Some Wednesday snippets. First, I juxtapose the political machinations that the EU President is engaged…
Trichet interview – the cult master speaks!
The centre-left Parisian daily newspaper Libération recently published (July 8, 2010) an – Interview with Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the ECB. The questions asked were nothing like those you would hear asked on Fox News in the US and essentially probed some of the key issues facing the EMU. The interviewer clearly understood the design flaws in the Eurozone system and pressed Trichet on them. Trichet’s responses were described by my friend Marshall Auerback in an E-mail to me this morning as allowing us to see “inside the mind of a cultist”. Here is a portrait of a neo-liberal cult leader!
Trichet was initially asked whether the “sovereign debt crisis that has rocked the euro area since last January (was) over now?” he responded:.
The concerns of investors and savers over sovereign debt are a global phenomenon and have particularly affected industrialised countries. Indeed, industrialised countries were hit hard by the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 and, for the most part, their government financial accounts suffered badly. In the particular case of Greece, some investors were convinced that the Greek government would be unable to take the bold decisions that were absolutely necessary, and that neither in Europe nor within the international community would there be the capacity to support its recovery plan.
The sovereign debt crisis inasmuch as there has been one has been confined to the Eurozone nations. No other advanced nation is struggling to place its public debt in bond markets at low and stable yields. Trichet is trying to deflect the specificity of the crisis in the EMU because then he doesn’t have to face up to the design flaws of their monetary system.
Further there has been no particular correlation between the state of government finances and the bond market dynamics. Spain was a solid member of the fiscal austerity brigage before the crisis and was hit hard just like Greece. Japan still issues as much public debt as it desires at very low yields and the bond markets cannot get enough of it.
In general, the bond markets want a lot more public debt than is being issued.
For example, it was reported by AAP today that the Australian Office of Financial Management sold $500 million of 10-year Treasury Bonds wiith a coverage ratio (the ratio of bids received to the value of bonds offered) of 2.70. “There were 38 bids” and only “15 were successful” with “seven of them allocated in full” via the auction process.
Skipping a question, he was then asked and answered:
Q: The markets attacked Europe precisely where it is most vulnerable, in that it has a federal monetary policy without a single economic and fiscal policy.
A: This is not how I would describe matters. Since the severe crisis that erupted in 2007, which we countered by avoiding a recession that could have been as devastating as the one in 1929, all fiscal policies of the industrialised countries have been vulnerable, and not only those in the euro area. The scale of the recession has significantly weakened a number of budgets that were already in difficulty. I do not see what happened – and what is in the process of being gradually resolved – as a targeted attack on the sovereign risks of the euro area, but rather as questioning the fiscal policy of industrialised countries. Some countries have shown themselves to be more vulnerable than others. Certainly, it immediately calls into question the quality of the surveillance of fiscal policies undertaken by the other governments.
Here is the exemplification of the cult leader denying that there is a cult.
Prior to the creation of the EMU, each of the member states were sovereign in their own currencies and had their own central banks. That means they were not revenue-constrained and could conduct fiscal policy and monetary policy in a co-ordinated way to best serve the socio-economic interests of their citizens.
Of-course, in this guise, they succumbed to the growing neo-liberal take-over of macroeconomic policy and typically worried about the size of budget deficits and the public debt. All the usual spurious arguments were used by the conservatives to politically constrain their use of fiscal policy – for example, crowding out arguments (higher deficits cause higher interest rates) and Eurosclerosis that engendered privatisations and deregulation.
Leading up to the unification, the interest rate argument was played to the full. Neo-liberal supporters of the EMU claimed that lower interest rates would emerge throughout Europe. Not only didn’t that happen but it begged the reality – the nations could have unilaterally maintained zero interest rates as sovereign economies by just managing their central bank operations along the lines followed by Japan, for example.
Once again, had they understood MMT and argued the case politically, these nations would now be in much better shape than they are now.
This is why Europe has been sustained very high unemployment rates since the mid-1970s.
Upon entering the EMU, all those previously sovereign states surrendered this capacity and became users of the currency issued under the auspices of the ECB rather than monopoly issuers of their own currency. In effect, they became states of a federation (like an Australian or a US state) but without any explicit federal fiscal capacity to support their sub-federal units.
The EMU tied itself up in a strait-jacket (Stability and Growth Pact) to ensure that individual member state governments who are still accountable politically to their own citizens could not pursue their own fiscal agendas very easily.
The reason the bond market attacks on the EMU nations has occurred relates to the design of the monetary system. It is clear that without ECB intervention, the member nations did face solvency risk. A sovereign government never faces solvency risk.
Further, when talking about a sovereign nation (one that issues its own currency and floats it on international markets) there is no sense in the statement that “fiscal policies of the industrialised countries have been vulnerable”. This presupposes that some non-vulnerable state can be defined.
Trichet would claim that a budget balance or even surplus is a position of fiscal strength. But there is no meaning in that statement. The reality is that the budget balance reflects the state of the economy and the strength of private spending. The point is that budget balances should never be a policy target.
