Category Archives: The Federal Government Deficit

Why Do Progressives Claim that Deficits Today Mean More Pain Tomorrow?

By L. Randall Wray

Yesterday I posted a blog here arguing that we should not conflate a sovereign government’s balance sheet with that of a household. One is the issuer of the currency, the other is a user. That makes a big difference. The currency issuer can spend by “financing” its purchases through credits to bank accounts, issues of new currency, or new issues of sovereign interest-paying debt that is considered to be the safest dollar-denominated asset in existence. Households cannot do that. I also argued that there is no “piper-paying” due date on which government needs to repay its debts, hence, no financial imperative to ever run a budget surplus (or even a balanced budget). Further, even if the government were to try to run surpluses to repay debt, that would (based on historical experience) throw the economy into a depression that would only increase budget deficits. Empirically, budget deficits are correlated with growth; budget surpluses precede depressions. Based solely on the historical record, only a fool would recommend budget surpluses as a policy goal. Yes, that implies that Robert Rubin and Pete Peterson advocate foolish policy.

Somewhat ironically (at least from my point of view) the shrillest critics come from the left. When I try to explain how government “really” spends, or why government is not like a household, or why the focus on budget deficits is misplaced, the loudest objections come from those who claim to be progressives. Indeed, on the matter of deficits, the only discernable difference between the “progressive” position and the “deficit hawk” position of a Pete Peterson is over the short run. Both agree that deficits today mean higher taxes and less government spending in the future—more burdens for our grandkids. Both agree that spending more now to relieve the pain of unemployment only means more pain in the future. The only difference of opinion comes down to the willingness to “party now” and “pay later”. Conservatives would forego the party to avoid the hangover; “progressives” would party like it is 1999, then deal with the migraines and stomach upsets later. I must say that if I had to choose between the two strategies, I would go with the conservatives: take the pain now and enjoy lower taxes later. Indeed, I cannot think of any justification for taking the party now and putting the burden of the aftermath on our children in the future—if that is what the choice really involved.

But here’s the deal. The “progressives” are wrong. Nay, they are dangerous. They are the worst enemies we face. At least with the Pete Petersons you know what you get: they oppose deficits precisely because they oppose any progressive policy that might help the average American today—the pain in the future is just a bogeyman to prevent progress today. Indeed, that is, by definition, the position of conservatives who want to return to the idyllic past when the poor suffered their deserved fate and the deserving enjoyed their privileges.

Progressives are supposed to be, well, progressive. But almost all of them constrain progressive policy to a Puritanical trade-off: anything that leads to improvement today is bought by more suffering later. They are far worse than the conservatives because no one who wants to improve the position of the average American would ever take the deficit hawk position of Pete Peterson seriously. We all know what he stands for. So the position of the progressives on deficits, which is identical in all important respects to that of the deficit hawks, is far more dangerous precisely because they appear to prefer progressive policy but warn that in the long run it will bankrupt us.

Why do they adopt a position that is fundamentally inimical to the progressive agenda?

Let me proffer an informed hypothesis. It is all politics. Back during the waning days of the Clinton administration, a high ranking economist of a major labor union laid it all out in public at an economics conference. Union surveys showed that voters trusted Democrats far more to protect Social Security than they trusted Republicans (a finding that is not surprising, given the efforts of Republicans dating back to the early postwar period to kill the program). As they have long argued, Republicans claimed that Social Security faces an Armageddon because when baby-boomers retire, payroll tax revenues will not cover Social Security benefit payments. This labor union economist assured the assembled crowd that this is not really a problem because Social Security is a government program, and as government is a sovereign issuer of the currency it can and will make all Social Security payments as they come due simply by crediting bank accounts. I was practically dumbfounded, having thought that I was just about the only economist who understood this.

But he went on. Democrats needed a campaign issue, he said, something candidate Gore the Bore could sink his teeth into. (Recall that this was before Gore had become the global warming messiah we all now love.) So the Democrats had decided that “save Social Security” would be his main campaign theme. Problem: Social Security did not and does not need saving because it does not and cannot face any financial problems. Solution: join the Pete Petersons and Senator Judds of the world, and claim that Social Security is going bankrupt. This would be a “two-for”. First, Gore could rise from the near-dead as savior of Social Security, garnering the support of voters fearing that Republicans would gut the program.

More importantly, Gore could collect the campaign contributions of Wall Streeters, who desperately wanted to privatize Social Security because the dot-com bubble was running out of steam. They wanted to manage a growing Trust Fund, charging huge fees from whence to pay Wall Street sized bonuses. And thanks to Clinton, the Democrats had become the official Protectorate of Wall Street’s cash flow (with Rubin and Summers the anointed minions). So Gore promised to save Social Security from the evil-doers on both the right and the left. The right wanted to slash benefits, the left wanted to use Social Security’s surpluses to finance other government spending. Gore would protect those surpluses by locking up Greenbacks in a safe, to be taken out later when the babyboomers retire. Not only that, he would have the federal government kick in some extra bucks by double counting Social Security’s surpluses. It was accounting nonsense, but Wall Street drooled in anticipation of obtaining access to the overstuffed safes.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the election: the population could not understand what the heck Gore was talking about, but it sure sounded scary. Baby Bush seemed to be a safer choice—he had lots of happy talk about making us all “stakeholders” in a new “ownership society”. That sounded a lot better than Gore’s scare mongering. Americans like to be scared about foreigners—immigrants, Reds, French fries—but they do not want to listen to incomprehensible plans to rescue near and dear entitlement programs to which they had become accustomed. Better to kill the messenger. (The same thing happened to Kyoto and cap-and-trade, but that is an issue to be left for another day.)

And so it goes. The “left” simply will not give up on the scare tactics. They want to terrorize the population about budget deficits, so they can propose some deficit-cutting policies in the distant future—preferably left for the next administration. More party today, more pain later. Who gets to party? Well, obviously, Wall Street—the main benefactors of the Democratic party and, no surprise, the main beneficiaries of bail-outs.

And what if Wall Street did not get its bail-outs? Armageddon, as Bernanke, Paulson, Rubin, and Geithner have been claiming for two years. In reality, there would have been no collapse, indeed, we would have been in far better shape had we simply closed down all of the insolvent financial institutions (which would have included all of the big ones). But the Wall Street rescue operation never had, and never will have, anything to do with saving the economy, dealing with retiring baby-boomers, or indeed with resolving any real world problems. It is all about stoking the flow of cash from Wall Street to Democrats.

Unfortunately, it is a strategy that will fail. Scaring voters and funneling money to Wall Street only generates distrust. Voters voted against Gore, against Kerry, and for change—that they thought they would get with Obama. They want honesty, not terror. They want action, not threats of deferred pain. They want jobs now, not excuses about “affordability” or “sustainability”. They don’t need nonsensical lectures about why the government can afford $23 trillion in promises to Wall Street, but it cannot afford to support Main Street. They want the sure recovery now, not scary talk about burdens this will place on future generations.

They will not accept the argument that because of some hypothetical revenue shortfalls 75 years from now, government cannot keep teachers employed and schools open now. They will not sit idly by as Haiti suffers from the same governmental near-paralysis that New Orleans experienced under the previous President. They want government to spend, now, on the necessary scale to deal with our problems, and those of our even less fortunate neighbors. They recognize that the problem is not one of “money”—something that costs the government nothing to create—but rather a failure of will to mobilize the ample and underused resources we now have to accomplish the tasks at a hand.

While more than two generations have passed, memories of WWII are still strong. Government ramped up its spending to 50% of GDP; its deficit reached 25% of GDP—almost twice as high as the ratio today. We shipped our highest tech products out of the country and we sent some of our most motivated and productive workers off to fight the war—many of whom never came back; we mobilized our labor force and went far beyond what anyone thought to be full employment—with the help of female workers that many had believed to be incapable of the work they successfully undertook; and we constrained our domestic consumption sector to preserve resources for the war effort. Still, living standards rose, inequality, racism, and poverty fell, and we emerged from the experience stronger than ever. The next generation experienced the “golden age” of US capitalism as we put resources to work producing for domestic consumption, and the rest of the world grew faster than it ever had before.

