard. A number of factors contributed to ending bimetalism and establishing the gold standard’s global dominance.

Milton Friedman has pointed to the U.S. Coinage Act of 1873 as the major contributing factor of this transformation of the global monetary system (See here). This was the so-called Crime of 1873. There was a similar European – or a German-French – Crime of 1873 driven by among other things the German decision to introduce the gold standard in 1871.

No matter what the explanation is for the triumph of the gold standard over bimetalism in the early 1870s the result was a global deflationary shock as demand for gold spiked. That kicked of what has come to be known as the worldwide Long Depression normally said to have lasted from 1873 to 1879.

The graph above clearly shows that Sweden was hit by the Long Depression, which coincided with a sharp increase in Swedish emigration to Denmark.

1873 also happen to be the year the Scandinavian Currency Union was established between Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The SCU was based on the gold standard. Prior to that the three Scandinavian countries had been on different bimetalistic standards.

The fact that a wide difference in growth between Denmark and Sweden emerged in the second half of the 1870s can be interpreted as an asymmetrical shock and I believe that it is this asymmetrical shock – growth was higher in Denmark than in Sweden – that fundamentally caused my great-great grandfather Sven and thousands of other Swedes to emigrate to Denmark during the 1870s and 1880s. The size of the asymmetrical shock in my view also shows that the SCU was indeed not an optimal currency area. Had it been then Sven likely would never have come to Denmark.

I have not spend much time studying the reasons for this asymmetrical shock, but I overall have three hypotheses that might explain the differences in growth.

First, the Danish krone might have been undervalued at the unset of the currency union, while the Swedish krona might have been overvalued.

Second, sectoral differences might have played a role – with the Swedish agricultural and mining sector being harder hit by the global deflationary shock than the dominant Danish economic sectors. This also includes the relative importance of the UK and German economies for the economies of Denmark and Sweden.

And finally the third explanation might be differences in fiscal policy. Denmark undertook major railway and defense investments in those years. I should stress this is hypotheses.

I would obviously appreciate comments from my readers on these hypotheses and links to relevant research.

The Great Depression and the death of Sven

I don’t know much about the life of Sven in Denmark. But he got married and he (likely) got four children. He likely continued to work as an unskilled worker in Denmark, where he died at the unset of the Great Depression on October 4 1929.

So we can say that my great-great grandfather was brought to Denmark because of a depression and he lived in Denmark until the unset of another depression.

Monetary policy failure surely can have great impact on the life of people – including on the decision to live in one or the other country. My family heritage is proof of that.

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PS if you want to have a look at my very incomplete family tree please have a look here.

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5 Comments
by Lars Christensen on November 25, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Asymmetrical shock, Danmarks Nationalbank, Denmark, Riksbanken, Scandinavian Currency Union, Sven Persson, Sweden
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Posted by Lars Christensen on November 25, 2014

https://marketmonetarist.com/2014/11/25/asymmetrical-shocks-in-a-currency-union-the-crime-of-1873-and-the-of-a-guy-called-sven-persson/

When forward guidance fails: the Fisher equation and the Swedish paradox

On 3 July the Swedish central bank, Riksbanken, cut its key policy rate by 50bp to 0.25%. Most analysts – and the markets – were taken by surprise by this decision. It was particularly surprising as Riksbanken’s governor Stefan Ingves had been voted down by a majority of Riksbanken’s board.

Most people – including myself – would say that when a central bank cuts it key policy rate more than expected, it is monetary easing, and it seemed that was how the market was interpreting Riksbanken’s move – the Swedish krona weakened significantly and Swedish share prices spiked. However, something was not as it should be – Swedish inflation expectations dropped (!) on the back of the rate decision, e.g. Swedish 2-year breakeven inflation dropped from around 0.85% before the rate decision to around 0.65% after the rate decision. This is a paradox – a Swedish paradox: when you cut rates you get lower inflation expectations. So judging from the inflation expectations Riksbanken had actually tightened monetary conditions rather than eased.

BE inflation expectations Sweden

The Fisher equation and focusing on the wrong target

So what went wrong? The answer in my view is that Riksbanken is focusing on the wrong policy target. Hence, the bank communicates in terms of interest rates rather than inflation expectations. And yes, the interest rates are an intermediate target.

Riksbanken controls the Swedish money base and it can use this to control money market rates – in the short term. However, the so-called Tinbergen rule also tells us that a central bank can only hit one target if it has one instrument.

Therefore, if Riksbanken targets interest rates it cannot at the same time effectively target inflation (expectations). Unless it uses an additional “instrument”, such as credibility. If the market believes that Riksbanken will always adjust monetary parameters to ensure that it hits its 2% inflation target, it will be able to move the money market rate (temporarily) away from the ‘natural’ interest rates.

Hence, if Riksbanken’s inflation target is fully credible, inflation expectations will basically be pegged at 2%. However, if the inflation target is not credible, the story is very different, and as inflation expectations are presently well below 2%, it is very clear that the 2% inflation target is presently not credible and has not been credible for years.

A way to illustrate this is to have a look at the so-called Fisher equation:

(1) i = r + pe

i is the nominal interest rate, r is the real interest rate and pe is inflation expectations. When we talk about money market rates we can also see i as the policy rate.