The government should pursue public purpose (high employment and sustainable economic growth) and use its fiscal capacity accordingly. At times when private spending is strong then the deficit will be lower (perhaps even in surplus if there is a strong external position). In times of weak private spending, the deficit will be higher.
While it makes sense to talk about weak or strong private spending, given that the non-government sector are revenue-constrained, there is no meaning to be gained by applying those descriptors to the public balance. I never use terms such as an “improving budget position” or a “deteriorating budget position”. There is no one position that is good and another that is bad.
But in terms of the state of the real economy which the budget balance reflects (via the automatic stabilisers initially) there are clearly good and bad outcomes and improving and deteriorating positions.
While Trichet wants us to believe that the crisis “weakened a number of budgets that were already in difficulty” I would suggest that the EMU member countries were running tighter fiscal positions for too long leading up to the crisis – as evidenced by the fact that they could not get their unemployment rates below (mostly) 8 per cent. The persistent degree of real slack across the Eurozone was testament to this.
The bond market problems that some of the EMU nations have now encountered are also not consistently related to their fiscal positions. Spain, for example, was a Eurozone “model citizen” leading up to the crisis but has been hit by the rising cost of gaining funds from the markets.
The bond crisis is directly attributable to the poor design of the Euro monetary system. Why haven’t we seen this sort of issue in sovereign nation bond markets?
He was then asked and answered:
Q: Wasn’t it the case that Europe responded too late to the sovereign debt crisis, given that all the elements of the crisis were in place as early as January 2009?
A: It was first necessary for the countries that were afflicted by a lack of market confidence to adopt a fiscal policy that would enable them to convince all market participants. That is what Greece failed to do in 2009. This made all the difference for a country like Ireland, which – despite the severity of its situation – drew up in advance and adopted a large-scale recovery programme without waiting to find itself in extremely difficult circumstances vis-à-vis investors …
I would not hold Ireland out as an example of being in “recovery”. Please read my blogs – The sick Celtic Tiger getting sicker and The Celtic Tiger is not a good example – for more discussion on this point.
Further, once again you realise that the EMU system is designed to ensure that financial matters take priority over everything. The democratically elected government have rendered their nations vulnerable because they bullied their citizenry into entering an economic and monetary system that would always deliver hardship the first time a serious negative aggregate demand shock hit that system. It was obvious from day one when the Maastricht Treaty was signed and then the Lisbon rules were consolidated that this would be the case. Please read my blog – What is it really all about? – for more discussion on this point.
The citizens within the EMU have ceded their democratic rights to an amorphous bond trading elite courtesy of the likes of Trichet.
Even though sovereign governments cripple themselves with voluntary constraints that empower bond markets, ultimately the government is always in charge andd does not have to “adopt a fiscal policy that would enable them to convince all market participants”. The only judges of fiscal policy should be the people at election time. Please read my blog – Who is in charge? – for more discussion on this point.power
Trichet was then asked:
Q: Why did you wait until 10 May 2010 to intervene in the secondary market for sovereign debt by purchasing Greek bonds and those of other countries? If you had done so earlier, you would have tripped up the speculators.
First some background.
On May 7, 2010, the Wall Street Journal (reprinted in the News Limited daily The Australian) wrote – ECB holds back its ‘nuclear option’ for containing the Greek debt crisis. The report followed the ECB Governing Council meeting in Lisbon on May 6, 2010.
The WSJ article said:
THE European Central Bank’s monetary council withheld its strongest weapon for stopping the Greek debt crisis from spreading to weaker euro-zone financial markets, but ECB watchers don’t rule out a later deployment. Called the ECB’s “nuclear option” in the markets, the procedure would involve the purchase of government bonds in the secondary market. Rumours that it could be activated as early as yesterday were flatly dismissed.
The ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet told a press conference that “We did not discuss this option” and CDS costs rose immediately.
Four days later, the ECB started by government bonds.
In its May 10 Statement, the ECB said:
The European Central Bank decided on several measures to address the severe tensions in certain market segments which are hampering the monetary policy transmission mechanism and thereby the effective conduct of monetary policy oriented towards price stability in the medium term … To conduct interventions in the euro area public and private debt securities markets (Securities Markets Programme) to ensure depth and liquidity in those market segments which are dysfunctional.
The dysfunctional elements they are referring to was the increasing spreads on some member government debt issues relative to the benchmark German debt instrument and the increasing insurance costs (credit default swaps).
See also its Monthly Report on the Eurosystem’s Covered Bond Purchase Programme for May 2010 where it touches on the sovereign debt purchases.
The WSJ reference to the “nuclear option” is just an ideological statement. Given all the neo-liberal posturing since the EMU was established such an intervention was considered anathema to the policy bosses in Brussel and Frankfurt. But what they finally realised was that without a fiscal capacity to cope with asymmetric shocks that this individual Eurozone countries they were on a fast-track to widespread sovereign defaults and the failure of their entire banking system.
