Daily Archives: August 15, 2009

Financial Instability

By L. Randall Wray [via CFEPS]

Economists have long been concerned with the economic fluctuations that occur more-or-less regularly in all capitalist economies. (Sherman 1991; Wolfson 1994) To be sure, there are different kinds of economic fluctuations—ranging from the Kitchin cycle (tied to inventory swings and lasting on average 39 months) to the Juglar cycle (lasting about seven or eight years and linked to investment in plant and equipment) to the Kuznets cycle of twenty years (associated with demographic changes) and finally to the Kondratieff long wave cycles attributed to major innovations (electrification, the automobile). (Kindleberger 1989) Financial factors might play only a small role in some of these fluctuations. Generally, economists studying financial instability have tended to focus on periodic financial crises that frequently coincide with the peak of the common business cycle, although financial crises (especially in recent years) can occur at other times during the cycle. Furthermore, an economy might be financially unstable but manage to avoid a financial crisis. It is best to think of financial instability as a tendency rather than as a specific event, although the typical financial crisis might be the result of unstable financial processes generated over the course of a business cycle expansion. In this essay, we will be concerned primarily with economic instability that has at its roots a financial cause, with less interest in either economic fluctuation that is largely independent of finance or in isolated financial crises that do not spill over to the economy as a whole.


A variety of explanations of the causes of financial instability have been offered. One possible cause could be a speculative “mania” in which a large number of investors develop unrealistic expectations of profits to be made, borrowing heavily to finance purchases of assets and driving their prices to absurd levels. Eventually, the mania ends, prices collapse, and bankruptcies follow. (Kindleberger 1989) The tulip mania of 1634, the South Sea bubble in 1719, or the Dot-com boom of the late 1990s might be cited as examples of speculative manias. Speculative booms often develop, and are fueled by, fraudulent schemes. Recent examples of financial crises in which fraud played a large role include the collapse of the Albanian national pension system (1990s) as well as the American Savings and Loan fiasco (1980s). (Mayer 1990) Other explanations have tended to focus on a sudden interruption of the supply of money or credit that prevents borrowing and forces spending to decline, precipitating a cyclical downturn. The modern monetarist approach attributes financial instability and crises to policy errors by central banks. According to monetarist doctrine, when the central bank supplies too many reserves, the money supply expands too quickly, fueling a spending boom. If the central bank then over-reacts to the inflation this is believed to generate, it reduces the money supply and causes spending to collapse. (Friedman 1982) Others advance a “credit crunch” thesis according to which lenders (mostly banks) suddenly reduce the supply of loans to borrowers—either because the lenders reach some sort of institutional constraint or because the central bank adopts restrictive monetary policy (as in the monetarist story). (Wojnilower 1980; Wolfson 1994) Finally, one could add exchange rate instability and foreign indebtedness as a precipitating cause of economic instability, especially in developing nations since the breakup of the Bretton Woods system. (Huerta 1998)

Other analyses have identified processes inherent to the operation of capitalist economies. (Magdoff and Sweezy 1987) In other words, rather than looking to fundamentally irrational manias or to “exogenous shocks” emanating from monetary authorities, these approaches attribute causation to internal or endogenous factors. Karl Marx had claimed that the “anarchy of production” that is an inevitable characteristic of an unplanned economy in which decisions are made by numerous individuals in pursuit of profit is subject to “disproportionalities” of production such that some of the produced goods cannot be sold at a price high enough to realize expected profits. Key to his explanation was the recognition that production always begins with money, some of which is borrowed, used to purchase labor and the instruments of production in order to produce commodities for sale. If, however, some of the commodities cannot be sold at a sufficiently high price, loans cannot be repaid and bankruptcies occur. Creditors then may also be forced into bankruptcy when their debtors default because the creditors, themselves, will have outstanding debts they cannot service. In this way, a snowball of defaults spreads throughout the economy generating a panic as holders of financial assets begin to worry about the soundness of their investments. Rather than waiting for debtors to default, holders of financial assets attempt to “liquidate” (sell) assets to obtain cash and other safer assets. This high demand for “liquidity” (cash and marketable assets expected to hold nominal value) causes prices of all less liquid assets to collapse, and at the same time generates reluctance to spend as all try to hoard money. Thus, the financial crisis occurs in conjunction with a collapse of aggregate demand. (Sherman 1991; Marx 1990, 1991, 1992)

