Category Archives: L. Randall Wray

Will Bernanke Be Reappointed? Does It Matter?

Posted on January 25, 2010 by | 6 comments

By L. Randall Wray

There is a lot of speculation over the reappointment of Ben Bernanke to continue to head the Fed, with the Obama Administration pushing hard. Of course, Wall Street is also calling in its favors. It looks like a done deal. The Administration has probably got the 60 votes required in the Senate to remove the hold, and the 51 votes needed for confirmation.

Does it matter? Well, on one level, this is a reward for incompetence—something that is never a good idea. Chairman Bernanke never saw “it” (the great financial crisis) coming, and indeed, actively promoted practices that made the crisis inevitable. However, on that score he is not nearly as guilty as his predecessor—Greenspan–who ruled monetary policy from 1987 to 2005. Poor Bernanke was left to clean up the mess, while Greenspan got to retire to great acclaim (that did not last long!). As the crisis unfolded, Bernanke had to learn on the job. While he was supposedly a student of the Great Depression and thus should have known what to do, in truth, he had always misunderstood the crisis of the 1930s. Hence, he has taken many half-steps and made many mis-steps over the past three years that made matters worse. Yet, if we look at where the Fed stands now, it has finally got to the position it should have immediately taken. It has satisfied the liquidity desires of the private financial system by expanding its own balance sheet to $2 trillion, and it is paying interest on reserves (reducing the “tax” on banks and simplifying interest rate targeting procedure). It took some time, but Bernanke finally figured out how to deal with the crisis. The liquidity crisis is over (at least for now). Banks are still insolvent—but that is a matter mostly for the FDIC, not for the Fed.

Here are my fears should Bernanke be reappointed.

1. He does not understand that “unwinding” the Fed’s balance sheet is nothing to be concerned about. As I have written previously, this will occur naturally as banks pay-off their loans that the Fed extended in the crisis, and as banks repurchase the assets they sold to the Fed to obtain reserves. However, Bernanke still seems to believe in the discredited “deposit multiplier” and believes the Fed will have to take action to drain reserves (“reverse the quantitative easing”) to prevent excess reserves from fueling inflation. This is nonsense. Banks do not lend reserves and existence of excess reserves does not make them more willing to lend. The Fed does not need to do anything more than to accommodate banks—no concerted action is required. Still, even in the worst case, the Fed will not be able to create a huge mess. Since it operates with an overnight interest rate target, if it tries to remove reserves that the banks want to hold, it will drive rates above the target—so will have to add back the reserves. This could create some uncertainty but it is not likely to generate any crisis.

2. Bernanke might appear to be a “born again” regulator, but that is highly doubtful. The Fed will never take regulation seriously because it is captured by Wall Street. So the important thing is to ensure that the Fed does not become the “super duper systemic regulator” that many are now proposing. This job needs to go to the FDIC, which has in the past actually done some regulating.

3. A win for Bernanke might energize the forces that want to keep Timmy Geithner and Larry Summers in their jobs. In truth, it is far more important to remove Timmy and Larry (and to remove Robert Rubin from his position as advisor to the administration). I have not seen any evidence that Bernanke has been corrupted by Wall Street. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Geithner and Summers—where apparent conflicts of interest abound, and questionable decisions have been taken that favor Wall Street institutions. And the Treasury is far more important than the Fed. If we are going to reregulate financial institutions (as Obama now seems inclined to do), we have got to have real regulators at the Treasury. Neither Timmy nor Larry has ever indicated any interest in “interfering” with Wall Street. Indeed, Geithner seems to have been leaking to the press his dissatisfaction with Obama’s recent proposals. Perhaps he is already angling for his Wall Street rewards—seeking a well-compensated position in a financial institution should he be fired.

To be clear, I would prefer to replace Bernanke with someone who actually understands monetary policy and who advocates regulation and supervision of financial institutions. Unfortunately, that looks unlikely. We need to turn our attention to Rubin, Geithner and Summers. Obama does not need any action by Congress to rid himself of these anchors that are dragging down his administration, as well as the Democratic party.

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“Obama Takes a Baby Step in the Right Direction”

Posted on January 24, 2010 by | 2 comments

By L. Randall Wray*

Today, President Obama finally took meaningful action toward financial reform, apparently prodded by his disaster in Massachusetts. Heck, if the Democrats cannot retain Teddy’s seat, there is no safe refuge. The Republicans and Tea Partiers will take the next election in a landslide unless Obama changes course, and fast.