Ultimately, the ECB became pragmatic and has assumed a fiscal role. But it still has asserted its ideological colours by bullying the nations into introducing damaging fiscal retrenchments.
The decision to buy government bonds in the secondary markets was an obvious intervention and should have been taken months earlier. Under the EU treaty, the ECB is forbidden from buying government bonds in the primary (issuing) market. It can buy them indirectly after they have been issued. In effect, this is a fiscal intervention and entrenches the power that the unelected ECB holds over the citizens of the nation states in the EMU.
The ECB can now bully the member governments into very harsh contractionary fiscal retrenchments while still having the capacity to “fund” any level of net public spending in any member state. So the have the capacity of a sovereign government but without any of the political accountability. It is really an appalling situation.
The intervention immediately eased the tension in bond markets as was expected. On May 11, 2010, the ECB bought 16.5bn euro of long-term Eurozone government bonds. This had the effect of pushing up bond prices and holding down yields (borrowing rates). It ensured that the bond markets maintained liquidity.
The ECB statement also indicated that it would not “affect the stance of monetary policy”. They said:
In order to sterilise the impact of the above interventions, specific operations will be conducted to re-absorb the liquidity injected through the Securities Markets Programme. This will ensure that the monetary policy stance will not be affected.
What they did was to offer interest-earning deposit facilities to the commercial banks as a vehicle to drain the added bank reserves as a result of the open market purchase of the government debt. So they added liquidity to ensure the bond prices would be supported and then drained it via the payment of a competitive return (at the main refinancing rate) to the commercial banks. This allowed them to maintain their target policy rate.
The critics of the strategy (including some members of the ECB Governing Council) raise various spurious and ideological arguments against this policy shift.
They say that it compromises the independence of central bank and makes it a subject of the political authorities. I see that as a good thing – a pro-democratic development. In practice, the central bank is part of the government sector because its transactions with the non-government sector can be vertical. For an explanation of the difference between vertical and horizontal transactions please read the Deficits suite – Deficit spending 101 – Part 1 – Deficit spending 101 – Part 2 – Deficit spending 101 – Part 3.
For the government sector to work effectively the central bank and the treasury have to coordinate their monetary interventions, the former being passive to the latter, given that the treasury reflects the elected intentions of government. For me, having an unelected and largely unaccountable body able to change policy settings that damage employment is unacceptable in any sophisticated democracy. This trend towards so-called “independent” central banks has been a feature of the neo-liberal erosion of our democratic rights.
The critics also argue that it amounts to monetising the debt which is inflationary. This is based on the discredited but still dominant Quantity Theory of Money which says that an increasing money supply translates directly into inflation. The theory is deeply flawed and has no empirical standing. Please read my blogs – Please read the following blogs – Building bank reserves will not expand credit and Building bank reserves is not inflationary – for further discussion. – for more discussion on this point.
If you think about the current state of the real economy across the EMU you will realise that the inflation risk is minimal. They will end up having to fight deflation. The rate of capacity utilisation is as low as it ever has been. There is currently zero (but probably negative) core inflation and unemployment rates are above 10 per cent (across the zone) and will worsen as the austerity packages bite. So there is zero wage pressure going to emerge in the EMU in the coming period.
The demand for credit is flat and banks are reluctant to lend anyway given the precarious nature of their balance sheets. There is virtuall no inflation risk at all in the EMU and it is highly likely that the bond purchases would just remain sitting as bank reserves anyway.
But this is not stopping the neo-liberal hard-heads from barking loudly. In this Bloomberg story (May 31, 2010) – ECB Must Stop Buying Bonds ‘Quickly,’ Draghi Says – the ECB council member Mario Draghi emphasised that the cure for the EMU crisis was that the EU had to strengthen enforcement of the deficit rules contained in its Stability and Growth Pact.
Draghi said
The commitment to achieve a structural budgetary position in balance or in surplus must be made cogent by introducing sanctions, including political sanctions, for non-compliance.
So expect more pressure on the use of fiscal policy including even harsher fiscal rules and penalties. Governments are going to be further punished when private spending collapses. It is nonsensical and a total denial of the purpose of fiscal policy – to, in part, offset private spending fluctuations.
Anyway, Trichet answered:
A: We acted because we saw a serious and unprecedented malfunctioning of the financial markets of certain euro area countries in the afternoon of 6 May and on Friday 7 May. At that moment in time and not before, we judged that we had a very serious problem with regard to the transmission of our monetary policy in part of the euro area, and that we had to contribute to re-establish a more normal functioning of the markets in question. Our aim was not to change our monetary policy, which is to maintain price stability for our 330 million fellow European citizens. Inflation is a tax on the poor and most vulnerable.
As noted above, the markets had been punishing Greece and other EMU countries for some time. They acted when they did because there would have been defaults and that would have put the banking system in jeopardy (which still might go under) and challenge the logic of their whole monetary system.
The ECB allowed the real economic situation to deteriorate well beyond what it should have before they intervened. This allowed the automatic stabilisers to drive the budgets further into deficit and beyond the SGP rules. And … this allowed them to bully the member governments into more draconian austerity programs – thus retrenching more public activities.