It follows logically from (1) that if the inflation target is fully credible – that is, if pe is ‘fixed’ – a cut in i will ‘automatically’ lower r. On the other hand, if inflation expectations are not well-anchored, a cut in i might as well reduce pe.

I believe this is exactly what happened in Sweden on the back of Riksbanken’s surprise cut.

Not only is Riksbanken communicating in terms of interest rates (rather than inflation expectations) but it is also communicating in terms of the interest rate path. Hence, Riksbanken is not only announcing rate decisions but it is also communicating about future expected changes in the policy rate.

In that regard it is important that Riksbanken actually lowered its expectations for interest rates in two years even more than it lowered its present key policy rate. In other words, Riksbanken flattened the money market rate curve. So for a given real interest rate Riksbanken is actually indirectly telling the market that it expects inflation expectations to decline even further in the coming two years.

Obviously this is not what Riksbanken meant to say (I hope) but when it chooses to focus on interest rates rather than inflation expectations, this is what the market will focus on as well. Riksbanken’s interest rate focus therefore ‘overruled’ the focus on inflation expectations. In fact, in Riksbanken’s statement there was no reference to the market’s inflation expectations.

Lesson: central banks should focus on the ultimate policy target rather than the intermediate one 

I think the lesson we can learn from thisis that central banks should not focus on intermediate targets – such as interest rates and the interest rate path – but should focus on the ultimate policy goal – in the case of Riksbanken expected inflation.

Imagine that Riksbanken had issued the following statement last week:

‘Inflation expectations are presently well below Riksbanken’s 2% inflation target. This is unsatisfactory and as a consequence the repo rate is now being cut by 0.5 percentage points to 0.25% and Riksbanken is fully committed to introducing further monetary easing if needed to ensure that market expectations will fully reflect its 2% inflation target. If needed the repo rate will be cut further and Riksbanken will actively intervene in the currency markets to ease monetary conditions through the FX channel until inflation expectations are at 2%’.

I think it is pretty clear that such a statement would have caused an immediate jump in (market) inflation expectations to 2%. This would obviously also have caused a significant drop in real interest rates – both as a result of the lower nominal rates AND, more importantly, through higher inflation expectations.

What a difference a few words make…

PS Riksbanken is not alone in terms of these problems. The ECB faces a similar problems, while the Fed and the Bank of Japan are focusing on the ultimate policy goal rather than on intermediate targets. However, during Operation Twist in 2011-12 the Fed was facing Riksbanken-style problems.

PPS In Swedish CPI there is an explicit (mortgage) interest rate component, weighing around 5% of total CPI (and hence, of course, incl when calculating breakeven inflation), implying that shorter breakeven inflation should indeed come down by some 0.3 p.p. if a full pass-through into mortgage rates from the cut. That, however, does not really change the point. The Riksbank is targeting CPI so it is really irrelevant why inflation is too low.

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Related blog posts:

Committed to a failing strategy: low for longer = deflation for longer?
Riksbanken moves close to the ZLB – Now it is time to give Bennett McCallum a call
A scary story: The Zero Lower Bound and exchange rate dynamics

 

4 Comments
by Lars Christensen on July 9, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Riksbanken, Sweden
Tagged ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on July 9, 2014

https://marketmonetarist.com/2014/07/09/when-forward-guidance-fails-the-fisher-equation-and-the-swedish-paradox/

Riksbanken moves close to the ZLB – Now it is time to give Bennett McCallum a call

In a very surprising move the Swedish Riksbank this morning cut its key policy rate by 50bp to 0.25%. It was about time! The Riksbank has for a very long time undershot its 2% inflation target and inflation expectations have consistently been below 2% for a long time as well.

The interesting question now is what is next? The Riksbank is now very close to the Zero Lower Bound and with inflation still way below the inflation target one could argue that even more easing is needed.

I have earlier addressed how to conduct monetary policy at the ZLB for small-open economies like Sweden. Traditional quantitative easing obviously is an option, but it is also possible to get some inspiration from the works of such great economists as Lars E. O. Svensson or Bennett McCallum.

Already back in 2012 I wrote a post about what advice Bennett would give to the Riksbank in a situation like it now find itself in. This is from my blog post Sweden, Poland and Australia should have a look at McCallum’s MC rule

Market Monetarists – like traditional monetarists – of course long have argued that “interest rate targeting” is a terribly bad monetary instrument, but it nonetheless remains the preferred policy instrument of most central banks in the world. Scott Sumner has suggested that central banks instead should use NGDP futures in the conduct of monetary policy and I have in numerous blog posts suggested that central banks in small open economies instead of interest rates could use the currency rate as a policy instrument (not as a target!). See for example my recent post on Singapore’s monetary policy regime.

Bennett McCallum has greatly influenced my thinking on monetary policy and particularly my thinking on using the exchange rate as a policy instrument and I would certainly suggest that policy makers should take a look at especially McCallum’s research on the conduct of monetary policy when interest rates are close to the “zero lower bound”.