Briefly, here is what he announced. Government spent a huge bundle trying to rescue Wall Street, and while that was distasteful, it was necessary, for otherwise the economy would have slipped into a second great depression. The financial system is now stronger than it was when he took office, but Wall Street continues to engage in its antisocial practices, Hoovering all the nation’s profits, paying huge bonuses, and trading rather than lending.

According to Obama, the root of the problem is that these institutions take advantage of their government guarantees (deposit insurance and bail-outs when things go bad) to gamble with house money. He says the root of the crisis was that these government-protected institutions engaged in proprietary trading and created their own hedge funds and private equity firms. The access to insured deposits gave them low cost funds with which they took huge risks at taxpayer expense. Further, they have sent an army of lobbyists to Washington to prevent financial reform. Hence, he proposes a new “Volcker Rule” that would prohibit these regulated financial institutions from operating hedge funds, private equity funds, or proprietary trading. And the government will prevent further consolidation of the financial sector.

The reforms sound good. It is always too easy to criticize reform for not going far enough. However, the nature of this proposal seems to indicate that Obama still does not understand the scope of the problem. Let me provide what I believe to be more than mere quibbles:

1. The financial bail-out was not needed and would do nothing to prevent another great depression. We had a liquidity crisis that could have been resolved in the normal way, through lending by the Fed without limit, to all financial institutions, and without collateral. That is how you end a liquidity crisis. But that has nothing to do with the Paulson/Rubin/Geithner plans that variously bought bad assets, injected capital, and provided guarantees — in an amount estimated above $20 trillion. None of that was necessary and none of it prevented collapse of the economic system. Banks are still massively insolvent. If we wanted to leave insolvent institutions open, all we had to do was to use forbearance. And, in truth, that is the only reason they are still open for business.

2. And of course, none of that had any benefit at all for Main Street. Indeed, we could have closed down the top 20 banks (responsible for almost all of the mess) with no impact on the economy. The only thing that has helped was the fiscal stimulus package. That will soon run out, and although it helped it was far too small. Obama has zero chance of getting more money for Main Street unless he can convince Congress and the public that he has changed his ways. The reforms he has announced fall short.

3. The financial system is not healthier today. Indeed, it is much more dangerous. The Bush and Obama administrations reacted to the crisis by encouraging and subsidizing consolidation of the sector in the hands of gargantuan and dangerously insolvent institutions. The sector is essentially run by a handful of rapacious institutions that have made out like bandits because of the crisis: Goldman, JP Morgan, Citi, Chase and Bank of America. All of these are systemically dangerous. All should be closed. Today.

4. Yes, the lobbyists are a problem. What do you expect when you operate a revolving door between Wall Street and the administration? Goldman essentially runs the Treasury. The lobbyists are in Washington to meet with their former colleagues, and to oil that revolving door. There is only one solution: ban all former employees of the financial sector from government employment (including roles as advisors), and prohibit all government employees from ever working for a Wall Street firm.

5. It is not enough to subject banks to the requirements of the Volcker Rule. Any institution that has access to the Fed and to the FDIC should be prohibited from making ANY KINDS OF TRADES. They should make loans, and purchase securities, and then hold them. (An exception can be made for government debt.) They should perform underwriting and due diligence to ensure that the assets they hold meet appropriate standards of risk. And then they should bear all the risk through maturity of the assets. They should not be allowed to offload assets, much less to short assets that they sell, while knowing they are trash (Goldman’s favorite strategy). They should not be able to hedge risks through derivatives. They should not be allowed to purchase credit default “insurance” to protect themselves. They should not be allowed to move risk off balance sheet. They should not be involved in equities markets. Any behemoth that does not like these conditions can hand back its bank charter and become an unprotected financial institution. Those that retain their charters will be treated as public-private partnerships, which is what banks are. They put up $5 of their own money, then gamble with $95 of government (guaranteed) money. The only public purpose they serve is underwriting-and that only works if they hold all the risks.

6. Obama ignores fraud. It is rampant in the financial sector. Indeed, it has no doubt increased since the crisis. Where do you think all of those record profits come from? It is a massive control fraud, based on Ponzi (or Bernie Madoff) schemes. This must be investigated. Fraudulent institutions must be shut down. Management must be prosecuted and jailed. Only if Obama is willing to take on fraud will we know that he really is about hope and change. He has got to start with the Rubin, Geithner and Summers team. Fire them, then investigate them. That is change I can believe in-and an end to “business as usual”, as Obama put it.