So the ECB created the dream situation for the neo-liberals – wholesale welfare state retrenchment.
Trichet was then asked and answered:
Q: So the ECB isn’t there to mop up the reckless spending of Member States?
A: The central bank is certainly not there to rectify the fiscal mistakes of governments, mistakes it constantly warned them about.
The intervention is fiscal in nature anyway and recognises, even though the ECB won’t express it like this, that the missing element in the EMU is a supranational fiscal authority that can spend like a sovereign government.
Skipping a few questions, Trichet was then asked and answered:
Q: Isn’t there a risk that the next stage of the crisis will occur in the private debt security market, as seen in Spain, where credit institutions are very vulnerable?
A: The calling into question of certain private debt instruments was the source of the international crisis that we are experiencing. It is as a result of this “private” crisis that we have been faced later with the problem of sovereign debt risk. All industrialised countries must strengthen the soundness and credibility of all public policies, and in particular fiscal policy …
The global crisis clearly arose because the private sector had become too indebted and major defaults started to occur. Banks stopped lending and private households and firms began to repair their vulnerable balance sheets.
As I noted in yesterday’s blog – Employment gaps – a failure of political leadership – the pursuit of government surpluses squeezed the private domestic sector of liquidity. This proved to be an non-viable growth strategy because the private sector (which always faces a financing constraint) cannot run on-going deficits.
Ultimately, the fiscal drag coming from the budget surpluses (structural or otherwise) forces the economy into recession (as private sector agents restructure their balance sheets by saving again).
With a spending collapse and the non-government sector desiring to move into solid surpluses, the government deficits had to increase. They did not increase enough given the magnitude and persistence of the recession.
To consider the rising deficts in the context of the private spending collapse and the impacts this has had on the real economy, to be a fiscal problem tells us that Trichet doesn’t consider fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical. If fiscal interventions cannot maintain high levels of employment in the face of private spending fluctuations, what purpose does it serve? Answer: None!
Trichet was then asked and answered:
Q: Is greater fiscal integration necessary to avoid a repeat crisis of this nature?
A: We must, in particular, be able to go as far as possible, without necessarily changing immediately the Treaty, notably with regard to very early surveillance, almost automatic sanctions, and the strengthening and extension of sanctions so that the euro area has the equivalent of what we would have if we were in a fiscal federation.
So the likely response in the EMU will be to further constrain fiscal policy. The glaring design flaw in the monetary system is the lack of a supranational fiscal authority that can spend like a sovereign government and address asymmetric demand shocks.
Trichet’s solution is to worsen this design flaw by penalising nations that encounter deficits outside of the fiscal rules. The reality is that the automatic stabilisers have driven the budgets in many countries beyond the SGP rules given how severe the collapse in economic activity has been following the sharp decline in aggregate demand.
Further constraining the fiscal capacity to respond to these negative spending shocks will entrench higher levels of unemployment and poverty. What a grim place these characters are creating for the people of Europe.
Skipping a few questions, Trichet was finally asked:
Q: Do the austerity plans announced amid monumental disarray by the Member States pose the risk of killing off the first green shoots of growth?
A: It is an error to think that fiscal austerity is a threat to growth and job creation. At present, a major problem is the lack of confidence on the part of households, firms, savers and investors who feel that fiscal policies are not sound and sustainable. In a number of economies, it is this lack of confidence that poses a threat to the consolidation of the recovery. Economies embarking on austerity policies that lend credibility to their fiscal policy strengthen confidence, growth and job creation.
His response here is the new orthodoxy. I covered it in this blog – We have been here before … – for more discussion on this point.
Somehow they believe that by heavily cutting government spending support for aggregate demand and reducing wages that households and investors will suddenly appreciate that they will have lower future tax levels, will stop saving and will go on a spending frenzy. It will just not happen that way.
The fiscal austerity directly threatens growth and job creation.
For all my Eurozone blogs.
Conclusion
So the cult master speaks.
There is nothing new in Trichet’s responses. They are all the utterances of an ideologue who wants to restore a policy framework that allowed the global economy to get into this crisis in the first place.
The worry is that the Europeans will seek to tighten the fiscal straitjacket even further than specified by the SGP and cause further real damage in their economies.
Finally, as I have noted in previous blogs (A total lack of leadership and Ignorance leads to bad policy), the ECB intervention into secondary bond markets really amounts to a massive fiscal intervention but with the barbs attached that the national governments have to toe the ECB line.
This concentration of power within the EMU within an unelected body which can hand out favours at will in return for total compliance is a very dangerous precedent. If anything looks like increasing totalitarianism in the current environment this is it.
That is enough for today!