In McCallum’s 2005 paper “A Monetary Policy Rule for Automatic Prevention of a Liquidity Trap?” …

…What McCallum suggests is basically that central banks should continue to use interest rates as the key policy instruments, but also that the central bank should announce that if interest rates needs to be lowered below zero then it will automatically switch to a Singaporean style regime, where the central bank will communicate monetary easing and tightening by announcing appreciating/depreciating paths for the country’s exchange rate.

McCallum terms this rule the MC rule. The reason McCallum uses this term is obviously the resemblance of his rule to a Monetary Conditions Index, where monetary conditions are expressed as an index of interest rates and the exchange rate. The thinking behind McCallum’s MC rule, however, is very different from a traditional Monetary Conditions index.

McCallum basically express MC in the following way:

(1) MC=(1-Θ)R+Θ(-Δs)

Where R is the central bank’s key policy rate and Δs is the change in the nominal exchange rate over a certain period. A positive (negative) value for Δs means a depreciation (an appreciation) of the country’s currency. Θ is a weight between 0 and 1.

Hence, the monetary policy instrument is expressed as a weighted average of the key policy rate and the change in the nominal exchange.

It is easy to see that if interest rates hits zero (R=0) then monetary policy will only be expressed as changes in the exchange rate MC=Θ(-Δs).

While McCallum formulate the MC as a linear combination of interest rates and the exchange rate we could also formulate it as a digital rule where the central bank switches between using interest rates and exchange rates dependent on the level of interest rates so that when interest rates are at “normal” levels (well above zero) monetary policy will be communicated in terms if interest rates changes, but when we get near zero the central bank will announce that it will switch to communicating in changes in the nominal exchange rate.

It should be noted that the purpose of the rule is not to improve “competitiveness”, but rather to expand the money base via buying foreign currency to achieve a certain nominal target such as an inflation target or an NGDP level target…

…The point is that monetary policy is far from impotent. There might be a Zero Lower Bound, but there is no liquidity trap. In the monetary policy debate the two are mistakenly often believed to be the same thing. As McCallum expresses it:

“It would be better, I suggest, to use the term “zero lower bound situation,” rather than “liquidity trap,” since the latter seems to imply a priori that there is no available mechanism for generating monetary policy stimulus”

…So central banks are far from “out of ammunition” when they hit the zero lower bound and as McCallum demonstrates the central bank can just switch to managing the exchange rates when that happens. In the “real world” the central banks could of course announce they will be using a MC style instrument to communicate monetary policy. However, this would mean that central banks would have to change their present operational framework and the experience over the past four years have clearly demonstrated that most central banks around the world have a very hard time changing bad habits even when the consequence of this conservatism is stagnation, deflationary pressures, debt crisis and financial distress.

I would therefore suggest a less radical idea, but nonetheless an idea that essentially would be the same as the MC rule. My suggestion would be that for example the Swedish Riksbank … should continue to communicate monetary policy in terms of changes in the interest rates, but also announce that if interest rates where to drop below for example 1% then the central bank would switch to communicating monetary policy changes in terms of projected changes in the exchange rate in the exact same fashion as the Monetary Authorities are doing it in Singapore.

…Imagine for example that the US had had such a rule in place in 2008. As the initial shock hit the Federal Reserve was able to cut rates but as fed funds rates came closer to zero the investors realized that there was an operational (!) limit to the amount of monetary easing the fed could do and the dollar then started to strengthen dramatically. However, had the fed had in place a rule that would have led to an “automatic” switch to a Singapore style policy as interest rates dropped close to zero then the markets would have realized that in advance and there wouldn’t had been any market fears that the Fed would not ease monetary policy further. As a consequence the massive strengthening of the dollar we saw would very likely have been avoided and there would probably never had been a Great Recession.

The problem was not that the fed was not willing to ease monetary policy, but that it operationally was unable to do so initially. Tragically Al Broaddus president of the Richmond Federal Reserve already back in 2003 (See Bob Hetzel’s “Great Recession – Market Failure or Policy Failure?” page 301) had suggested the Federal Reserve should pre-announce what policy instrument(s) should be used in the event that interest rates hit zero. The suggestion tragically was ignored and we now know the consequence of this blunder.

The Swedish Riksbank…can.. avoid repeating the fed’s blunder by already today announcing a MC style. That would lead to an “automatic prevention of the liquidity trap”.

That is it – now back to writing on the Polish central bank’s failure to do the right thing at it’s rate decision yesterday.

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See also A scary story: The Zero Lower Bound and exchange rate dynamics

5 Comments
by Lars Christensen on July 3, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Bennett McCallum, Lars E. O. Svensson, Riksbanken
Tagged , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on July 3, 2014

https://marketmonetarist.com/2014/07/03/riksbanken-moves-close-to-the-zlb-now-it-is-time-to-give-bennett-mccallum-a-call/

The monetary transmission mechanism – causality and monetary policy rules

Most economists pay little or no attention to nominal GDP when they think (and talk) about the business cycle, but if they had to explain how nominal GDP is determined they would likely mostly talk about NGDP as a quasi-residual. First real GDP is determined – by both supply and demand side factors – and then inflation is simply added to get to NGDP.