With the New Deal programs and constraints in place, the financial system played a secondary role, with no significant crises for a whole generation after the war. By design, Wall Street was tiny, and our financial institutions were simple, but they financed the most rapid and sustained growth of output and living standards our nation had ever seen. Over the course of the 1930s, we had downsized, strangled, and constrained Wall Street. It took a half century for it to fully recover—and once it did it returned to its old destabilizing ways. To make a long story short, finance gradually returned to the dominant position it enjoyed on the eve of the Great Depression—and duplicated the result.

In this current crisis, Wall Street refuses to downsize. It wants to emerge as the still dominate force that it had enjoyed before the crisis. Its biggest threat is the recognition that it is not needed, that it plays no important social function. Not only can the financial system be downsized by two-thirds or more without ill effects, the economy would actually perform better.

From Wall Street’s perspective, if government finance were truly understood, there would be little room left for the “financialization” that Goldman Sachs and others have been promoting. Securitization of mortgages and of other consumer debt is superfluous. Private pensions managed by Wall Street are unneeded–Social Security is safe and can be expanded as desired to provide decent and secure pensions. Health care insurance does not need to be reformed or expanded, instead, it needs to be eliminated and replaced by a single payer system. Government does not need to beg or bribe finance to fund efforts by entrepreneurs to create jobs because a federal job guarantee program can ensure continuous full employment. And Wall Street does not need to choose our candidates for us, as voters are perfectly capable of electing representatives of their interests. In short, it is difficult to conceive of any positive role for outsized finance to play.

Lest anyone think that I am advocating a bigger government, I want to make clear that I am actually arguing for less government intervention into the economy. The market wants to eliminate the biggest financial institutions. I think the market is correct. It wants to get rid of the riskiest financial instruments, such as credit default swaps and securitization. The market is correct on that score. The market would eliminate bonuses for Wall Street traders and CEOs—only Bernanke and Geithner stand in the way, providing government bail-outs that fund the outrageous rewards paid to the crooks and fools that created the crisis. The market would wipe out the mortgage debts of underwater homeowners—it is only the inducements provided by government that keep the mortgage servicers and first and second lien vampires afloat so that they can suck some more blood. And no rational market would have developed private employer-based pension plans or use of employment-related insurance as the dominant method of providing healthcare services. Both of these anomalies were created by partnerships of Government and Wall Street acting against the interests of the vast majority of Americans. I believe that we can have decent and rationalized retirements, health care, and jobs programs without increasing the size of government.

But the first step is to get beyond the deficit bogey. A government budget is not like a household budget. A government deficit—by itself–is neither good nor bad. And in any case government deficits are mostly not discretionary—they do not result from government policy but are largely “endogenously” determined by the nongovernment sector’s behavior. That is a topic for another blog. The most important thing to recognize that there is no “party today, pain tomorrow” trade-off. If government needs to spend more today to create jobs, provide healthcare, and support education, that simply means we can enjoy the benefits of fuller use of our resources. It does not impact our ability tomorrow to similarly use government spending as necessary to create jobs, provide healthcare, and support education. Indeed, it will make it easier because our nation will be in better shape tomorrow than it would have been if we had gone without jobs, healthcare and education today.

The President Remains Trapped In the Talons of Deficit Hawks

By Marshall Auerback

Last Friday Mr. Obama and the GOP staged the equivalent of a British Parliamentary Question Period in front of the TV cameras. It showed the quick-thinking, articulate President at his best. Unfortunately, the subsequent Saturday morning national radio address showed him at his worst. Obama reiterated the need for job creation, even as he decried government deficits, which allegedly imperil our long term economic prosperity. It’s like calling for an open house policy, whilst simultaneously putting explosives on the door knobs.

“As we work to create jobs, it is critical that we rein in the budget deficits we’ve been accumulating for far too long – deficits that won’t just burden our children and grandchildren, but could damage our markets, drive up our interest rates, and jeopardize our recovery right now”.

Give Obama credit. He packs a veritable trifecta of innocent, but deadly, frauds into one sentence – government debt is bad, markets determine interest rates, deficits represent a form of “intergenerational theft”– and then adds several new ones to boot.

Unfortunately, he’s got it backwards. The deficits he decries actually help to sustain demand, and create jobs, thereby supporting the economy – not destroying it. And he reflects a commonly held belief that growing government debt represents a burden on our children and grandchildren, implicitly suggesting that future generations will have to reduce consumption in order to pay the taxes required to pay off the outstanding debt. Related to this is the fallacy that too much bond issuance will create a “debtors’ revolt”, whereby “the markets” will force the country to pay higher interest rates in order to “fund” its spending.

Where to begin? Since the days of George Washington’s administration, national budget deficits and increased public debt have been the rule on all but about six very short occasions. And the US has generally prospered. Why? Far from being a burden, the deficits, and the corresponding government bonds, constitute the foundation of private financial wealth in any nation that creates its own sovereign currency for use by its citizens. Debt owed by the government yields net income to the private sector, unlike all purely private debts, which merely transfer income from one part of the private sector to another. In basic national accounting terms, government deficits equal non-government savings surpluses.

Another important other angle that is often overlooked is that private holdings of government bonds also constitute an income source – that is, the government interest payments on its outstanding debt constitute another avenue for stimulus. So when the Government retires debt it reduces private incomes, just as when it runs budget surpluses, it constrains private sector demand directly by reducing private income and access to adequate currency. Just ask any pensioner if he/she is happy when their income stream from annuities has declined.

Take away that debt, and you take away income. It is no coincidence that the budget surpluses of the Clinton years (wrongly trumpeted as a great fiscal triumph by President Obama) subsequently led to recessions: government budget surpluses ultimately restrict private sector demand and income growth and force greater reliance on PRIVATE debt. Does anybody think it is a coincidence that two of the longest and largest periods of budget surpluses in America history – the periods of 1997-2000 and 1927-1930 – were followed by calamitous economic collapses?

There are ample analyses which explain how government surpluses drain aggregate demand (here, and here). Suffice to say, a government budget surplus has two negative effects for the private sector: the stock of financial assets (money or bonds) held by the private sector, which represents its wealth, falls; and private disposable income also falls as tax demands exceed income. And, as Stephanie Kelton has noted, the case of Japan illustrates that despite a debt-to-GDP ratio in excess of 200%, the Bank of Japan never lost the ability to set the key overnight interest rate, which has remained below 1% for about a decade. And, the debt didn’t drive long-term rates higher either.

Furthermore, now that we’re off the gold standard, Chinese and other Treasury buyers do not “fund” anything for us, contrary to the completely false and misguided scare stories that deficit hawks and, and now Obama, implicitly endorse. (See here for an explanation). Legions of economists, investment advisors, Wall Street practitioners and policy makers continue to peddle such gold-standard thinking to their citizens nationwide. To paraphrase Churchill, “It is as though a vast Gold Standard curtain has descended across the entire body of public thinking.”

Let’s consider a real world example to demonstrate the President’s conceptual confusion on government deficits. We’re in a recession. Our American citizen who was working in a pie shop has lost his job even though his productivity was just as high during the boom years. The problem is that as the recession intensified, pie demand fell as did consumer demand in general. For a variety of reasons, households perceive their wealth holdings are not going to appreciate as quickly as they did in prior periods, so they are saving more money out of their income flows.

The pie guy wants to exercise his freedom to work hard for money. So too do 152 million other people. But there are jobs available for only 138 million of them given current business perceptions of money profit prospects from production now and in the future. The pie guy is stuck with over 15 million other people who would like to exercise their freedom to work hard for money. Over 6 million of those people have been trying to exercise that freedom for over half a year, with no luck. They are dumpster diving for leftover pie scraps.

In desperation, the pie guy has gone back to the pie shop to offer his services for a lower money wage, but unit pie demand is still down, even though the owner has cut pie prices. However, the pie owner, facing lower prices per pie, decides to hire the pie guy back at a lower wage and fires one of his other workers to scratch his way to a little higher profit. Are we all any better off? I suppose pies are cheaper, but then so too are incomes earned by pie makers lower.

In that situation, someone else has to take up the spending slack. Fortunately, we live in an economic system in which a government can freely spend and fill the gap left by the private sector. It has the unique capacity to spend without the constraint of a private firm on productive job creation, thereby increasing output, not just redistributing it. Just giving the pie firm a payroll tax cut on new hires is not going to generate more jobs. Rather giving it to all employees will lead to more pie sales. And the government can do that. Rather than decrying the government deficits, then, the President should be celebrating them as a form of economic salvation.