Some of the elements of Marx’s analysis were adopted by Irving Fisher in his “debt deflation” theory of the Great Depression, as well as by John Maynard Keynes in his General Theory. While Fisher devised a theory of special conditions in which markets would not be equilibrating, in Keynes’s theory these were general conditions operating in monetary economies. Briefly, Fisher attributed the severity of the Great Depression to the collapse of asset prices and the ensuing financial crisis that resulted from an avalanche of defaults. (Fisher 1933; also Galbraith 1972) Adopting Marx’s notion that capitalist production begins with money on the expectation of ending with more money later, Keynes developed a general theory of the determination of equilibrium output and employment that explicitly incorporated expectations. (Keynes 1964) He concluded there are no automatic, self-righting forces operating in capitalist economies that would move them toward full employment of resources. Indeed, he described destabilizing “whirlwinds” of optimism and pessimism, in striking contrast to the Smithian notion of an “invisible hand” that would guide markets toward stable equilibrium. Also, like Marx, Keynes identified what he called the “fetish” for liquidity as a primary destabilizing force that erects barriers to the achievement of full employment. Most relevantly, rising liquidity preference lowers the demand for capital assets, which leads to lower production of investment goods and thus falling income and employment through the multiplier effect.

Hyman Minsky, arguably the foremost twentieth century theorist on the topic of financial instability, extended Keynes’s analysis with two primary contributions. (Minsky 1975, 1986) First, Minsky developed what he labeled “a financial theory of investment and an investment theory of the cycle”, attempting to join the approaches of those who emphasized financial factors and those who emphasized real factors as causes of the cycle by noting that the two are joined in a firm’s balance sheet. (Papadimitriou and Wray 1998) As in Keynes’s approach, fluctuations of investment drive the business cycle. However, Minsky explicitly examined investment finance in a modern capitalist economy, arguing that each economic unit takes positions in assets (including, but not restricted to, real physical assets) that are expected to generate income flows by issuing liabilities that commit the unit to debt service payment flows. Because the future income flows cannot be known with certainty (while the schedule of debt payments is more-or-less known), each economic unit operates with margins of safety, collateral, net worth, and a portfolio of safe, liquid assets to be drawn upon if the future should turn out to be worse than expected. The margins of safety, in turn, are established by custom, experience, and rough rules of thumb. If things go at least as well as expected, these margins of safety will prove in retrospect to have been larger than what was required, leading to revisions of operating rules. Thus, a “run of good times” in which income flows are more than ample to meet contracted payment commitments will lead to reductions of margins of safety. Minsky developed a classification scheme for balance sheet positions that adopted increasingly smaller margins of safety: hedge (expected income flows sufficient to meet principal and interest payments), speculative (near-term expected income flows only sufficient to pay interest), and Ponzi (expected income flows not even sufficient to pay interest, hence, funds would have to be borrowed merely to pay interest).

This leads directly to Minsky’s second contribution, the financial instability hypothesis. Over time, the economy naturally evolves from one with a “robust” financial structure in which hedge positions dominate, toward a “fragile” financial structure dominated by speculative and even Ponzi positions. This transition occurs over the course of an expansion as increasingly risky positions are validated by the booming economy that renders the built-in margins of error superfluous—encouraging adoption of riskier positions. Eventually, either financing costs rise or income comes in below expectations, leading to defaults on payment commitments. As in the Marx-Fisher analyses, bankruptcies snowball through the economy. This reduces spending and raises planned margins of safety. The recession proceeds until balance sheets are “simplified” through defaults and conservative financial practices that reduce debt leverage ratios.