Market Monetarists on the other hand would think of nominal GDP determining real GDP. In fact if you read Scott Sumner’s excellent blog The Money Illusion – the father of all Market Monetarist blogs – you are often left with the impression that the causality always runs from NGDP to RGDP. I don’t think Scott thinks so, but that is nonetheless the impression you might get from reading his blog. Old-school monetarists like Milton Friedman were basically saying the same thing – or rather that the causality was running from the money supply to nominal spending to prices and real GDP.

In my view the truth is that there is no “natural” causality from RGDP to NGDP or the other way around. I will instead here argue that the macroeconomic causality is fully dependent about the central bank’s monetary policy rules and the credibility of and expectations to this rule.

In essenssens this also means that there is no given or fixed causality from money to prices and this also explains the apparent instability between the lags and leads of monetary policy.

From RGDP to NGDP – the US economy in 2008-9?

Some might argue that the question of causality and whilst what model of the economy, which is the right one is a simple empirical question. So lets look at an example – and let me then explain why it might not be all that simple.

The graph below shows real GDP and nominal GDP growth in the US during the sharp economic downturn in 2008-9. The graph is not entirely clearly, but it certainly looks like real GDP growth is leading nominal GDP growth.

RGDP NGDP USA 2003 2012

Looking at the graph is looks as if RGDP growth starts to slow already in 2004 and further takes a downturn in 2006 before totally collapsing in 2008-9. The picture for NGDP growth is not much different, but if anything NGDP growth is lagging RGDP growth slightly.

So looking at just at this graph it is hard to make that (market) monetarist argument that this crisis indeed was caused by a nominal shock. If anything it looks like a real shock caused first RGDP growth to drop and NGDP just followed suit. This is my view is not the correct story even though it looks like it. I will explain that now.

A real shock + inflation targeting => drop in NGDP growth expectations

So what was going on in 2006-9. I think the story really starts with a negative supply shock – a sharp rise in global commodity prices. Hence, from early 2007 to mid-2008 oil prices were more than doubled. That caused headline US inflation to rise strongly – with headline inflation (CPI) rising to 5.5% during the summer of 2008.

The logic of inflation targeting – the Federal Reserve at that time (and still is) was at least an quasi-inflation targeting central bank – is that the central bank should move to tighten monetary condition when inflation increases.

Obviously one could – and should – argue that clever inflation targeting should only target demand side inflation rather than headline inflation and that monetary policy should ignore supply shocks. To a large extent this is also what the Fed was doing during 2007-8. However, take a look at this from the Minutes from the June 24-25 2008 FOMC meeting:

Some participants noted that certain measures of the real federal funds rate, especially those using actual or forecasted headline inflation, were now negative, and very low by historical standards. In the view of these participants, the current stance of monetary policy was providing considerable support to aggregate demand and, if the negative real federal funds rate was maintained, it could well lead to higher trend inflation… 

…Conditions in some financial markets had improved… the near-term outlook for inflation had deteriorated, and the risks that underlying inflation pressures could prove to be greater than anticipated appeared to have risen. Members commented that the continued strong increases in energy and other commodity prices would prompt a difficult adjustment process involving both lower growth and higher rates of inflation in the near term. Members were also concerned about the heightened potential in current circumstances for an upward drift in long-run inflation expectations.With increased upside risks to inflation and inflation expectations, members believed that the next change in the stance of policy could well be an increase in the funds rate; indeed, one member thought that policy should be firmed at this meeting. 

Hence, not only did some FOMC members (the majority?) believe monetary policy was easy, but they even wanted to move to tighten monetary policy in response to a negative supply shock. Hence, even though the official line from the Fed was that the increase in inflation was due to higher oil prices and should be ignored it was also clear that that there was no consensus on the FOMC about this.

The Fed was of course not the only central bank in the world at that time to blur it’s signals about the monetary policy response to the increase in oil prices.

Notably both the Swedish Riksbank and the ECB hiked their key policy interest rates during the summer of 2008 – clearly reacting to a negative supply shock.

Most puzzling is likely the unbelievable rate hike from the Riksbank in September 2008 amidst a very sharp drop in Swedish economic activity and very serious global financial distress. This is what the Riksbank said at the time:

…the Executive Board of the Riksbank has decided to raise the repo rate to 4.75 per cent. The assessment is that the repo rate will remain at this level for the rest of the year… It is necessary to raise the repo rate now to prevent the increases in energy and food prices from spreading to other areas.

The world is falling apart, but we will just add to the fire by hiking interest rates. It is incredible how anybody could have come to the conclusion that monetary tightening was what the Swedish economy needed at that time. Fans of Lars E. O. Svensson should note that he has Riksbank deputy governor at the time actually voted for that insane rate hike.

Hence, it is very clear that both the Fed, the ECB and the Riksbank and a number of other central banks during the summer of 2008 actually became more hawkish and signaled possible rates (or actually did hike rates) in reaction to a negative supply shock.

So while one can rightly argue that flexible inflation targeting in principle would mean that central banks should ignore supply shocks it is also very clear that this is not what actually what happened during the summer and the late-summer of 2008.

So what we in fact have is that a negative shock is causing a negative demand shock. This makes it look like a drop in real GDP is causing a drop in nominal GDP. This is of course also what is happening, but it only happens because of the monetary policy regime. It is the monetary policy rule – where central banks implicitly or explicitly – tighten monetary policy in response to negative supply shocks that “creates” the RGDP-to-NGDP causality. A similar thing would have happened in a fixed exchange rate regime (Denmark is a very good illustration of that).