The problem obviously isn’t about money which a government can always create. The ultimate irony is that in order to somehow ‘save’ public funds for the future, as the President appears to be advocating, what we do is cut back on expenditures today, which does nothing but set our economy back and cause the growth of output and employment to decline. Worse yet, the great irony is that the first thing governments generally cut back on is education- the one thing the mainstream agrees should be done that actually helps our children 50 years down the road. Education cutbacks – as any Californian can tell you – are something that does hurt us, as well as harming our children AND our grandchildren down the road. This is the true “intergenerational theft”, not “runway” government spending.

Like many other people who embrace the nostrums of the Concord Coalition, the President continues to view government spending through a failed household budget analogy:

There are certain core principles our families and businesses follow when they sit down to do their own budgets. They accept that they can’t get everything they want and focus on what they really need. They make tough decisions and sacrifice for their kids. They don’t spend what they don’t have, and they make do with what they’ve got.”

Yes, it’s true: If households spend more than their income now, they have to borrow. To pay the loan back they have to ensure that they can dedicate adequate income in the future, either by increasing incomes somehow or diverting existing income from consumption. If a household borrows too much, it will face major corrections in its balance of income and expenditure and consequently may have to seriously forgo spending later.

That is the logic that the users of the currency have to consider every day. They have to finance every $ they spend and so planning is required to ensure they don’t blow out their personal balance sheets. If all households attempt to net save by spending less than they are earning, and businesses attempt to net save (reinvesting less than their retained earnings), then private sector incomes and real output will decline absent an increase in government spending.

But it’s not the same for a government, as the President wrongly suggests, as the government is the creator of a currency. They can spend now. They can also spend later as well as service and pay back the debt without compromising anything. And a government, unlike a household or a private business, can choose to exact greater tax revenues by imposing new taxes or raising tax rates.

Notwithstanding the obvious reality that sovereign governments have no solvency risk because they create their own currency, most financial commentators (and the President’s own advisors) still waste their time talking about sovereign default risks and the President implicitly legitimizes this sort of talk when he talks about the need for government to embrace budgeting like a household does. This is what we presume he has in mind when he discusses the long term dangers of government deficits. Firms, households, and even state and local governments require income or borrowings in order to spend. But the federal government’s spending is not constrained by revenues or borrowing. It is constrained only by what our population chooses as national goals.

Suffice to say, we would all rather live in a world where profit prospects are so abundant that business investment spending is high enough to insure full employment given household preferences to save out of income flows. But historical and current experience suggests that is a rare configuration indeed. Ideally, that would be the business sector investing more than it retains in earnings. But in recent decades, such appears to only be the case during asset bubbles, and we know how that story ends. Alternatively, the foreign sector could deficit spend – the US could run a trade surplus. But the reality is US firms have chosen to reinvest in low cost production centers abroad (or would prefer to use free cash flow to engage in short run shareholder value maximization through various financial engineering efforts, including M&A) so the US based production structure no longer matches foreign demand very well. Ironically that leaves government fiscal deficit spending as the sole remaining mechanism to insure the freedom of its citizens to work hard for money.

The President, unfortunately, has yet to put the pieces of the puzzle together. He also fails to understand the idea that a government like the United States – i.e. one that issues a non-convertible sovereign currency (i.e. one the government doesn’t promise to convert into gold or other currencies at a fixed price) – can meet any and all outstanding financial obligations, provided the debts are denominated in its national currency. In this regard, the size of the national debt is irrelevant. This myth, and this myth alone, underpins arguments by orthodox economists against government activism in macroeconomic policy. The President does his Administration and the country no service by continuing to jump on this mythical bandwagon. Myth may constitute good grounds for literature, but is a horrible foundation for sound economic policy.

A Plea to the President: Tear Up That Speech

By Stephanie Kelton

My colleague and fellow blogger, Randy Wray, has just argued that President Obama should scrap the speech he’s planning to deliver tonight and surprise the American people with something entirely different. I couldn’t agree more. And while I agree that job creation must be JOB ONE in the months (and years) ahead, I would encourage the President to make massive tax relief the cornerstone of tonight’s speech.
Specifically, the President should call on Congress to support a full and immediate payroll tax holiday. Right now, the government takes away about 15% of our incomes in the form of payroll taxes. With a full payroll tax holiday, a married couple earning $60,000 a year would see their take-home pay increase by about $750 each month. In the aggregate, this will help millions of Americans pay their mortgages, student loans, credit card bills, and so on, while at the same time reducing business expenses (remember that employers contribute to the payroll tax too). All told, a full payroll tax holiday would allow Americans to keep about $1 trillion this year.
So stand before us, Mr. President, and tell us that you want to stop taking this income away from us until we, as a nation, have clawed back every job that has been lost since the start of the recession. Tell us that you intend to take bold steps to protect jobs, keep families intact and provide relief for millions of American businesses. Tell us that you have done all you intend to do to help the banks and the automakers and that you will not accept a jobless recovery — that an increase in economic activity is meaningless without rising employment in good jobs.
And, most importantly, tell us that you refuse to adopt a timeline for cutting the deficit. Tell us that you will not take one dime of payroll taxes away from us until your Administration can declare “Mission Accomplished” on the job front.
Finally, tell the American people that anyone who opposes a payroll tax holiday wants to keep taking hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars from them every month. Then watch what happens in 2012.

Is It Time to Reduce the Ease to Prevent Inflation and Possible National Insolvency?

By L. Randall Wray

The growing consensus view is that the worst is behind us. The Fed’s massive intervention finally quelled the liquidity crisis. The fiscal stimulus package has done its work, saving jobs and boosting retail sales. The latest data show that net exports are booming. While residential real estate remains moribund, there are occasional reports that sales are picking up and that prices are firming. Recovery is just around the corner.

Hence, many have started to call on the Fed to think about reversing its “quantitative ease”—that is, to remove some of the reserves it has injected into the banking system. Further, most commentators reject any discussion of additional fiscal stimulus on the argument that it is no longer needed and would likely increase inflation pressures. Thus, the ARRA’s stimulus package should be allowed to expire and Congress ought to begin thinking about raising taxes to close the budget deficit.

Still, there remain three worries: unemployment is high and while job losses have slowed all plausible projections are for continued slack labor markets for months and even years to come; state and local government finances are a mess; and continued monetary and fiscal ease threaten to bring on inflation and perhaps even national insolvency.

Me thinks that reported sightings of economic recovery are premature. Still, let us suppose that policy has indeed produced a resurrection. What should we do about unemployment, state and local government shortfalls, and federal budget deficits? I will be brief on the first two topics but will provide a detailed rebuttal to the belief that continued monetary ease as well as federal government deficits might spark inflation and national insolvency.

1. Unemployment

Despite the slight improvement in the jobs picture (meaning only that things did not get worse), we need 12 million new jobs just to deal with workers who have lost their jobs since the crisis began, plus those who would have entered the labor force (such as graduating students) if conditions had been better. At least another 12 million more jobs would be needed on top of that to get to full employment—or, 24 million total. Even at a rapid pace of job creation equal to an average of 300,000 net jobs created monthly it would take more than six years to provide work to all who now want to work (and, of course, the labor force would continue to grow over that period). There is no chance that the private sector will sustain such a pace of job creation. As discussed many times on this blog, the only hope is a direct job creation program funded by the federal government. This goes by the name of the job guarantee, employer of last resort, or public service employment proposal. (see here, here, and here)

2. State and Local Government Finance

Revenues of state and local governments are collapsing, forcing them to cut services, lay-off employees, and raise fees and taxes. Problems will get worse in coming months. Most property taxes are infrequently adjusted, and many governments will be recognizing depressed property values for the first time since the crisis began. Lower assessed values will mean much lower property tax revenues next year, compounding fiscal distress. Ratings agencies have begun to downgrade state and local government bonds—triggering a vicious downward spiral because interest rates rise (and in some cases, downgrades trigger penalties that must be paid by governments—to those same financial institutions that caused the crisis). Note that contractual obligations, such as debt service, must be met first. Hence, state and local governments have to cut noncontractual spending like that for schools, fire departments, and law enforcement so that they can use scarce tax revenue to pay interest and fees to fat cat bankers. As government employees lose their jobs, local communities not only suffer from diminished services but also from reduced retail sales and higher mortgage delinquencies—again pushing a vicious cycle that collapses tax revenue.
The solution, again, must come from the federal government, which is the only entity that can spend countercyclically without regard to its tax revenue. As discussed on this blog in several posts (here and here), one of the best ways to provide funding would be in the form of federal block grants to states on a per capita basis—perhaps $400 billion next year. A payroll tax holiday would also help—increasing take-home pay of employees and reducing employer costs on all employees covered by Social Security.