Central to Minsky’s exposition is his recognition that development of the “big bank” (central bank) and the “big government” (government spending large relative to GDP) helps to moderate cyclical fluctuation. The central bank helps to attenuate defaults and bankruptcies by acting as a lender of last resort; countercyclical budget deficits and surpluses help to stabilize income flows. The problem, according to Minsky, is that successful stabilization through the big bank and the big government creates moral hazard problems because economic units will build into their expectations the supposition that intervention will prevent “it” (another great depression) from happening again. Thus, risk-taking is rewarded and systemic fragility grows through time, increasing the frequency and severity of financial crises even as depression is avoided. While there may be no ultimate solution, Minsky believed that informed and evolving regulation and supervision of financial markets is a necessary complement to big bank and big government intervention. Like Keynes, Minsky dismissed the belief that reliance upon an invisible hand would eliminate financial instability, indeed, he was convinced that an unregulated, small government capitalist economy would be prone to great depressions and the sort of debt deflation process analyzed by Irving Fisher.

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REFERENCES

Fisher, I. (1933), ‘The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions’, Econometrica, 1, October: pp. 337-57.

Friedman, M. (1982), Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Galbraith, J. (1972), The Great Crash, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

Keynes, J. (1964), The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Kindleberger, C. (1989) Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A history of financial crises, New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Huerta, A. (1998), La Globalizacion, Causa de la Crisis Asiatica Y Mexicana, Mexico: Editorial Diana.

Magdoff, H. and P. Sweezy. (1987) Stagnation and the Financial Explosion, New york: Monthly Review Press.

Marx, K. (1990), Capital: Volume 1, London: Penguin Classics.

—–. (1991), Capital: Volume 3, London: Penguin Classics.

—–. (1992), Capital: Volume 2, London: Penguin Classics.

Mayer, M. (1990), The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery: the collapse of the savings and loan industry, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Minsky, H. (1975), John Maynard Keynes, New York: Columbia University Press.

—–. (1986), Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, New Haven and London; Yale University Press.

Papadimitriou, D. and L.R. Wray (1998), ‘The Economic Contributions of Hyman Minsky: varieties of capitalism and institutional reform‘, Review of Political Economy 10, No. 2, pp. 199-225.

Sherman, H. (1991), The Business Cycle: Growth and crisis under capitalism, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Wojnilower, A. (1980), ‘The Central Role of Credit Crunches in Recent Financial History’, Brookings Papers on #Economic Activity, No. 2: 277-326.

Wolfson, M. (1994), Financial Crises: Understanding the postwar U.S. experience, Armonk, New York and London: M.E. Sharpe.

A Primer on Government Surpluses

What is a federal government surplus?

When the federal government’s revenue exceeds its spending over the course of a year, it is running a budget surplus and outstanding Treasury securities will be reduced by the same amount over the year. In 1999, the federal government’s surplus was $99 billion and it is projected to grow to $142 billion for fiscal year 2000. This means that US taxpayers will pay $142 billion more in taxes this year than the government spends. More concretely, taxpayers will write checks to the Internal Revenue Service in the amount of $1.914 trillion, while the US Treasury will write checks received by Americans in the amount of only $1.772 trillion—a difference of $142 billion. The only way that taxpayers can write checks to the IRS that exceed the amount of checks received from the Treasury is to surrender $142 billion of Treasury securities to the government. In other words, running a surplus necessarily means that the Treasury is reducing nominal wealth of the non-government sector. This is why federal budget surpluses reduce outstanding Treasury debt and non-government sector net nominal worth.


What is the long-term effect of running perpetual government surpluses?