NGDP targeting: Decoupling NGDP from RGDP shocks 

I hope to have illustrated that what is causing the real shock to cause a nominal shock is really monetary policy (regime) failure rather than some naturally given economic mechanism.

The case of Israel illustrates this quite well I think. Take a look at the graph below.

NGDP RGDP Israel

What is notable is that while Israeli real GDP growth initially slows very much in line with what happened in the euro zone and the US the decline in nominal GDP growth is much less steep than what was the case in the US or the euro zone.

Hence, the Israeli economy was clearly hit by a negative supply shock (sharply higher oil prices and to a lesser extent also higher costs of capital due to global financial distress). This caused a fairly sharp deceleration real GDP growth, but as I have earlier shown the Bank of Israel under the leadership of then governor Stanley Fischer conducted monetary policy as if it was targeting nominal GDP rather than targeting inflation.

Obviously the BoI couldn’t do anything about the negative effect on RGDP growth due to the negative supply shock, but a secondary deflationary process was avoid as NGDP growth was kept fairly stable and as a result real GDP growth swiftly picked up in 2009 as the supply shock eased off going into 2009.

In regard to my overall point regarding the causality and correlation between RGDP and NGDP growth it is important here to note that NGDP targeting will not reverse the RGDP-NGDP causality, but rather decouple RGDP and NGDP growth from each other.

Hence, under “perfect” NGDP targeting there will be no correlation between RGDP growth and NGDP growth. It will be as if we are in the long-run classical textbook case where the Phillips curve is vertical. Monetary policy will hence be “neutral” by design rather than because wages and prices are fully flexible (they are not). This is also why we under a NGDP targeting regime effectively will be in a Real-Business-Cycle world – all fluctuations in real GDP growth (and inflation) will be caused by supply shocks.

This also leads us to the paradox – while Market Monetarists argue that monetary policy is highly potent under our prefered monetary policy rule (NGDP targeting) it would look like money is neutral also in the short-run.

The Friedmanite case of money (NGDP) causing RGDP

So while we under inflation targeting basically should expect causality to run from RGDP growth to NGDP growth we under NGDP targeting simply should expect that that would be no correlation between the two – supply shocks would causes fluctuations in RGDP growth, but NGDP growth would be kept stable by the NGDP targeting regime. However, is there also a case where causality runs from NGDP to RGDP?

Yes there sure is – this is what I will call the Friedmanite case. Hence, during particularly the 1970s there was a huge debate between monetarists and keynesians about whether “money” was causing “prices” or the other way around. This is basically the same question I have been asking – is NGDP causing RGDP or the other way around.

Milton Friedman and other monetarist at the time were arguing that swings in the money supply was causing swings in nominal spending and then swings in real GDP and inflation. In fact Friedman was very clear – higher money supply growth would first cause real GDP growth to pick and later inflation would pick-up.

Market monetarists maintain Friedman’s basic position that monetary easing will cause an increase in real GDP growth in the short run. (M, V and NGDP => RGDP, P). However, we would even to a larger extent than Friedman stress that this relationship is not stable – not only is there “variable lags”, but expectations and polucy rules might even turn lags into leads. Or as Scott Sumner likes to stress “monetary policy works with long and variable LEADS”.

It is undoubtedly correct that if we are in a situation where there is no clearly established monetary policy rule and the economic agent really are highly uncertain about what central bankers will do next (maybe surprisingly to some this has been the “norm” for central bankers as long as we have had central banks) then a monetary shock (lower money supply growth or a drop in money-velocity) will cause a contraction in nominal spending (NGDP), which will cause a drop in real GDP growth (assuming sticky prices).

This causality was what monetarists in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were trying to prove empirically. In my view the monetarist won the empirical debate with the keynesians of the time, but it was certainly not a convincing victory and there was lot of empirical examples of what was called “revered causality” – prices and real GDP causing money (and NGDP).

What Milton Friedman and other monetarists of the time was missing was the elephant in the room – the monetary policy regime. As I hopefully has illustrated in this blog post the causality between NGDP (money) and RGDP (and prices) is completely dependent on the monetary policy regime, which explain that the monetarists only had (at best) a narrow victory over the (old) keynesians.

I think there are two reasons why monetarists in for example the 1970s were missing this point. First of all monetary policy for example in the US was highly discretionary and the Fed’s actions would often be hard to predict. So while monetarists where strong proponents of rules they simply had not thought (enough) about how such rules (also when highly imperfect) could change the monetary transmission mechanism and money-prices causality. Second, monetarists like Milton Friedman, Karl Brunner or David Laidler mostly were using models with adaptive expectations as rational expectations only really started to be fully incorporated in macroeconomic models in the 1980s and 1990s. This led them to completely miss the importance of for example central bank communication and pre-announcements. Something we today know is extremely important.

That said, the monetarists of the times were not completely ignorant to these issues. This is my big hero David Laidler in his book “Monetarist Perspectives” (page 150):

“If the structure of the economy through which policy effects are transmitted does vary with the goals of policy, and the means adopted to achieve them, then the notion of of a unique ‘transmission mechanism’ for monetary policy is chimera and it is small wonder that we have had so little success in tracking it down.”