*This post was first published on New Deal 2.0

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Bye, Bye Pensions, Goodbye

Posted on January 19, 2010 by | 7 comments
I recently attended a financial markets conference at which some pension funds managers as well as a former head of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC, the FDIC of the pension world) spoke. Private pensions are just over 80% funded, meaning that the value of accumulated assets falls short of meeting promised pay-outs of defined benefit pension plans by about a fifth, amounting to a $400 billion shortfall. Not surprisingly, they are down considerably due to losses incurred during the financial crisis. Public pensions provided by state and local governments have a shortfall estimated to run as high as $2 trillion. On any reasonable accounting standard, the PBGC is bankrupt because its reserves will be wiped out by the failure of just a couple of large firms on “legacy” pensions. Most pensions have already been converted to defined contribution plans—which means that workers and retirees take all the risks. That will be the outcome of “legacy” plans that require bail-outs. In spite of some attempts to improve management and transparency of pension funds, it is almost certain that the PBGC , itself, will need a government bail-out, and that retirees face a more difficult future.

It is important to understand how we got into this predicament. During WWII government wanted to hold down wages to prevent inflation given that much of the nation’s productive activity was oriented toward the war. Unions and employers negotiated postponed payment in the form of pensions—which pleased all three parties: big firms, big government, and big unions. Government promoted this with tax advantages for contributions to pensions. Firms loved pushing costs to an indefinite future—rather than paying wages, they would promise to pay pensions 30 or 40 years down the road. Much of the promise was unfunded, or met by stock in the firm. This meant that pensions could be paid only if the firm was successful for a very long time into the future.

(As an aside, it is worth noting the similarities between the US healthcare system and its pension system. Firms also offered healthcare as a tax-advantaged benefit in lieu of wage increases. Over time, this became our current “managed care” highly financialized system. Like pension funds that are controlled by money managers, our healthcare is managed by highly oligopolized financial firms run by well-compensated executives. Workers have little control over their healthcare or their pensions. They are not “sovereign consumers” because they have neither the knowledge nor the ability to shop around for healthcare or pensions—in both cases, employers negotiate with providers and pass fees along to workers. With others in control, there is little to hold down costs—even as wages were sacrificed on the argument that workers were receiving valuable nonwage compensation. Now both healthcare and pensions are endangered by the same Washington forces promoting even greater financialization. (Go here.)

As time went on and it became apparent that “legacy” firms might not survive for the necessary half century (or more), unions and government felt that a mere promise to pay pensions would not suffice. Either firms would have to kick in a huge amount of cash to fully fund the pensions, or government would have to guarantee the pensions. Corporations did not like the costs attached to full funding. The grand compromise was that firms would increase funding a bit, and government would provide insurance through the PBGC. Funding did increase, although the more frequent and more severe crises in the post 1970 period always wiped out enough assets in each crisis to cause pension funding to dip below prudent levels. Only a financial bubble could get them back to full funding. To make matters worse, firms were allowed to reduce contributions during speculative bubbles (since asset values would be rising)—ensuring that the funds would face a crisis whenever the economy was not bubbling.

Just before the current global crisis hit, pension funding was, on average, doing well—thanks to the speculative bubble as well as to some deregulation that took place at the end of the Clinton administration that allowed pensions to gamble in more exotic instruments, and in riskier markets such as commodities. Previous to 2000, pensions could not buy commodities because these are purely speculative bets. There is no return to holding commodities unless their prices rise—indeed, holding them is costly. However, Goldman Sachs promoted investment in commodities as a hedge, on the basis that commodities prices are uncorrelated with equities. In the aftermath of the dot com collapse, that was appealing. (In truth, when managed money flows into an asset class that had previously been uncorrelated with other assets, that asset will become correlated. Hence, by marketing commodities Wall Street ensured a commodities bubble that would collapse along with everything else.)