3. Federal Budget Deficit, Insolvency, and Inflation

Resolving the unemployment and state and local budget problems will require help from the federal government. Yet that conflicts with the claimed necessity of tightening fiscal and monetary policy in order to preempt inflation and solvency problems. Two former Fed Chairmen have weighed in on US fiscal and monetary policy ease and the dangers posed. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Alan Greenspan argued:
“I think the Fed has done an extraordinary job and it’s done a huge amount (to bolster employment). There’s just so much monetary policy and the central bank can do. And I think they’ve gone to their limits, at this particular stage. You cannot ask a central bank to do more than it is capable of without very dire consequences,”

He went on, claiming that the US faces inflation unless the Fed begins to pull back “all the stimulus it put into the economy.”

In an interview (with SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International) former Chairman Paul Volcker said the deficit will need to be cut:

Volcker: You’ve got to deal with the deficit and you’ve got to deal with it in a timely way. Right now, with the unemployment rate still very high, excess capacity is still evident, and the economy is dependent on government money as we said. We are not going to successfully attack the deficit right now but we have got to prepare for attacking it.
SPIEGEL: Should Americans prepare themselves for a tax increase?
Volcker: Not at the moment, but I think we would have to think about it. The present tax system historically has transferred about 18 to 19 percent of the GNP to the government. And we are going to come out of all this with an expenditure relationship to GNP very substantially above that. We either have to cut expenditures and that means reducing entitlements and certainly defense expenditures by an amount that may not be possible. If you can do it, fine. If we can’t do it, then we have to think about taxes.
Both the Fed and the Treasury are said to be “pumping” too much money into the economy, sowing the seeds of future inflation. There are two kinds of cases made for the argument that monetary and fiscal policy are too lax. The first is based loosely on the old Monetarist view that too much money causes inflation., while the second is more Keynesian, pointing toward the money provided through the Treasury’s spending. The evidence can be found in the huge expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet to two trillion dollars of liabilities and in the Treasury’s budget deficit that has grown toward a trillion and a half dollars. Chairman Greenspan, a committed Monetarist, points to the first of these, recognizing that most of these Fed liabilities take the form of reserves held by banks—which will eventually start lending their excess reserves. Chairman Volcker points to the second—federal government spending that will create income that will be spent. Hence, those trillions of extra dollars provided by the Treasury and Fed surely will fuel more lending and spending, leading to inflation or even to a hyperinflation of Zimbabwean proportions.
Some have made a related argument: all those excess reserves in the banking system will be lent to speculators, fueling yet another asset price bubble. The consequence could be rising commodities prices (such as oil prices) feeding through to inflation of consumer and producer prices. Or, the speculative bubble would give way to yet another financial crisis. Worse, either inflation or a bursting bubble could generate a run out of the dollar, collapsing the currency—and off we go again toward Zimbabwean ruin.
Finally, over the past two decades the Fed—accompanied by New Consensus macroeconomists—has managed to create a widespread belief that inflation is caused by expected inflation. In other words, if everyone believes there will be inflation, then inflation will result because wages and prices will be hiked on the expectation that costs will rise. For this reason, monetary policy has long been directed toward managing inflation expectations, with the Fed convincing markets that it is diligently fighting inflation pressures even before they arise. Now, however, the Fed is in danger of losing the battle because all of those extra reserves in the banking system will create the expectation of inflation—which will itself cause inflation. For this reason, the Fed needs to begin raising interest rates and (or, by?) removing reserves from the banking system. That would prevent expected inflation from generating Zimbabwean hyperinflation.

Unfortunately, all these arguments misunderstand the situation. Here is why:

You cannot tell much of anything by looking at current bank reserve positions. As and when banks decide they do not need to hold so many reserves, they will begin to unwind them, repaying loans to the Fed (destroying reserves) and buying Treasuries (the Fed will accommodate by selling assets in order to keep the overnight fed funds rate on target—if it did not, excess reserves would drive the fed funds rate to zero).There are no direct inflationary pressures that result from such operations. Indeed, all else equal, the reserves will be reduced with no new bank lending or deposit creation.

Banks normally buy financial assets (including loan IOUs) by issuing liabilities (including deposits). As the economy recovers, banks will want to resume such activities. If there is a general demand to buy output or financial assets, coming from borrowers perceived to be creditworthy, banks normally accommodate by making loans. This does not require ex ante reserves (or even capital if regulators do not enforce capital requirements or if banks can move assets off balance sheet). Yes, such a process can generate rising asset prices and banks broadly defined might accommodate this as they seek profits through lending to speculators. In this respect you could argue that expected inflation of asset prices fuels actual inflation of asset prices since that can fuel a speculative run up. Yet, this can occur with or without any excess reserves–indeed even if banks were already short required reserves they could expand lending then go to Fed to get the reserves. In other words, banks do not lend reserves nor is their lending constrained by reserves. Thus, while it is true that banks can finance a speculative bubble in asset prices, they can do this no matter what their reserve position is.

Nor will bank lending for asset purchases necessarily generate inflation of output prices. Any implications of renewed bank lending for CPI or PPI inflation are contingent on pass through from commodities to output prices. If the speculative binge in, say, futures prices of commodities feeds through to commodities spot prices, and if this then pressures output price inflation (as measured by the CPI and PPI), there can be an effect on measured inflation. There are lots of caveats–due to the way these indexes are calculated, to the possibility of consumer and producer substitutions, and to offsetting price deflation pressures (Chinese production and all of that). In any case, if there is a real danger that the current commodities price boom could accelerate to the point that it might create a crash or output price inflation, the best course of action would be to constrain the speculation directly. This can be done through direct credit controls placed on lenders as well as regulation of speculators.

It is true that the Fed has operated on the belief that by controlling inflation expectations it prevents inflation. Low inflation, in turn, is supposed to generate robust economic growth and high employment. This has been exposed by the current crisis as an unwarranted belief. The Wizard of Oz behind the curtain was exposed as an impotent fraud—while Bernanke remained focused on controlling inflation expectations for far too long, the whole economy collapsed around him. It was only when he finally abandoned expectations management in favor of bold action—lending without limit to institutions that needed reserves—that he helped to quell the liquidity crisis. All of his subsequent actions have had no impact on the economy—“quantitative easing” is nothing but a slogan, meaning that the Fed accommodates the demand for reserves (which it has always done, and necessarily must do so long as it has an interest rate target and wants par clearing).

It is sheer folly to believe that inflation expectations lead to inflation and that by controlling the expectations one controls inflation. In the modern capitalist economy, prices of output are mostly administered, with the caveat that competitive pressures from low cost producers in China and India put downward pressure on prices that may force domestic sellers to cut prices. Hence, US inflation has remained low in recent years because there has been little cost pressure; and note that most countries around the world have also experienced low inflation over the same period even though they did not enjoy the supposed benefits of a Wizard in charge of monetary policy. In the current environment of a global financial and economic calamity, the real danger is price deflation. The bit of inflation we do experience is due almost entirely to energy price blips—which could be prevented if we would just prohibit pension funds from speculating in commodities.

Still, there remains one path to Zimbabwean hyperinflation: a collapse of the currency due to insolvency and default by our federal government on its debts. Yet, as many have discussed on this blog (see here, here, here, here, and here), the US government is the sovereign issuer of our dollar currency. It cannot be forced into bankruptcy because it services its dollar debt by crediting bank accounts. It can never run out of these credits, since they are merely electronic entries on balance sheets, created at the stroke of a computer key. It can, and will, make all payments as they come due. In short, federal government insolvency is not possible.