Macroeconomists to this day unfortunately still forget or ignore the wisdom of David Laidler.

HT DL and RH.

10 Comments
by Lars Christensen on May 10, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Bank of Israel, David Laidler, Inflation Targeting, Lars E. O. Svensson, Monetary institutions, Monetary policy, Monetary policy rules, NGDP Targeting, Riksbanken, Scott Sumner, Stanley Fischer
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Posted by Lars Christensen on May 10, 2014

https://marketmonetarist.com/2014/05/10/the-monetary-transmission-mechanism-causality-and-monetary-policy-rules/

A scary story: The Zero Lower Bound and exchange rate dynamics

I was in Sweden last week and again yesterday (today I am in Norway). My trips to Sweden have once again reminded me about the dangers of conducting monetary policy with interest rates at the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB). The Swedish central bank – Riksbanken – has cut is key policy rate to 1% and is like to cut it further to 0.75% before the end of the year so we are inching closer and closer to zero.

Riksbanken is just one of a number of European central banks close to zero on interest rates – most notably the ECB is at 0.25%. In the Czech Republic the key policy rate stands at 0.05%. And even Poland, Hungary, Norway are moving closer and closer to the ZLB.

Most of these central banks seem to be quite unprepared for what might happen at the Zero Lower Bound. In this post I will particularly focus on the exchange rate dynamics at the ZLB.

A Taylor rule world

Lets say we can describe monetary policy with a simple Taylor rule:

r = rN+a*(p-pT)+b(ygap)

In a “normal” world where everything is fine and the key policy rate (r) is well-above zero the central bank will hike or cut r in response to increasing or declining inflation (p) relative to the inflation target (pT) or in response to the output gap (ygap) increasing or decreasing. If the output gap is closed and inflation is at the inflation target then the central bank will set it’s key policy rate at the “natural” interest rate rN.

What happens at the ZLB?

However, lets assume that we are no longer in a normal world. Lets instead assume that p is well below the inflation target and the output gap is negative. As we know this is the case in most European countries today.

So if we plug these numbers into our Taylor rule above we might get r=1%. As long as r>0 we are not in trouble yet. The central bank can still conduct monetary policy with its chosen instrument – the key policy interest rate. This is how most inflation targeting central banks in the world are doing their business today.

But what happens if we get a negative shock to the economy. Lets for example assume that an overheated property markets starts to cool gradually and real GDP starts to slow. In this case the central bank according to it’s Taylor rule should cut its key policy rate further. Sooner or later the central bank hits the ZLB.

An then suddenly the currency starts strengthening dramatically

In fact imagine that the interest rate level needed to close the output gap and keep inflation at the inflation target is -2%.

We can say that monetary policy is neutral when the central bank sets interest rates according to the Taylor rule, but if interest rates are higher than the what the Taylor rule stipulates then monetary policy is tight. So if the Taylor rule tells us that the key policy rate should be -2% and the actual policy rate is zero then monetary policy is of course tight. This is what many central bankers fail to understand. Monetary policy is not necessarily easy just because the interest rate is low in a historical or absolute perspective.

And this is where it gets really, really dangerous because we now risk getting into a very unstable economic and financial situation – particularly if the central bank insists that monetary policy is already easy, while it is in fact tight.

What happens to the exchange rate in a situation where monetary policy is tightened? It of course appreciates. So when the “stipulated” (by the Taylor rule) interest rate drops to for example -2% and the actual interest rate is at 0% then obviously the currency starts to appreciates – leading to a further tightening of monetary conditions. With monetary conditions tightening inflation drops further and growth plummets. So now we might need an interest rate of -4 or -7%.

With that kind of monetary tightening you will fast get financial distress. Stock markets start to drop dramatically as inflation expectations plummets and the economy contracts. It is only a matter of time before the talk of banking troubles start to emerge.

The situation becomes particularly dangerous if the central bank maintains that monetary policy is easy and also claim that the appreciation of the currency is a signal that everything is just fine, but it is of course not fine. In fact the economy is heading for a massive collapse if the central bank does not change course.

This scenario is of course very similar to what played out in the US in 2008-9. A slowdown in the US property market caused a slowdown in the US economy. The Fed failed to respond by not cutting interest rates aggressive and fast enough and as a consequence we soon hit the ZLB. And what happened to the dollar? It strengthened dramatically! That of course was a very clear indication that monetary conditions were becoming very tight. Initially the Fed clearly failed to understand this – with disastrous consequences.

But don’t worry – there is a way out

The US is of course special as the dollar is a global reserve currency. However, I am pretty sure that if a similar thing plays out in other countries in the world we will see a similar exchange rate dynamics. So if the Taylor rule tells you that the key policy rate should be for example -4% and it is stuck at zero then the the currency will start strengthening dramatically and inflation and growth expectations will plummet potentially setting off financial crisis.

However, there is no reason to repeat the Fed’s failure of 2008. In fact it is extremely easy to avoid such a scenario. The central bank just needs to acknowledge that it can always ease monetary policy at the ZLB. First of all it can conduct normal open market operations buying assets and printing its own currency. That is what we these days call Quantitative Easing.