On current projections, the federal government will run surpluses over this decade that will total more than $2.9 trillion, leading to an equivalent reduction of non-government sector net nominal wealth—of $2.9 trillion. This wipes out almost 80% all of the publicly-held US Treasury debt, including that now held by foreigners. No one can accurately predict how the economy will react to such an unprecedented reduction of its nominal wealth—especially when the most liquid assets will be removed from private portfolios. However, throughout our history, the US has experienced exactly six periods of substantial reduction of federal government debt, achieved through persistent budget surpluses, and each of those periods ended in one of our nation’s six depressions. Our last period of substantial surpluses occurred between 1920 and 1930, when Treasury debt was reduced by 36%; the Great Depression began in 1929. For a more recent example, Japan began to run government surpluses in 1987, which reduced non-governmental nominal wealth and generated a deep recession that has already lasted a decade. Note, however, that neither the US in the 1920s nor Japan in the late 1980s came close to draining $2.9 trillion worth of wealth from the economy, even after adjusting for higher prices today.

Doesn’t a budget surplus allow us to save for the future?

Those who believe that a surplus can be “saved” for the future, or “used” to finance tax cuts or spending increases simply do not understand the nature of a surplus. Does anyone really believe that we can “save for the future” by burning $3 trillion worth of private sector wealth? During any period, the government can always choose to spend more (or less), in which case the surplus over the period may be lower (or higher); similarly, it can increase (decrease) taxes and thereby may increase (decrease) the surplus. But, as Gertrude Stein said, “there is no there there”-a surplus exists only as a deduction from private sector income. The negative household saving that some commentators are finally noticing is merely the accountant’s flip-side to the budget surplus. A government surplus necessarily reduces private sector savings and cannot be “saved for the future”.

How do budget surpluses impact non-government sector financial balances?

There is another, less transparent, impact of government surpluses on the non-government sector. At the level of the economy as a whole, when one sector spends more than its income, another necessarily spends less for the simple reason that in the aggregate, total spending equals total income. Let us, then, disaggregate the economy into three sectors to determine the implications of government surpluses for the other sectors. First, we can consolidate all levels of government into a public (or, government) sector, and likewise consolidate households and firms into a domestic, non-government (or, private) sector. For completion, we must add a foreign (“rest-of-the-world”) sector. At the aggregate level, the spending of all three sectors combined must equal the income received by the three sectors. It is clear that if the public sector is spending less than its income—that is, it is running a surplus—this must imply that at least one other sector is spending more than its income (in other words, is running a deficit). Mathematically, the sum of the balances of the three sectors must equal zero. It is convenient for our purposes to write this as:

{Public Sector Surplus} + {Foreign Sector Surplus} = {Private Sector Deficit},

which merely moves the private sector balance to the right-hand-side and reverses the sign (in other words, writes the balance as a deficit rather than a surplus, since a negative surplus is the same thing as a deficit).

Because the US has been running a balance of payments deficit in recent years, this means that the foreign sector is in surplus (the rest-of-the-world receives more US dollars than it spends). A few years ago, our public sector ran a sufficiently large deficit to more than offset the foreign sector surplus, so that our domestic non-government sector was able to run surpluses. However, in the past two years, the US public sector’s balance has turned toward surplus. When combined with our balance of payments deficit (or foreign sector surplus), this means that the domestic private sector’s balance (that is, its savings) has turned sharply negative—toward large and growing deficits. The non-government sector deficit is now approximately equal to 5.5 percent of GDP—far and away the largest private sector deficit the US has seen in the post-war period.

Will the federal government really run surpluses for the next decade?

It is very difficult to take seriously any analyses that begin with the projection that our government will run surpluses for the next decade. Part of our skepticism comes from the inherent difficulty in making projections. More importantly, it is difficult to believe that our economy can continue to grow robustly as the government sucks disposable income and wealth from the private sector by running surpluses. When the economy slows, the surplus will eventually disappear—automatically—as unemployment compensation rises and tax revenue falls due to the slowdown. As the government spends more and taxes less, the surplus will vanish.