To be sure, as we have emphasized many times, too much government spending can be inflationary. But the measure of “too much” cannot be found by looking at the size of the deficit (or, equivalently, at the shortfall of tax revenue), or at the ratio of government spending to GDP, or at the outstanding debt stock. Rather, government spending will approach an inflation barrier as the economy approaches full employment of resources, including labor resources. Yet, we are no where near to full employment. Any fear that current levels of spending, or even much larger amounts of federal spending, might be inflationary are premature. With 12 to 25 million jobless workers remaining, inflation is not a legitimate worry.

You can be sure that no matter how misguided President Obama’s policies might be, he is not taking us down the path to a Zimbabwean hyperinflation. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the probable course of the dollar. In coming months it might decline a bit, or rise a bit (I’d bet on the latter if I were a gambler)—but there will be no global run out of the dollar. For one thing, runners must run to something—and as recent reports suggest, Euroland’s prospects look dire. That leaves smallish nations (Japan, the UK—both with their own problems) or big nations (China, India) that are too risky for foreigners. The best place to park savings will remain the US dollar.

Memo to Congress: Don’t Increase the Government’s Debt Limit!

By L. Randall Wray

In a piece written for CNN, Senator Evan Bayh rails against the growing federal government budget deficit. He warns that next month the Treasury will ask Congress to raise the debt limit from its current $12.1 trillion, and promises that he will vote “no”. It is time, he argues, for Congress to stand up for our nation’s future by creating a bi-partisan debt commission that would finally put an end to “unsustainable” deficit spending.

The Senator goes on:

When President George W. Bush took office in 2001, our public debt amounted to 33 percent of our economy. Today, it is 60 percent of our gross domestic product. If we do nothing, our debt is projected to swell to over 70 percent by 2019. To put those numbers in perspective: If you divided the debt equally among all Americans, every man, woman and child living in the United States today would owe more than $39,000.

I presume the Senator has got his math correct, but there is a glaring error in his English that can be corrected by substituting an “n” for an “e”: If you divided the debt equally among all Americans, every man, woman and child living in the United States today would own more than $39,000. Government debt is a private asset. You and I do not owe government debt, we own it. Indeed, the only source of net dollar-denominated financial wealth is federal government debt.

The good Senator continues, comparing his proposed debt commission with an earlier successful bi-partisan effort:

There is precedent to create this type of commission with real teeth. President Ronald Reagan created a commission, chaired by Alan Greenspan, to shore up Social Security in the early 1980s.

That commission hiked payroll taxes to transform Social Security from a “pay-as-you-go” system (payroll taxes collected were matched to current year spending) to an “advanced funded” system that accumulated “Trust Fund assets”. In truth the Trust Fund is nothing but an accounting gimmick in which one arm of government (the Treasury) owes another arm of government (Social Security), with workers and their firms saddled with payroll taxes that are a third larger than Social Security spending. Like almost everything else Alan Greenspan did, the Social Security commission was a monumental failure and its actions were completely unnecessary. All Social Security payments can be made as they come due whether the Trust Fund holds Treasury debt or not, and no matter how much “revenue” the payroll tax collects. Like the bowling alley that credits points when pins are knocked down, the Treasury cannot run out of “points” credited to the accounts of pensioners.

The anti-deficit mania in Washington is getting crazier by the day. So here is what I propose: let’s support Senator Bayh’s proposal to “just say no” to raising the debt ceiling. Once the federal debt reaches $12.1 trillion, the Treasury would be prohibited from selling any more bonds. Treasury would continue to spend by crediting bank accounts of recipients, and reserve accounts of their banks. Banks would offer excess reserves in overnight markets, but would find no takers—hence would have to be content holding reserves and earning whatever rate the Fed wants to pay. But as Chairman Bernanke told Congress, this is no problem because the Fed spends simply by crediting bank accounts.

This would allow Senator Bayh and other deficit warriors to stop worrying about Treasury debt and move on to something important like the loss of millions of jobs.

Should America Kowtow to China?

By Marshall Auerback
First Published on New Deal 2.0.

Do the Chinese really fund our deficit? Or is this more Neo-classical money mythology?

Another Presidential junket to Asia and another one of the usual lectures from China, decrying our “profligate ways”. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports:, “China’s top banking regulator issued a sharp critique of U.S. financial management only hours before President Barack Obama commenced his first visit to the Asian giant, highlighting economic and trade tensions that threaten to overshadow the trip.”

According to Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, a weak U.S. dollar and low U.S. interest rates had led to “massive speculation” that was inflating asset bubbles around the world. It has created “unavoidable risks for the recovery of the global economy, especially emerging economies,” Mr. Liu said. The situation is “seriously impacting global asset prices and encouraging speculation in stock and property markets.”

Well, “them’s fightin’ words”, as we say over here. And of course, the President and his advisors are supposed to accept this criticism mildly because in the words of the NY Times, the US has assumed “the role of profligate spender coming to pay his respects to his banker.”

The Times actually does believe this to be true. They refer to China’s role as America’s largest “creditor” as a “stark fact”. They do not seem to understand that simply because a country issuing debt which it creates, it does not depend on bond holders to “fund” anything. Bonds are simply a savings alternative to cash offered by the monetary authorities, as we shall seek to illustrate below.

It is less clear to us whether the Chinese actually believe this guff, or simply articulate it for public consumption. China has made a choice: for a variety of reasons, it has adopted an export-oriented growth strategy, and largely achieved this through closely managing its currency, the remnimbi, against the dollar.

One can query the choice, as many would argue that it is more economically and socially desirable for China to consume its own economic output. According to Professor Bill Mitchell, for example, “once the Chinese citizens rise up and demand more access to their own resources instead of flogging them off to the rest of the world…then the game will be up. They will stop accumulating financial assets in our currencies and we will find it harder to run [current account deficits] against them.”

But there have undoubtedly been certain benefits that have accrued to the Chinese as a consequence of this strategy. The export prices obtained by Chinese manufacturers are about 10 times as high as the prices obtained in the more competitive domestic markets, and the challenge of competing in global markets has forced Chinese manufacturers to adhere to higher quality standards. This, in turn, has improved the overall quality of Chinese products. In the words of James Galbraith:

“Is there a way for the Chinese manufacturing firm to turn a profit? Yes: the alternative to selling on the domestic market is to export. And export prices, even those paid at wholesale, must be multiples of those obtained at home. But the export market, however vast, is not unlimited, and it demands standards of quality that are not easily obtained by neophyte producers and would not ordinarily be demanded by Chinese consumers. Only a small fraction of Chinese firms can actually meet the standards. These standards must be learned and acquired by practice.” (”The Predator State, Ch. 6, “There is no such thing as free trade”, pg. 84).

What about the US government? What should it do? Should it actually respond to China’s complaints by trying to “defend the dollar”?

I hear this recommendation all of the time in the chatterplace of the financial markets, but seldom do those who fret about the dollar’s declining level actually suggest a concrete strategy to achieve the objective. In fact, it is unclear to me that there is any measure the Fed or Treasury could adopt which might support the dollar’s external value.

And why should they? Given the horrendous unemployment data, and 65% capacity utilization, it is hard to view imported inflationary pressures via a weaker dollar actually becoming a serious threat.

But wait? Don’t the Chinese (and other external creditors) “fund” our deficit? And won’t they demand a higher equilibrating interest rate in order to offset the declining value of their Treasury hoard?

Again, this displays a seriously lagging understanding of how much modern money has changed since Nixon changed finance forever by closing the Gold window in 1973. Now that we’re off the gold standard, the Chinese, and other Treasury buyers, do not “fund” anything, contrary to the completely false & misguided scare stories one reads almost daily in the press.

This claim is seldom challenged, but our friend, Warren Mosler, recently gave an excellent illustration of this fact in an interview with Mike Norman. Mosler provides a hypothetical example in which China decides to sell us a billion dollars’ worth of T-shirts. We buy a billion dollars’ worth of T-shirts from China:

“And the way we pay them is somebody pays China. And the money goes into their checking account at the Federal Reserve. Now, it’s called a reserve account because it’s the Federal Reserve, and they give it a fancy name. But it’s a checking account. So we get the T-shirts, and China gets $1 billion in their checking account. And that’s just a data entry. That’s just a one and some zeroes.

Whoever bought them gets a debit. You know, it might have been Disneyland or something. So we debit Disney’s account and then we credit China’s account.