For small open economies there is an even simpler way out. The central bank can simply intervene directly in the currency market to weak its currency and remember the market can never beat the central bank in this game. The central bank has the full control of the printing press.

So imagine we now hit the ZLB and we would need to ease monetary policy further. The central bank could simply announce that it will weaken its currency by X% per months until the output gap is close and inflation hits the inflation target. It is extremely simple. This is what Lars E.O. Svensson – the former deputy central bank governor in Sweden – has termed the foolproof way out of deflation.

And even better any central bank, which is getting dangerously close to the ZLB should pre-announce that it will in fact undertake such Svenssonian monetary operations to avoid the dangerous of conducting monetary policy at the ZLB. That would mean that as the economy is moving closer to the ZLB the currency would automatically start to weaken – ahead of the central bank doing anything – and in that sense the risk of hitting the ZLB would be much reduced.

Some central bankers understand this. For example Czech central bank governor Miroslav Singer who recently has put a floor under EUR/CZK, but unfortunately many other central bankers in Europe are dangerously ignorant about these issues.

PS I told the story above using a relatively New Keynesian framework of a Taylor rule, but this is as much a Market Monetarist story about understanding expectations and that the interest rate level is a very bad indicator of the monetary policy stance.

4 Comments
by Lars Christensen on November 26, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in CNB, Lars E. O. Svensson, Miroslav Singer, Riksbanken, Zero Lower Bound
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on November 26, 2013

https://marketmonetarist.com/2013/11/26/a-scary-story-the-zero-lower-bound-and-exchange-rate-dynamics/

Sweden, Poland and Australia should have a look at McCallum’s MC rule

Sweden, Poland and Australia all managed the shock from the outbreak of Great Recession quite well and all three countries recovered relatively fast from the initial shock. That meant that nominal GDP nearly was brought back to the pre-crisis trend in all three countries and as a result financial distress and debt problems were to a large extent avoided.

As I have earlier discussed on my post on Australian monetary policy there is basically three reasons for the success of monetary policy in the three countries (very broadly speaking!):

1)     Interest rates were initially high so the central banks of Sweden, Poland and Australia could cut rates without hitting the zero lower bound (Sweden, however, came very close).

2)     The demand for the countries’ currencies collapsed in response to the crisis, which effectively led to “automatic” monetary easing. In the case of Sweden the Riksbank even seemed to welcome the collapse of the krona.

3)     The central banks in the three countries chose to interpret their inflation targeting mandates in a “flexible” fashion and disregarded any short-term inflationary impact of weaker currencies.

However, recently the story for the three economies have become somewhat less rosy and there has been a visible slowdown in growth in Poland, Sweden and Australia. As a consequence all three central banks are back to cutting interest rates after increasing rates in 2009/10-11 – and paradoxically enough the slowdown in all three countries seems to have been exacerbated by the reluctance of the three central banks to re-start cutting interest rates.

This time around, however, the “rate cutting cycle” has been initiated from a lower “peak” than was the case in 2008 and as a consequence we are once heading for “new lows” on the key policy rates in all three countries. In fact in Australia we are now back to the lowest level of 2009 (3%) and in Sweden the key policy rate is down to 1.25%. So even though rates are higher than the lowest of 2009 (0.25%) in Sweden another major negative shock – for example another escalation of the euro crisis – would effectively push the Swedish key policy rate down to the “zero lower bound” – particularly if the demand for Swedish krona would increase in response to such a shock.

Market Monetarists – like traditional monetarists – of course long have argued that “interest rate targeting” is a terribly bad monetary instrument, but it nonetheless remains the preferred policy instrument of most central banks in the world. Scott Sumner has suggested that central banks instead should use NGDP futures in the conduct of monetary policy and I have in numerous blog posts suggested that central banks in small open economies instead of interest rates could use the currency rate as a policy instrument (not as a target!). See for example my recent post on Singapore’s monetary policy regime.

Bennett McCallum has greatly influenced my thinking on monetary policy and particularly my thinking on using the exchange rate as a policy instrument and I would certainly suggest that policy makers should take a look at especially McCallum’s research on the conduct of monetary policy when interest rates are close to the “zero lower bound”.

In McCallum’s 2005 paper “A Monetary Policy Rule for Automatic Prevention of a Liquidity Trap?” he discusses a new policy rule that could be highly relevant for the central banks in Sweden, Poland and Australia – and for matter a number of other central banks that risk hitting the zero lower bound in the event of a new negative demand shock (and of course for those who have ALREADY hit the zero lower bound as for example the Czech central bank).

What McCallum suggests is basically that central banks should continue to use interest rates as the key policy instruments, but also that the central bank should announce that if interest rates needs to be lowered below zero then it will automatically switch to a Singaporean style regime, where the central bank will communicate monetary easing and tightening by announcing appreciating/depreciating paths for the country’s exchange rate.

McCallum terms this rule the MC rule. The reason McCallum uses this term is obviously the resemblance of his rule to a Monetary Conditions Index, where monetary conditions are expressed as an index of interest rates and the exchange rate. The thinking behind McCallum’s MC rule, however, is very different from a traditional Monetary Conditions index.