You know the rest of that story: pension funds poured into commodities and commodity futures, driving up prices of energy, metals, and food. As energy prices rose, Congress mandated biofuels—which added to pressures on food prices that contributed to starvation around the globe. The bubble popped in what is known as the great Mike Masters inventory liquidation, as pension funds pulled out of commodities on the fear that Congress was coming after them. They didn’t want all the bad publicity that would be caused if workers knew that it was their own pension funds that were driving up gas prices at the pump.
However, pensions have quietly moved back into commodities—and oil prices have doubled. (go here) Indeed, pensions are also looking into placing bets on death through the so-called life settlements market (securitized life insurance policies that pay-off when people die early). (Go here) Ironically, this would be a sort of doubling down on death of retirees—since early death reduces the amount of time that pensions have to be paid, even as it increases pension fund assets. To conclude, pension funds are so large that they will bubble-up any financial market they are allowed to enter—and what goes up must come down.

But that is not what I want to write about here. I always had my suspicions about the strategy followed by pension fund managers, so the conference gave me the opportunity to talk to experts.
Here’s the deal. Each pension fund manager must come from the land of Lake Wobegone, because she/he must beat the average return or get fired. There are two fundamental principles widely believed to operate in financial markets that make such an outcome unlikely: the risk-return relation and the efficient markets hypothesis. Higher risk is rewarded with higher returns, hence, fund managers must take on more risk to get the reward of above-average returns. But since the higher return only rewards higher risk, with efficient markets the average fund manager will only receive the risk-free return. The higher returns of the brighter or luckier managers will be offset by the lower returns of the dumber and luckless money runners.

In other words, if your fund manager does not come from Lake Wobegone, you’d be better off investing in riskless Treasury bonds. Indeed, it is even worse than that because hiring an above average fund manager will require above average compensation—so even those funds with B-rated managers would probably provide lower net returns than Treasuries. To be sure, there is some shuffling of the deck so that one manager with a run of good luck can beat the average for a while, but she will probably fail catastrophically and wipe out several years of winnings in one swoop as some other lucky fool takes her place in the Wall Street lottery. Only the fortunate few can permanently live in Lake Wobegone and thereby beat Treasuries over the long run.

To be clear, these two principles may not be entirely correct—or, there could be other forces at play to allow for a positive return to risk even after subtracting losses. If so, that would go against the conventional wisdom that drives Wall Street. I think it is likely that over long periods of time, markets do tend to push risk-adjusted net returns toward zero so that on average safe Treasuries will beat net returns on risky assets. There is, however, a positive return to taking illiquid positions. And all things equal, it is probable that longer term maturities (long duration) receive a premium. Still, when all is said and done, pension managers that follow similar strategies, including taking positions in traded, liquid assets, will push risk spreads toward to the point that they just compensate for losses due to risk.

Each time there is a financial crisis, the funds tank and managers look for strategies to reduce risk. Enter Wall Street marketeers with an array of instruments to hedge and diversify risks. That was one of the big topics of the conference I attended. There is one sure bet when it comes to gambling: the house always wins. In financial markets, the big boys on Wall Street are the house, and they always win. Even if we leave to the side their ability to dupe and defraud country bumpkin pension fund managers, they charge fees for all the stuff they are selling. This ensures that on average pension funds will net less than a risk-free return. But wherever Wall Street intrudes, sucker bets and fraud exist. So the average return should be way below that of Treasuries, and even the managers from Lake Wobegone will probably net less than the risk-free return.
To recap: pension fund managers take on risk on the assumption that with higher risk comes higher return. Wall Street manufactures risky assets such as securitized subprime mortgages. It then convinces pension funds that they ought to diversify to reduce risk, for example by gambling on commodities. By coincidence, Wall Street just happens to be marketing commodities futures indexes to satisfy the demand it has created. It also provides a wide array of complex hedging strategies to shift risk onto better fools, as well as credit default “insurance” and buy-back assurances in case anything goes wrong. If all of these “risk management” strategies were completely successful, the pension fund would achieve a risk-free portfolio. Of course, it could have achieved this if it had bypassed Wall Street entirely and gone straight to the Treasury. However, Wall Street’s masters of the universe then would have had no market for the junk they were pushing, and pension fund managers would not have received their generous compensation. So workers are left with fees that drain their pension funds, and with massive counter-party risk as the hedges, insurance, and assurance go bad.