In this situation, we’ve increased our trade deficit by $1 billion. But it’s not an imbalance. China would rather have the money than the T-shirts, or they wouldn’t have sent them. It’s voluntary. We’d rather have the T-shirts than the money, or we wouldn’t have bought them. It’s voluntary. So, when you just look at the numbers and say there’s a trade deficit, and it’s an imbalance, that’s not correct. That’s imbalance. It’s markets. That’s where all market participants are happy. Markets are cleared at that price.

Okay, so now China has two choices with what they can do with the money in their checking account. They could spend it, in which case we wouldn’t have a trade deficit, or they can put it in another account at the Federal Reserve called a Treasury security, which is nothing more than a savings account. You give them money, you get it back with interest. If it’s a bank, you give them money, you get it back with interest. That’s what a savings account is.”

The example here clearly illustrates that bonds are a savings alternative which we offer to the Chinese manufacturer, not something which actually “funds” our government’s spending choices. It demonstrates that rates are exogenously determined by our central bank, not endogenously determined by the Chinese manufacturer who chooses to park his dollars in treasuries (credit demand, by contrast, is endogenous).

Here is how the mechanics actually work: government spending and lending adds reserves to the banking system because when the government spends, it electronically credits bank accounts.

By contrast, government taxing and security sales (i.e. sales of bonds) drain (subtract) reserves from the banking system. So when the government realizes a budget deficit (as is the case today), there is a net reserve add to the banking system, WHICH BRINGS RATES LOWER (not higher). That is, government deficit spending results in net credits to member bank reserves accounts. If these net credits lead to excess reserve positions, overnight interest rates will be bid down by the member banks with excess reserves to the interest rate paid on reserves by the central bank (currently .25% in the case of the US since the Fed started to pay interest on these reserves). If the central bank has a positive target for the overnight lending rate, either the central bank must pay interest on reserves or otherwise provide an interest bearing alternative to non interest bearing reserve accounts. But this is a choice determined by our central bank, not an external creditor.

Yet we are constantly being told by the financial press that the dollar’s weakness was supposed be the factor that would “force” the Fed to raise rates, since the Chinese supposedly “fund” our deficits.

So far, that thesis hasn’t been borne out. And it won’t be, because this isn’t how things operate in a post gold-standard world.

And a second and equally salient point: what would those who fret about the dollar, have the Fed do? Should they raise rates to defend it? It is unclear that this would work. The relationship between a given level of interest rates offered by the central bank and the external value of a currency is tenuous. Consider Japan as Exhibit A. The BOJ has been offering virtually free money for 15 years and yet the yen today remains a strong currency (much to the chagrin of the likes of Toyota or Sony).

Of course, higher rates can have an offsetting beneficial income impact (what Bernanke calls the “fiscal channel”), but it does not follow that a decision to raise rates would actually elevate the value of the dollar (and the benefits of higher rates from an income perspective could just as easily be achieved via lower taxation).

The reality is that private market participants could well view the move as something akin to a panicked response by the Fed, and the decision could well trigger additional capital flight, which could weaken the value of the dollar.

So it is unclear to me what the Tsy or Fed should be doing about the dollar. My view is that this is a private portfolio preference shift and I don’t think central banks should be responding to every vicissitude of changing market preferences. The US government should simply ignore the market chatter and idle threats from the Chinese and do nothing.

One To Watch

By Stephanie Kelton

So far, President Obama has shown little understanding of our domestic monetary system. His pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, together with his assertion that the federal government is “out of money”, reveal deep flaws in his understanding of key issues related to the workings of government finance. Unless he masters the basics of double-entry bookkeeping — and fast — the nation’s job numbers will remain grim, social unrest will mount, and every one of his political challengers will adopt the same battle cry in 2012: “President Obama mishandled the economy — Vote for me if you want a better tomorrow.”

Almost none of them will have a better understanding of the issues than our current president, but one candidate will, and his name is Warren Mosler. I ran across this interview yesterday and thought it was worth sharing. He is one to watch.

Happy Halloween: Pay Curbs Are a Trick on The Taxpayer, Not a Treat

By Marshall Auerback

How appropriate that with Halloween just around the corner, the Fed and Treasury have announced a coordinated effort that will put the central bank at the forefront of pay regulation on the zombie firms now kept alive courtesy of US government largesse. Trick or treat for the US taxpayer?

The new pay regulations are ostensibly designed try to align the financial incentives of managers with the longer-term performance of their firms. The Federal Reserve will have direct oversight over the pay of tens of thousands of executives, bankers, and traders. The oversight is being justified as a “safety and soundness issue”, according to Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke.

Would that the Fed and Treasury had demonstrated similar concerns about the overheating housing market, the degeneration of lending standards, the proliferation of dangerous Over The Counter (OTC) derivatives during the past 10 years, areas where more aggressive moves by the nation’s central bank and the Treasury could have done much to alleviate today’s still profound financial instability.


This measure, by contrast, reeks of bogus populism. In the words of Reuters’ columnist, Jeffrey Cane:

By making executives at seven companies wear hair-shirts, some of the populist anger over bonuses and Wall Street may be assuaged — anger that should rightly be channeled into calls to prevent banks from engaging in risky activities. There’s no reason that banks that are back-stopped by the government should be in the securities business. Taxpayers — voters — should ignore the media fascination with pay and urge that Congress heavily regulate and tax such risky activities.

As Cane acknowledges, the curbs only apply to the newest wards of the state, the likes of AIG, Chrysler, GM, Bank of America, and Citibank. The more than 700 banks and other companies that have directly benefited from the government’s largesse are not affected — even those who are minting profits from credit markets propped up by trillions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money, and who continue to benefit from government largesse as a consequence of the FDIC guarantees of their commercial paper, which substantially reduced (subsidized?) borrowing costs at a time of uniquely high financial stress. And we’re still neither proposing any kind of serious regulation, nor any kind of resolution mechanism to deal with the problem of “too big to fail” banks.

The Fed has other big ideas: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has also called on Congress to ensure that the costs of closing down large financial institutions are borne by the industry instead of taxpayers. He has called for a “credible process” for imposing losses on the shareholders and creditors, saying “any resolution costs incurred by the government should be paid through an assessment on the financial industry.” That would be the very same financial industry that has already received trillions of dollars in financial guarantees and aid by the Federal Government, wouldn’t it? The left hand giveth, and the right hand taketh away. It’s all a big shell game. Given the absence of structural changes in the industry, this will simply increase the cost of credit, so the taxpayer will end up paying again.

What’s with the Fed’s newfound populism? It’s as if Ben Bernanke has started to channel his inner Huey Long. Well, there could well be other motivations at play here.

The Federal Reserve, as we know, is now under uncomfortably high public scrutiny and its hitherto secretive actions are being subject to the greatest degree of Congressional and press scrutiny that the institution has experienced in its 96 year history. True, in the 1970s, the then Chairman of the Committee of Financial Services, Henry Reuss, sought to challenge the constitutionality of the Federal Open Market Committee’s ultimate decision making power on monetary policy, but he was denied standing, so the Supreme Court never ruled on the issue. But now, like so many other things, the Fed’s privileged status in our society is again being queried, so a healthy dose of skepticism in regard to their actions is well merited.

And what of the Obama Administration itself? It demonstrates a similar kind of cognitive dissonance evinced by the Federal Reserve. Having left open the gates of the asylum, the President and his main economic advisors profess shock, (“shock!”) that the sociopaths who run our investment banks are back to their old tricks, daring to gamble in a totally uninhibited manner with the taxpayers’ dollars Those dollars, which have been all but guaranteed by Treasury Secretary Geithner, who promised that there would be “no more Lehmans”. The very same tax dollars now being deployed to lobby against financial reforms which will mitigate the practices that created the mess in the first place. The next time these same banks are likely to leave a catastrophe far scarier than any Halloween costume. Having been duped, the President now seeks to deploy a cheap political trick, attacking an easy political target, but as usual, doing nothing concrete to ameliorate credit conditions and, indeed, will likely act to increase the cost of credit.

