Several readers have written to me asking me to comment on a recent paper that the New York Federal Reserve released as a Staff Report (May 2011) – A Note on Bank Lending in Times of Large Bank Reserves. Apparently, there is an impression that the federal reserve economists might be seeing the light a bit about the banking system and the way economists think about it. The reason that some readers have concluded that is because the substantive conclusion of the paper is that credit expansion is independent of the level of banking reserves held at the central bank. This conclusion is totally consistent with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) but is at odds with the standard mainstream macroeconomic view (as taught in textbooks) that relies on the money multiplier to draw a (spurious) connection between bank reserves and the money supply. As you will see – my advice is to be very careful when reading such papers – they are not what they seem. The FRNY paper reaches the correct conclusion using erroneous theory which they partition as a special case arising from the extreme circumstances surrounding the crisis. Even in defining their “model” as a special case, they employ flawed logic. It is a case of being beware of the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Some years ago – I did not have sexual relations with that woman – were the famous words that seemed to redefine everything we had come to think of sexual relations between two consenting partners. Suddenly we could have sexual relations without having them. The same person has come up with a new conclusion – the US never ran “permanent structural deficits of any size before 1981”. Hmm, you mean that for 84 per cent of those years from 1930 when the US federal government ran deficits they were just cyclical events indicating deteriorating economic conditions? Maybe the former president might say a structural deficit equivalent to 3 per cent of GDP was not of “any size”. My conclusion is different – that this statement like the previous one was another case of a former US president making things up.

The US press was awash with claims over the weekend that the US was “living beyond” its “means” and that “will not be viable for a whole lot longer”. One senior US central banker claimed that the way to resolve the sluggish growth was to increase interest rates to ensure people would save. Funny, the same person also wants fiscal policy to contract. Another fiscal contraction expansion zealot. Pity it only kills growth. Another commentator – chose, lazily – to be the mouthpiece for the conservative lobby and wrote a book review that focused on the scary and exploding public debt levels. Apparently, this public debt tells us that the US is living beyond its means. Well, when I look at the data I see around 16 per cent of available labour idle in the US and capacity utilisation rates that are still very low. That tells me that there is a lot of “means” available to be called into production to generate incomes and prosperity. A national government doesn’t really have any “means”. It needs to spend to get hold off the means (production resources). Given the idle labour and low capacity utilisation rates the government in the US is clearly not spending enough. The US is currently living well below its means. But the US government can always buy any “means” that are available for sale in US dollars and if there is insufficient demand for these resources emanating from the non-government sector then the US government can bring those idle “means” into productive use any time it chooses.