As mentioned above, we reward pensions with tax advantages and government guarantees. Before this crisis, private pension fund assets reached about 50% of GDP and state and local government pension fund assets reached almost 25%. That is a huge industry that has created a lot of well-compensated jobs for managers as well as Wall Street snake oil sales staff. The entire industry can be justified only if through skill or luck pension fund management can beat the average risk-free return by enough to pay all of those industry compensations. Yet, the expectation should be that fund managers are significantly less skilled and less “lucky” than, say, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan banksters. Hence, workers would be far better off if their employers were required to fully fund pensions with investments restricted to Treasury debt. At most, each pension plan would require one lowly paid employee who would log-in to www.treasurydirect.gov to transfer funds out of the firm’s bank deposit and into Treasuries, in an amount determined by actuarial tables plus nominal benefits promised. Goodbye fund managers and Wall Street sales staff.

Indeed, this raises the question: should the federal government promote and protect pensions at all? Surely individuals should be free to place savings with fund managers of their choice, and each saver can try to find that manager from Lake Wobegone. But it makes no sense to promote a scheme that cannot succeed at the aggregate level—the average fund manager cannot beat the average, and on average there is no reason to believe that managed funds will provide a net return that is above the return on Treasuries. It would be far better to remove the tax advantages and government guarantees provided to pension plans, and instead allow individuals to put their savings directly into US Treasuries that are automatically government-backed and provide a risk-free return.

The US retirement system is supposed to rest on a three-legged stool: pensions, individual savings, and Social Security. Pensions are mostly employer-related and are chronically and seriously underfunded. There are also huge and growing administrative problems posed by the transformation of the US workplace—with the typical worker switching jobs many times over the course of her career, and with the lifespan of the typical firm measured in years rather than decades. And, finally, as discussed here the most plausible long-term return on managed money would be somewhat below the risk-free return on Treasuries.
The problem with private savings is that Americans do not save enough for their retirement. They never have. And even if they tried to do so, they would be duped out of their savings by Wall Street.
Thus, the best solution would be to eliminate government support for pension plans and instead to boost Social Security to ensure that anyone who works long enough to qualify will receive a comfortable retirement. They can supplement this with private savings, according to ability and desires.

I ran these arguments by several of the pension experts at the conference. All of them agreed that this would be the best public policy. But they pleaded with me to keep it a secret because such a change would be devastating for fund managers and Wall Street. Can you keep a secret?

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Timmy Geithner Must Go

Posted on January 7, 2010 by | 6 comments

SECRET EMAILS SHOW GEITHNER’S NYFED FORCED AIG TO HIDE DATA
By L. Randall Wray

Breaking News: As reported on Bloomberg here and in NYT here, secret emails show that the NYFed under Geithner’s command prohibited AIG from reporting that it was passing government bail-out funds directly to counterparties, including Goldman Sachs. AIG had been negotiating with the banks, asking them to take as little as 40 cents on the dollar against bad CDOs they held. AIG was the biggest insurer in the country and had provided $62 billion of credit default “insurance” to these banks. The CDOs went bad and AIG could not cover claims. It was forced into insolvency and the government came to the rescue, with $182 billion of bailout funds through last June. By all rights, its counterparties should have lost big on their bad bets. Apparently, Geithner arranged the bailout of AIG with full knowledge that it would pass the bailout funds directly to the banks. Whether or not some protection should have been provided to the banks, it clearly was not good public policy to provide dollar-for-dollar protection to them. If you are a favored Wall Street bank, no bet can go bad!

Note that Geithner worked with then Treasury Secretary Paulson to broker this deal. Paulson, of course, had been the CEO of Goldman. Geithner is the protégé of Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Rubin, also from Goldman.

According to Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, “It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information to the S.E.C.”. Not only did Geithner want to keep this information from the public, but also from fellow regulators. (Whoops, Geithner admitted he was never a regulator.) This smells fishy because it is. Geithner not only oversaw the operation but his office prohibited AIG from telling the truth about it. Remember, this is the same guy who “forgot” to pay his taxes (see here). He is ethically challenged. Should he be running the Treasury?

As Republican Congressman Brady of Texas put it, “Conservatives agree that, as point person, you’ve failed. Liberals are growing in that consensus as well. Poll after poll shows the public has lost confidence in this president’s ability to handle the economy. For the sake of our jobs, will you step down from your post?” (see here).

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Let The Mea Culpas Begin, Part 2

Posted on January 6, 2010 by | 10 comments

BERNANKE’S APOLOGY FALLS FLAT
By L. Randall Wray

As discussed in Part 1 (see here), some of the policymakers responsible for this calamity have started to apologize. On January 3 Chairman Bernanke admitted that rather than using rate hikes back in 2004 to deflate the housing bubble, the Fed should have used “[s]tronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lenders’ risk management” (see here).