Just over the weekend, the President again lambasted the banks for failing to enhance credit availability. During his weekly address, the President said banks should return the favor of their recent taxpayer-financed bailout by lending more money to small businesses. As a taxpayer, I don’t recall ever granting this “favor”, but that aside, the President still demonstrates huge conceptual confusion when it comes to the economy. Under the guidance of Larry Summers and Timmy Geithner, policy has continued to preserve the interests of big financial companies, rather than implementing government programs that directly sustain employment and restore states’ finances. To make matters worse, the Obama Administration remains preoccupied with how to “fund” these expenditures, since he claims we are “running out of money”.

All of which collectively will serve to cause incomes to stagnate, personal balance sheets to deteriorate, thereby diminishing creditworthiness. Repeat after me, Mr. President: “Enhance creditworthiness and improved credit conditions will follow; personal balance sheets before bank balance sheets.” You improve aggregate demand, and incomes will rise, as will the borrowers’ capacity to borrow. All of which makes it easier for lenders to lend. It’s so simple that even a banker can figure it out.

And here is why the whole model of securitization itself precludes improving credit conditions. In the words of L. Randall Wray and Eric Tymoigne,

When a commercial bank makes a loan, the loan officer wonders “how will I get repaid”. Because the loan is illiquid and will be held to maturity, it is the ability to repay that matters—and it is most prudent to rely on income flows rather than potential seizure and forced sale of the asset at some time in the possibly distant future and in unknown market conditions. On the other hand, when an investment bank makes a loan, the loan officer wonders “how will I sell this asset”. The future matters only to the degree that it enters the value of the asset today because it will be sold immediately. (“It isn’t Working: Time for More Radical Policies” http://www.levy.org/ )

And you can’t sell any securitized asset today.

It’s Halloween at the end of this week, so it wouldn’t be right to conclude this post without a bit of Halloween imagery. Last week, I described the bankers as vampires (with full tribute to Matt Taibbi and the banks as zombies. I have also noted (as has my colleague, Anat Shenker) the tendency of many deficit terrorists (many of whom the largest beneficiary so far of taxpayer bailouts, but who still claim we “can’t afford” to help the vast majority of Americans) to deploy imagery relating to our government spending as something unnatural or unhealthy. We hear characterizations of the budget deficit as a “national cancer” (former Illinois Senator, Paul Simon – http://www.moslereconomics.com/mandatory-readings/soft-currency-economics ), or government spending as something akin to a heroin addiction (a description I heard last week at a Financial Forum in Denver, Colorado). True to my love of Hammer Film horror classics, I prefer a different image to describe our government spending. It’s a necessary blood transfusion, without which the patient (in this case, the US economy) dies.

But like any blood transfusion, you want to give it to a sick patient who has a chance to get better, not a terminally ill one (i.e. like our TBTF banks), who are being propped up by phony accounting (what we might call a life support system, where the government steadfastly refuses to pull the plug). Unfortunately, these “blood transfusions” have hitherto been misallocated. No amount of populist grandstanding by the President or the Fed can change that. The aid conferred to the banks is like using our blood to feed vampires, who in turn prey on the rest of us, rather than people who could genuinely use a transfusion to recover their (economic) health. By the same token, introducing pay restrictions on the likes of AIG, BofA, or Citi, is akin to complaining about the quality of the clothing being worn by the zombies as they rampage and munch away on the living. Happy Halloween everybody.

Money as a Public Monopoly

By L. Randall Wray

What I want to do in this blog is to argue that the reason both theory and policy get money “wrong” is because economists and policymakers fail to recognize that money is a public monopoly*. Conventional wisdom holds that money is a private invention of some clever Robinson Crusoe who tired of the inconveniencies of bartering fish with a short shelf-life for desired coconuts hoarded by Friday. Self-seeking globules of desire continually reduced transactions costs, guided by an invisible hand that selected the commodity with the best characteristics to function as the most efficient medium of exchange. Self-regulating markets maintained a perpetually maximum state of bliss, producing an equilibrium vector of relative prices for all tradables, including the money commodity that serves as a veiling numeraire.

All was fine and dandy until the evil government interfered, first by reaping seigniorage from monopolized coinage, next by printing too much money to chase the too few goods extant, and finally by efficiency-killing regulation of private financial institutions. Especially in the US, misguided laws and regulations simultaneously led to far too many financial intermediaries but far too little financial intermediation. Chairman Volcker delivered the first blow to restore efficiency by throwing the entire Savings and Loan sector into insolvency, and then freeing thrifts to do anything they damn well pleased. Deregulation, which actually dates to the Nixon years and even before, morphed into a self-regulation movement in the 1990s on the unassailable logic that rational self-interest would restrain financial institutions from doing anything foolish. This was all codified in the Basle II agreement that spread Anglo-Saxon anything goes financial practices around the globe. The final nail in the government’s coffin would be to preserve the value of money by tying monetary policy-maker’s hands to inflation targeting, and fiscal policy-maker’s hands to balanced budgets. All of this would lead to the era of the “great moderation”, with financial stability and rising wealth to create the “ownership society” in which all worthy individuals could share in the bounty of self-regulated, small government, capitalism.

We know how that story turned out. In all important respects we managed to recreate the exact same conditions of 1929 and history repeated itself with the exact same results. Take John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash, change the dates and some of the names of the guilty and you’ve got the post mortem for our current calamity.

What is the Keynesian-institutionalist alternative? Money is not a commodity or a thing. It is an institution, perhaps the most important institution of the capitalist economy. The money of account is social, the unit in which social obligations are denominated. I won’t go into pre-history, but I trace money to the wergild tradition—that is to say, money came out of the penal system rather than from markets, which is why the words for monetary debts or liabilities are associated with transgressions against individuals and society. To conclude, money predates markets, and so does government. As Karl Polanyi argued, markets never sprang from the minds of higglers and hagglers, but rather were created by government.

The monetary system, itself, was invented to mobilize resources to serve what government perceived to be the public purpose. Of course, it is only in a democracy that the public’s purpose and the government’s purpose have much chance of alignment. In any case, the point is that we cannot imagine a separation of the economic from the political—and any attempt to separate money from politics is, itself, political. Adopting a gold standard, or a foreign currency standard (“dollarization”), or a Friedmanian money growth rule, or an inflation target is a political act that serves the interests of some privileged group. There is no “natural” separation of a government from its money. The gold standard was legislated, just as the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 legislated the separation of Treasury and Central Bank functions, and the Balanced Budget Act of 1987 legislated the ex ante matching of federal government spending and revenue over a period determined by the celestial movement of a heavenly object. Ditto the myth of the supposed independence of the modern central bank—this is but a smokescreen to protect policy-makers should they choose to operate monetary policy for the benefit of Wall Street rather than in the public interest (a charge often made and now with good reason).

So money was created to give government command over socially created resources. Skip forward ten thousand years to the present. We can think of money as the currency of taxation, with the money of account denominating one’s social liability. Often, it is the tax that monetizes an activity—that puts a money value on it for the purpose of determining the share to render unto Caesar. The sovereign government names what money-denominated thing can be delivered in redemption against one’s social obligation or duty to pay taxes. It can then issue the money thing in its own payments. That government money thing is, like all money things, a liability denominated in the state’s money of account. And like all money things, it must be redeemed, that is, accepted by its issuer. As Hyman Minsky always said, anyone can create money (things), the problem lies in getting them accepted. Only the sovereign can impose tax liabilities to ensure its money things will be accepted. But power is always a continuum and we should not imagine that acceptance of non-sovereign money things is necessarily voluntary. We are admonished to be neither a creditor nor a debtor, but try as we might all of us are always simultaneously both. Maybe that is what makes us Human—or at least Chimpanzees, who apparently keep careful mental records of liabilities, and refuse to cooperate with those who don’t pay off debts—what is called reciprocal altruism: if I help you to beat the stuffing out of Chimp A, you had better repay your debt when Chimp B attacks me.

OK I have used up two-thirds of my allotment and you all are wondering what this has to do with regulation of monopolies. The dollar is our state money of account and high powered money (HPM or coins, green paper money, and bank reserves) is our state monopolized currency. Let me make that just a bit broader because US Treasuries (bills and bonds) are just HPM that pays interest (indeed, Treasuries are effectively reserve deposits at the Fed that pay higher interest than regular reserves), so we will include HPM plus Treasuries as the government currency monopoly—and these are delivered in payment of federal taxes, which destroys currency. If government emits more in its payments than it redeems in taxes, currency is accumulated by the nongovernment sector as financial wealth. We need not go into all the reasons (rational, irrational, productive, fetishistic) that one would want to hoard currency, except to note that a lot of the nonsovereign dollar denominated liabilities are made convertible (on demand or under specified circumstances) to currency.