This is off topic, but I just got Mark Thoma to engage in a brief debate over the existence of a reserve money multiplier. His original post last night is here:
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/economic-news/blog/maximum-utility/should-you-be-worried-about-inflation-what-about-deflation/704/
My comment is here:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/07/should-you-be-worried-about-inflation-what-about-deflation.html#comment-6a00d83451b33869e201348568d5e8970c
And Professor Thoma’s reply to me is under the fold. Several other commentators weigh in further down the thread. I hope I did a good job presenting the MMT point of view. I was basically just summarizing Professor Mitchell’s blog “Money Multiplier and other Myths,” and Winterspeak’s blog “The Public Purpose of Banking,” plus adding in a few insights I gained from discussions with my cousin. Sorry for the off-topic comment, but I thought it was interesting that Professor Thoma engaged with the MMT point of view. In the past he has been reluctant to do so.
Trichet:
“At present, a major problem is the lack of confidence on the part of households, firms, savers and investors who feel that fiscal policies are not sound and sustainable.”
Why don’t journalists ask him what base he has for this claim, how does he know this is the a fact in European countries now?
Or does he solely relay on Ricardian equivalence assumption.
As one commenter at Krugmans blog called him, Jean-Claude Pangloss.
@NKlein
Way to go! 🙂
What do you think the neo-libs gain by advocating these things? Here in the U.S., at least, I see their views as resulting from a combination of anti-government ideology and mistaken ideas about economics.
Are there more practical reasons for their advocacy? I can think of a couple of these … less progressive tax code, less regulation. Is there some other angle that I’m missing? How do they personally benefit?
Ken
NKlein: Congratulations. I noticed that not too brilliant article by Thoma soon after it appeared and thought of responding. You probably said what needed to be said better than I would have done.
Ralph, I would not bother replying.
NKlein1553, I’d keep track of your posts. thoma and duy deleted some of mine. I’d repost just make sure something else wasn’t wrong. That got deleted. I asked why my comments were being deleted. That got deleted. I think duy banned me, not sure what thoma did. I quit posting there.
I have NO respect for either one of them. IMO, they are doing well to be right half the time.
A lot of economists believe in the delete and ban “buttons” when someone says something they don’t like. So much for college professors and free speech/discussions.
NKlein:
I added an additional comment to my post.
NKlien1553:
It’s hard to locate Prof. Thoma’s later comment on his site, so here it is:
NKlein:
I didn’t realize you were doing victory dances at other blogs, so let me add one more comment.
I understand full well that there is a small, but *very noisy* group of people who think they have a better monetary theory than that found in standard textbooks and in economics journals. When people I respect a lot have looked at this theory, they have found it wanting and my own reading of this work accords with that conclusion. So go ahead and make your points, but don’t act like I’m making some egregious error by adopting the standard, well-tested, and accepted theoretical structure over the new one that most people reject, one that I find comes up short in many ways. We may all be wrong, time will tell, but for now that’s how it is. This theory has a secondary place in the literature (at best, that’s way too generous). I’m sorry to see that you – an admitted amateur with no ability to discern finer points – has been taken in.
I am trying to figure out what part of your comment was a “victory lap” (“a brief debate”, “I found it interesting …”?), you didn’t get any points for being so polite (almost obsequious, IMHO). But I wonder how he figured out where to find your “victory lap” comment, so he could post here. Slumming around 2nd rate (that’s way too generous) blogs, professor?
Speaking about time-tested theoretical structures, this is from Thoma’s CBS Money Watch post:
“However, the money supply has not gone up very much at all, particularly in recent months. How could that be? It’s because the multiplier for M2 depends upon the quantity of excess reserves – reserves held by banks over and above the minimum mandated by regulation. The multiplier falls when excess reserves increase, and the dramatic increase in excess reserves during the crisis has caused the multiplier to fall substantially, enough to offset the increase in MB.”
This is the first I’ve heard that the multiplier theory assumes an optimal level of reserves in order to function – excess reserves cause the multiplier to drop? Is this supposed to mean that since I have too many reserves, I won’t lend out the deposit I just received because I want keep my reserves high? Or is it just because the calculation for the multiplier has reserves as the denominator, therefore excess reserves causes a low multiplier?
And then later:
“The worry about inflation is that as the economy begins to recover, banks will begin to loan out their excess reserves. As excess reserves fall, the multiplier will go up driving up the money supply.”
Now, this makes no sense (to me) – the excess reserves were keeping the multiplier down, but once the economy recovers (not through any lending activity, apparently), then I start loaning, reducing my excess reserves (while increasing someone else’s) and that is going to increase the multiplier – hence inflation. This sounds like voodoo. What is the logic here? (I know the multiplier theory is bogus), just trying to figure out what the rationale is behind such an assertion?
Dear pebird, NKlein1553 and all
Mark Thoma continues to demonstrate how pleasant he is.
You quote him:
I would point out that I have never seen a formal refutation by academic economists of our work. A lot of statements like this one – “I have found it wanting” – but no formal debate ever! I have presented at many conferences over the years, to many staff seminars, as have my MMT colleagues. We have presented at major and minor conferences etc in many countries. Never, have the mainstream economists come forward with a coherent refutation. They typically descend into abuse and mockery to avoid engaging on matters of substance.