McCallum basically express MC in the following way:

(1) MC=(1-Θ)R+Θ(-Δs)

Where R is the central bank’s key policy rate and Δs is the change in the nominal exchange rate over a certain period. A positive (negative) value for Δs means a depreciation (an appreciation) of the country’s currency. Θ is a weight between 0 and 1.

Hence, the monetary policy instrument is expressed as a weighted average of the key policy rate and the change in the nominal exchange.

It is easy to see that if interest rates hits zero (R=0) then monetary policy will only be expressed as changes in the exchange rate MC=Θ(-Δs).

While McCallum formulate the MC as a linear combination of interest rates and the exchange rate we could also formulate it as a digital rule where the central bank switches between using interest rates and exchange rates dependent on the level of interest rates so that when interest rates are at “normal” levels (well above zero) monetary policy will be communicated in terms if interest rates changes, but when we get near zero the central bank will announce that it will switch to communicating in changes in the nominal exchange rate.

It should be noted that the purpose of the rule is not to improve “competitiveness”, but rather to expand the money base via buying foreign currency to achieve a certain nominal target such as an inflation target or an NGDP level target. Therefore we could also formulate the rule for example in terms of commodity prices (that would basically be Irving Fisher’s Compensated dollar standard) or for that matter stock prices (See my earlier post on how to use stock prices as a monetary policy instrument here). That is not really important. The point is that monetary policy is far from impotent. There might be a Zero Lower Bound, but there is no liquidity trap. In the monetary policy debate the two are mistakenly often believed to be the same thing. As McCallum expresses it:

“It would be better, I suggest, to use the term “zero lower bound situation,” rather than “liquidity trap,” since the latter seems to imply a priori that there is no available mechanism for generating monetary policy stimulus”

Implementing a MC rule would be easy, but very effective

So central banks are far from “out of ammunition” when they hit the zero lower bound and as McCallum demonstrates the central bank can just switch to managing the exchange rates when that happens. In the “real world” the central banks could of course announce they will be using a MC style instrument to communicate monetary policy. However, this would mean that central banks would have to change their present operational framework and the experience over the past four years have clearly demonstrated that most central banks around the world have a very hard time changing bad habits even when the consequence of this conservatism is stagnation, deflationary pressures, debt crisis and financial distress.

I would therefore suggest a less radical idea, but nonetheless an idea that essentially would be the same as the MC rule. My suggestion would be that for example the Swedish Riksbank or the Polish central bank (NBP) should continue to communicate monetary policy in terms of changes in the interest rates, but also announce that if interest rates where to drop below for example 1% then the central bank would switch to communicating monetary policy changes in terms of projected changes in the exchange rate in the exact same fashion as the Monetary Authorities are doing it in Singapore.

You might object that in for example in Poland the key policy rate is still way above zero so why worry now? Yes, that is true, but the experience over the last four years shows that when you hit the zero lower bound and there is no pre-prepared operational framework in place then it is much harder to come up with away around the problem. Furthermore, by announcing such a rule the risk that it will have to “kick in” is in fact greatly reduced – as the exchange rate automatically would start to weaken as interest rates get closer to zero.

Imagine for example that the US had had such a rule in place in 2008. As the initial shock hit the Federal Reserve was able to cut rates but as fed funds rates came closer to zero the investors realized that there was an operational (!) limit to the amount of monetary easing the fed could do and the dollar then started to strengthen dramatically. However, had the fed had in place a rule that would have led to an “automatic” switch to a Singapore style policy as interest rates dropped close to zero then the markets would have realized that in advance and there wouldn’t had been any market fears that the Fed would not ease monetary policy further. As a consequence the massive strengthening of the dollar we saw would very likely have been avoided and there would probably never had been a Great Recession.

The problem was not that the fed was not willing to ease monetary policy, but that it operationally was unable to do so initially. Tragically Al Broaddus president of the Richmond Federal Reserve already back in 2003 (See Bob Hetzel’s “Great Recession – Market Failure or Policy Failure?” page 301) had suggested the Federal Reserve should pre-announce what policy instrument(s) should be used in the event that interest rates hit zero. The suggestion tragically was ignored and we now know the consequence of this blunder.

The Swedish Riksbank, the Polish central bank and the Australian Reserve Bank could all avoid repeating the fed’s blunder by already today announcing a MC style. That would lead to an “automatic prevention of the liquidity trap”.

PS it should be noted that this post is not meant as a discussion about what the central bank ultimately should target, but rather about what instruments to use to hit the given target. McCallum in his 2005 paper expresses his MC as a Taylor style rule, but one could obviously also think of a MC rule that is used to implement for example a price level target or even better an NGDP level rule and McCallum obviously is one of the founding father of NGDP targeting (I have earlier called McCallum the grandfather of Market Monetarism).

24 Comments
by Lars Christensen on December 10, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in CNB, Exchange rate policy, Exchange rates, McCallum, NBP, Reserve Bank of Australia, Riksbanken, Scott Sumner
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Lars Christensen on December 10, 2012

https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/12/10/sweden-poland-and-australia-should-have-a-look-at-mccallums-mc-rule/

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