Since government is the only issuer of currency, like any monopoly government can set the terms on which it is willing to supply it. If you have something to sell that the government would like to have—an hour of labor, a bomb, a vote—government offers a price that you can accept or refuse. Your power to refuse, however, is not that great. When you are dying of thirst, the monopoly water supplier has substantial pricing power. The government that imposes a head tax can set the price of whatever it is you will sell to government to obtain the means of tax payment so that you can keep your head on your shoulders. Since government is the only source of the currency required to pay taxes, and at least some people do have to pay taxes, government has pricing power.

Of course, it usually does not recognize this, believing that it must pay “market determined” prices—whatever that might mean. Just as a water monopolist cannot let the market determine an equilibrium price for water, the money monopolist cannot really let the market determine the conditions on which money is supplied. Rather, the best way to operate a money monopoly is to set the “price” and let the “quantity” float—just like the water monopolist does. My favorite example is a universal employer of last resort program in which the federal government offers to pay a basic wage and benefit package (say $10 per hour plus usual benefits), and then hires all who are ready and willing to work for that compensation. The “price” (labor compensation) is fixed, and the “quantity” (number employed) floats in a countercyclical manner. With ELR, we achieve full employment (as normally defined) with greater stability of wages, and as government spending on the program moves countercyclically, we also get greater stability of income (and thus of consumption and production)—a truly great moderation.

I have said anyone can create money (things). I can issue IOUs denominated in the dollar, and perhaps I can make my IOUs acceptable by agreeing to redeem them on demand for US government currency. The conventional fear is that I will issue so much money that it will cause inflation, hence orthodox economists advocate a money growth rate rule. But it is far more likely that if I issue too many IOUs they will be presented for redemption. Soon I run out of currency and am forced to default on my promise, ruining my creditors. That is the nutshell history of most private money (things) creation.

But we have always anointed some institutions—called banks—with special public/private partnerships, allowing them to act as intermediaries between the government and the nongovernment. Most importantly, government makes and receives payments through them. Hence, when you receive your Social Security payment it takes the form of a credit to your bank account; you pay taxes through a debit to that account. Banks, in turn, clear accounts with the government and with each other using reserve accounts (currency) at the Fed, which was specifically created in 1913 to ensure such clearing at par. To strengthen that promise, we introduced deposit insurance so that for most purposes, bank money (deposits) functions like government currency.

Here’s the rub. Bank money is privately created when a bank buys an asset—which could be your mortgage IOU backed by your home, or a firm’s IOU backed by commercial real estate, or a local government’s IOU backed by prospective tax revenues. But it can also be one of those complex sliced and diced and securitized toxic waste assets you’ve been reading about. A clever and ethically challenged banker will buy completely fictitious “assets” and pay himself huge bonuses for nonexistent profits while making uncollectible “loans” to all of his deadbeat relatives. (I use a male example because I do not know of any female frauds, which is probably why the scales of justice are always held by a woman.) The bank money he creates while running the bank into the ground is as good as the government currency the Treasury creates serving the public interest. And he will happily pay outrageous prices for assets, or lend to his family, friends and fellow frauds so that they can pay outrageous prices, fueling asset price inflation. This generates nice virtuous cycles in the form of bubbles that attract more purchases until the inevitable bust. I won’t go into output price inflation except to note that asset price bubbles can fuel spending on consumption and investment goods, spilling-over into commodities prices, so on some conditions there can be a link between asset and output price inflations.

The amazing thing is that the free marketeers want to “free” the private financial institutions to licentious behavior, but advocate reigning-in government on the argument that excessive issue of money is inflationary. Yet we have effectively given banks the power to issue government money (in the form of government insured deposits), and if we do not constrain what they purchase they will fuel speculative bubbles. By removing government regulation and supervision, we invite private banks to use the public monetary system to pursue private interests. Again, we know how that story ends, and it ain’t pretty. Unfortunately, we now have what appears to be a government of Goldman, by Goldman, and for Goldman that is trying to resurrect the financial system as it existed in 2006—a self-regulated, self-rewarding, bubble-seeking, fraud-loving juggernaut.

To come to a conclusion: the primary purpose of the monetary monopoly is to mobilize resources for the public purpose. There is no reason why private, for-profit institutions cannot play a role in this endeavor. But there is also no reason to believe that self-regulated private undertakers will pursue the public purpose. Indeed, as institutionalists we probably would go farther and assert that both theory and experience tell us precisely the opposite: the best strategy for a profit-seeking firm with market power never coincides with the best policy from the public interest perspective. And in the case of money, it is even worse because private financial institutions compete with one another in a manner that is financially destabilizing: by increasing leverage, lowering underwriting standards, increasing risk, and driving asset price bubbles. Unlike my ELR example above, private spending and lending will be strongly pro-cyclical. All of that is in addition to the usual arguments about the characteristics of public goods that make it difficult for the profit-seeker to capture external benefits. For this reason, we need to analyze money and banking from the perspective of regulating a monopoly—and not just any monopoly but rather the monopoly of the most important institution of our society.

* Much confusion is generated by using the term “money” to indicate a money “thing” used to satisfy one of the functions of money. I will be careful to use the term “money” to refer to the unit of account or money as an institution, and “money thing” to refer to something denominated in the money of account—whether that is currency, a bank deposit, or other money-denominated liability

Central Bank Sterilization

By L. Randall Wray [via CFEPS]

There is a great deal of confusion over international “flows” of currency, reserves, and finance, much of which results from failure to distinguish between a floating versus a fixed exchange rate. For example, it is often claimed that the US needs “foreign savings” in order to “finance” its persistent trade deficit that results from “profligate US consumers” who are said to be “living beyond their means”. Such a statement makes no sense for a sovereign nation operating on a flexible exchange rate. In a nation like the US, when viewed from the vantage point of the economy as a whole, a trade deficit results when the rest of the world (ROW) wishes to net save in the form of dollar assets. The ROW exports to the US reflect the “cost” imposed on citizens of the ROW to obtain the “benefit” of accumulating dollar denominated assets. From the perspective of America as a whole, the “net benefit” of the trade deficit consists of the net imports that are enjoyed. In contrast to the conventional view, it is more revealing to think of the US trade deficit as “financing” the net dollar saving of the ROW—rather than thinking of the ROW as “financing” the US trade deficit. If and when the ROW decides it has a sufficient stock of dollar assets, the US trade deficit will disappear.


It is sometimes argued that when the US experiences a capital account surplus, the dollars “flowing in” will increase private bank reserves and hence can lead to an expansion of private loan-and-deposit-making activity through the “money multiplier”. However, if the Fed “sterilizes” this inflow through open market sales, the expansionary benefits are dissipated. Hence, if the central bank can be persuaded to avoid this sterilization, the US can enjoy the stimulative effects.

Previous analysis should make it clear that sterilization is not a discretionary activity. First it is necessary to understand that a trade deficit mostly shifts ownership of dollar deposits from a domestic account holder to a nonresident account holder. Often, reserves do not even shift banks as deposits are transferred from an account at a US branch to an account at a foreign branch of the same bank. Even if reserves are shifted, this merely means that the Fed debits the accounts of one bank and credits the accounts of another. These operations will be tallied as a deficit on current account and a surplus on capital account. If treasury or central bank actions result in excess reserve holdings (by the foreign branch or bank), the holder will seek earning dollar-denominated assets—perhaps US sovereign debt. US bond dealers or US banks can exchange sovereign debt for reserve deposits at the Fed. If the net result of these operations is to create excess dollar reserves, there will be downward pressure in the US overnight interbank lending rate. From the analysis above, it will be obvious that this is relieved by central bank open market sales to drain the excess reserves. This “sterilization” is not discretionary if the central bank wishes to maintain a positive overnight rate target. Conversely, if the net impact of international operations is to result in a deficit dollar reserve position, the Fed will engage in an open market purchase to inject reserves and thereby relieve upward pressure that threatens to move the overnight rate above target.