So when Mark says he has found our work wanting I can only ask him – as an academic who is meant to be open to ideas and debate – to spell out the grounds for his conclusion. In detail, from start to finish, so we can discusss it.
The only time he has been approached to debate me on these issues he refused and said I was stupid!
I think his “pleasant” approach (not!) indicates a deep-seated insecurity with his own position.
best wishes
bill
Dear pebird (at 2010/07/15 at 10:23)
I would suggest the only time Mark has been into a bank is when he has had to deposit or withdraw some money. And then he clearly doesn’t know what was going on behind the teller’s desk that he was standing at.
Banks do not lend reserves. They are for clearing purposes and for satisfying statutory requirements where applicable.
best wishes
bill
My comment at Mark Thoma’s (I post as tjfxh):
tjfxh said…
Mark Thomas wrote: “So go ahead and make your points, but don’t act like I’m making some egregious error by adopting the standard, well-tested, and accepted theoretical structure over the new one that most people reject, one that I find comes up short in many ways.”
I would be interested in hearing how you think it “comes up short.” I have been following this also and it seems that many of the strongest argument come not from economists but from people with actual experience in finance and banking. According to them, the currently accepted theory that you are defending does not accord with contemporary operational reality in banking.
A good deal of give and take has occurred at Nick Rowe’s place, as you may know, and commenters like JKH are clearly more knowledgeable about finance and banking operations than the economists participating.
I would include Warren Mosler, whose background is in finance but who has co-authored papers with economists, too. Academic economist James K. Galbraith also seems to be that camp, and he is not exactly a light-weight. So I don’t think that this view can be dismissed out of hand as marginal based on its minority position relative to the current orthodoxy.
My field is neither economics nor finance. But in my judgment after having followed this for some time, the people speaking on the platform of experience with operations seem to be correct, and I would hand the debate so far to them, although I am certainly not qualified to be a judge in the matter. So any further comments about the details of your objections would be appreciated.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 05:01 PM
Here is a link to JKH’s model:
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2009/11/money-banks-loans-reserves-capital-and-loan-officers.html
Posted by: JKH | November 29, 2009 at 05:32 PM
The fastest way to get there once at the link is:
Press Ctrl and F then type “4:50”
About excess reserves (for me I would call them excess central bank reserves), I thought the banks could convert these to currency 1 to 1.
Why haven’t they?
If they did convert them to currency, can they then use the currency as captial?
FedUp:
Thanks for the link, this is an v.interesting observation from JKH from his comment:
There is an enormous irony here around the issue of causality. MMT observes correctly that the central bank supplies required reserves in response to the banking system’s creation of new loan and deposits, most obviously in those systems that have positive rather than zero reserve requirements. This correct description positions the traditional textbook described “multiplier” causality as literally backwards. The irony is that the textbook causality direction applies correctly to capital, not reserves. Not only does a significant proportion of the economics profession not yet understand that the textbook model is wrong, but they don’t yet understand that the correct version of the same causality applies to capital rather than reserves, and they really don’t understand that they have effectively been confusing reserves with capital all along. Economists in general are typically weak on the subject of bank capital. That’s probably why they got the role of reserves wrong in the first place. The MMT group has distinguished itself in getting it right. Macroeconomic theory that directs itself toward an understanding of the financial system in general and the banking system in particular needs to do a MAJOR REBALANCING of conceptual thinking around the dual subjects of capital and reserves.
pebird’s post said: “The worry about inflation is that as the economy begins to recover, banks will begin to loan out their excess reserves. As excess reserves fall, the multiplier will go up driving up the money supply.”
I am going to try to answer this one whether rightly or wrongly.
Assuming JKH’s model and a positive reserve requirement, banks don’t lend out reserves. However, a loan/deposit will require reserves. If the fed provides no new ones, that will come out of the excess reserves.
I believe no new reserves would be needed from the loan/deposit if the reserve requirement is zero (or possibly pseudo zero because of sweeps).
Anyone can feel free to correct me.
pebird’s post said: “I understand full well that there is a small, but *very noisy* group of people who think they have a better monetary theory than that found in standard textbooks and in economics journals. When people I respect a lot have looked at this theory, they have found it wanting and my own reading of this work accords with that conclusion. So go ahead and make your points, but don’t act like I’m making some egregious error by adopting the standard, well-tested, and accepted theoretical structure over the new one that most people reject, one that I find comes up short in many ways. We may all be wrong, time will tell, but for now that’s how it is. This theory has a secondary place in the literature (at best, that’s way too generous). I’m sorry to see that you – an admitted amateur with no ability to discern finer points – has been taken in.”
How about the BIS?
http://www.bis.org/publ/work292.pdf?noframes=1
p. 19 of the document ; p. 26 of the .pdf
“Does financing with bank reserves add power to balance sheet policy?
The underlying premise of the first proposition, which posits a close link between reserves expansion and credit creation, is that bank reserves are needed for banks to make loans. Either bank lending is constrained by insufficient access to reserves or more reserves can somehow boost banks’ willingness to lend. An extreme version of this view is the text-book notion of a stable money multiplier: central banks are able, through exogenous variations in the supply of reserves, to exert a direct influence on the amount of loans and deposits in the banking system.30
In fact, the level of reserves hardly figures in banks’ lending decisions. The amount of credit outstanding is determined by banks’ willingness to supply loans, based on perceived risk-return trade-offs, and by the demand for those loans.31 The aggregate availability of bank reserves does not constrain the expansion directly. The reason is simple: as explained in Section I, under scheme 1 – by far the most common – in order to avoid extreme volatility in the interest rate, central banks supply reserves as demanded by the system. From this perspective, a reserve requirement, depending on its remuneration, affects the cost of intermediation and that of loans, but does not constrain credit expansion quantitatively.32 The main exogenous constraint on the expansion of credit is minimum capital requirements.”
“30 The money multiplier view of credit creation is still pervasive in standard macroeconomic textbooks including, for example, Walsh (2003), Mishkin (2004), and Abel and Bernanke (2005).”
Thanks, Fed Up, for posting that link. Bring back memories. Later on in that thread it’s interesting how very difficult it is for some people to actually admit that the cb as the monopoly supplier of reserve balances can set an interest rate target where it wants.
From the same BIS pdf above:
p. 3 of the document ; p. 10 of the .pdf
“The fulcrum of the implementation of interest rate policy is the market for bank reserves. This is a peculiar market. By virtue of its monopoly over this asset, the central bank can set the quantity and the terms on which it is supplied at the margin. As such, the central bank is able to set the opportunity cost (“price”) of reserves, the overnight rate, to any particular level, simply because it could stand ready, if it so wished, to buy and sell unlimited amounts at the chosen price. This is the source of the credibility of the signal.
Crucially, the interest rate can be set quite independently of the amount of bank reserves in the system. The same amount of bank reserves can coexist with very different levels of interest rates; conversely, the same interest rate can coexist with different amounts of reserves. What is critical is how reserves are remunerated relative to the policy rate. We refer to this as the “decoupling principle”.4 It is a principle that has far-reaching implications for the rest of the analysis.”
Posted this at Thoma’s :
Prof Mark Thoma,
NKlein has clearly demonstrated that there is no multiplier and that the Federal Reserve says so too.
Hasn’t the recent crisis made economists, inflationistas and hyperinflationistas realize that there is no multiplier? Perhaps you can argue that the crisis is an exception and that money has not multiplied. Thats not a bad argument but doesn’t that make mainstream economists realize that they have been wrong ?
Here is another article by the Fed guys – Divorcing Money From Monetary Policy
Quoting:
“Monetary policy has traditionally been viewed as the process by which a central bank uses its influence over the supply of money to promote its economic objectives. For example, Milton Friedman (1959, p. 24) defined the tools of monetary policy to be those “powers that enable the [Federal Reserve] System to determine the total amount of money in existence or to alter that amount.” In fact, the very term monetary policy suggests a central bank’s policy toward the supply of money or the level of some monetary aggregate.
In recent decades, however, central banks have moved away from a direct focus on measures of the money supply. The primary focus of monetary policy has instead become the value of a short-term interest rate. In the United States, for example, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee(FOMC) announces a rate that it wishes to prevail in the federal funds market, where overnight loans are made among commercial banks. The tools of monetary policy are then used to guide the market interest rate toward the chosen target. For this reason, we follow the common practice of using the term monetary policy to refer to a central bank’s interest rate policy.”
I challenge you to get into a debate with Prof Bill Mitchell, Director, CoFFEE, Newcastle, Australia. You may create a blog post titled “Is the money multiplier model wrong?” and write about 3000 words and allow him to write 3000 words in your blog. No edits, but within the spirit of a debate. Just some ideas on how to go into a debate openly.
NKlein’s links and the Fed paper I quoted clearly suggests that he is right!
NK, I like Thoma’s blog, but his comment on your posts (only part of which is reposted above) is, I think, quite extraordinary.
It includes (I paraphrase) an ‘appeal to authority’ (people I respect have looked at this and found it wanting), a pointless ad hominem (you are an amateur, how can you possibly think these complex issues through), another appeal to authority (my view is the well accepted orthodox theoretical framwork), as well an unwillingness to actually specify what the shortcomings are that he identified.
Now, I’m no acredited professor, but I know more than enough economics to know that the emperor’s clothes in the economic empire are a little tatty. Andbesides, being a professor is no defense. Professors sometimes say very stupid things. Thoma’s should have been rather less pointed – not least because we are precisely in economic circumstances where a hard core devotee of exogenous money and reserve multipliers is going to have trouble explaining what is going on.
Ken: “What do you think the neo-libs gain by advocating these things? Here in the U.S., at least, I see their views as resulting from a combination of anti-government ideology and mistaken ideas about economics.
Are there more practical reasons for their advocacy? I can think of a couple of these … less progressive tax code, less regulation. Is there some other angle that I’m missing? How do they personally benefit?”
IMO neo liberals defend big private capital interests. I think greed and short sight of big capital are the reasons they don’t recognize, yet, MMT. Unlike fiat money, real recourses in the economy are limited. Big private capital is against prioritizing of public purpose. They put themselves first – government should bail them out when necessary ignoring free market theory.
With MMT squeezed in the corner high unemployment levels are easier to be maintained, which leads to lower wages so capital, eventually?, makes bigger profits. All they have to say is: Look at our public debt, government can’t afford spending for health care, education or any other public purpose. These financial constrains are much easier to be explained with the very nature (wrongly presented and accepted by almost everyone) of the monetary system, and not that actually private financial interests were behind.
But if big capitalists were smarter, or when they get smarter, they will discover that MMT could be of great support to them as well. When there is full employment with stable prizes and steady rate of profit they will be happy to avoid the crisis which have been torturing everybody since the beginning of capitalism.
@rjw
Extraordinary? I prefer to call things by their right name. The comments by Mark Thoma to NK are rude, arrogant, ignorant and pretentious. If he prefers to surround himself only with enlightened economic authorities of his choosing plus some cheering layman audience he might either stop blogging, disable comments (like Mankiw) or update his comment policy accordingly. It’s not our duty to accommodate the vanities of some economic professor Mark Thoma by carefully tailoring our comments to his liking.
Beside that reading the arguments of Thoma I’m wondering where George Soros takes the confidence from to establish a New Economic Thinking? Thoma was part of the Inaugural Conference in Cambridge. So somebody with a deep sitting believe in orthodox textbooks and an almost reflexive defense against new ideas shall suddenly bring forward some new thinking? Forget it! The utmost what will happen is him tinkering with his outdated models to incorporate some features of the real world instead of modelling the economy on Alpha Centauri.
Hi Billy
Thanks for this article on Mr.Trichets interview. He has had a difficult year I think with all the about turns he has had to make and I like the idea of him leading a cult! Very apt.
I found your site via a recommendation on the BBC website (stephanomics) where I find the comments to be much more interesting than her articles …
[bill notes: I edited out a link that followed this text that was just advertising another blog that has no intrinsic relevance to our discussion]
Professor Thoma has sent me a personal e-mail about our exchange. For my part I am satisfied. Although I continue to disagree with Professor Thoma about the role reserves play in our modern banking system I hope all sides can continue to express their opinions in an appropriate and respectful manner. As I said before, I hope I was able to present the MMT point of view appropriately and I apologize to Professor Mitchell if I caused him any headaches. Although I seriously doubt he care much about what Professor Thoma or anyone else for that matter thinks about his presentation of his theories =) Cheers all.
@ Stephan
yes, well, I used the word ‘extraordinary’ because I was too polite to say what I really thought. (and understatement is an English prerogative …. ). I really think his comment was quite outrageous, and I can only assume he wrote it after stubbing his toe or jamming his hand in the door, because it came across as arrogant and rather stupid. Not too many people are convinced by an argument of the form: “me and my clever friends think you are wrong, but I can’t be bothered to explain why”. I suspect he probably regrets writing it. At least , I hope so.
1. Just to confirm, I am not the Nick R from Kyoto Japan.
2. If you want to link to a comment (by JKH at WCI, or wherever), the easiest way to do it is to click on the date just below the comment (or where it says “permalink”), and you can link directly to the comment.
3. For what it’s worth (not much) my own position is halfway between Paul Krugman’s and Jamie Galbraith’s (I haven’t read the latter’s post, so take this as such). PK is correct if the debt is inflation-indexed (as he assumed). But if the debt is not indexed, and most of it isn’t, it’s not really the same. If you have a $1 quadrillion national debt, which is a promise to pay $1 quadrillion, then you just print $1 quadrillion paper dollars, and pay it off. Yes it will cause a massive jump in the price level, sooner or later. Yes, you can’t do this on an ongoing basis. You can presumably only do this once (unless you can do a really good con-job and say it will never happen again). But you can do it. Don’t really see what the issue is here.
Thanks, Nick ROWE (!!).
Nick, nice to hear from you here. I think most of us figured you hadn’t moved to Japan. 🙂
BTW, if GDP (denominator) has grown proportionately faster, a quadrillion quadrillion is no problem. That is Krugman’s problem. He is assuming that the nominator is changing faster than the denominator. Empirically that is not borne out in the US and there is no good reason to think that it would happen anytime soon. Randy Wray pointed it out in his comment about automatic stabilizers here
Stimulus is, well, stimulus. The Treasury view that some are trying to resurrect is a zombie that won’t die. When recovery begins to kick in, not only does GDP grow, but tax revenue increases faster than GDP and safety net spending trails off. Empirically, that’s just the way it works.
Krugman’s “thought experiment” is pure fantasy, and as Jamie pointed out to him, it is providing ammo to the enemy that will be used against him later.
Best regards,
tom