There appear to be at least three reasons for Bernanke’s admission that the Fed did not do its job. First, and most obviously, Bernanke is up for reappointment (his term expires January 31)—and he will not sail through. The public is mad as hell, and politicians will have to put him through the wringer or face voter’s wrath in the next election. So Bernanke will have to appear contrite, and will apologize for his misdeeds many more times while Congress makes him sweat it out.

Second, Congress is actually considering whether it should strip the Fed of all regulatory and supervisory authority, given its miserable performance over the past decade—during which the Fed has consistently demonstrated that it has neither the competence nor the will to restrain Wall Street’s bankers. Since Greenspan took over the helm, the Fed has never seen a financial instrument or practice that it did not like—no matter how predatory or dangerous it was. Adjustable rate mortgages with teaser rates that would reset to levels guaranteed to produce defaults? Greenspan praised them (see here). Liar loans? Bring them on! NINJA loans (no income, no job, no assets)? No problem! Credit default swaps that let one gamble on the death of assets, firms, and countries? Prohibit government from regulating them! So Bernanke has to grovel and beg Congress to let the Fed retain at least some of its authority.

Third, many commentators blame the Fed for the crisis, arguing that it kept interest rates too low for too long, fueling the real estate bubble. Bernanke argues “When historical relationships are taken into account, it is difficult to ascribe the house price bubble either to monetary policy or to the broader macroeconomic environment”. If he can convince Congress that the problem was lack of oversight and regulation he can shift at least some of the blame to Treasury and Congress—since it was Treasury Secretary Rubin, and his protégé Summers, as well as Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, and many others (significantly, Democrats who will now decide the Fed’s fate) who pushed through the deregulation bills in 1999 and 2000. He figures that if the Fed now supports re-regulation, he will be forgiven and the Democrats will be too embarrassed to admit their own misdeeds. (Significantly, Dodd has announced his retirement, in recognition of the role he played in creating the crisis. Another mea culpa on the way?)

While I do believe the Fed should be stripped of all such authority, I am sympathetic to his argument about monetary policy. Low interest rates do not cause bubbles. The Fed kept interest rates low after the NASDAQ crash because it feared deflation in the face of significant downward pressures on wages and prices globally (see here). The belief was that low interest rates would keep borrowing costs low for firms and households, helping to promote spending and recovery. In truth, spending is not very interest sensitive and the economy stumbled along in a “jobless recovery” in spite of the low rates. What was actually needed was a fiscal stimulus (if anything, low rates are counterproductive because they reduce government interest spending on its debt—as Japan’s experience taught us over the past couple of decades—but that is a point for another blog).

Still, the Fed was following conventional wisdom, and only began to gradually raise rates when job growth picked up in 2004. Over the following years, the Fed kept raising rates, and economic growth improved. (So much for conventional wisdom!) The worst excesses in real estate markets began only after the Fed had started raising rates, and lending standards continued their downward spiral the higher the Fed pushed its target interest rate. In other words, contrary to what many are arguing, the Fed DID raise rates but this had no impact in real estate markets.

Why not? Two main reasons. First, recall that Greenspan had promoted adjustable rate mortgages with teasers. No matter how high the Fed pushed rates, lenders could offer “option rate” deals in which borrowers would pay a rate of 1 or 2 percent for two to three years, after which there would be a huge reset. Lenders ensured the borrowers that there was no reason to worry about resets, since they would refinance into another option rate mortgage before the reset. That is the beauty of ARMs—they virtually eliminate the impact of monetary policy on real estate.

Second, and this was the key, house prices would only go up. At the time of refinance, the borrower would have far more equity in the home, thus obtain a better mortgage. Further, the borrower could flip the house and walk away with cash. While I will not go into this now, public policy actually encouraged homeowners to look at their houses as assets, rather than as homes (see here) (And now that many are walking away from underwater mortgages—treating houses as assets that became bad deals—policy makers and banksters are shocked, shocked!, that borrowers are treating their homes as nothing but bad assets.)

In truth, when speculation comes to dominate an asset class, there is no interest rate hike that can kill a bubble. If one expects asset prices to rise by 20%, 30%, or more per year, an interest rate of 10% will not dampen enthusiasm. To kill the housing boom, the Fed would have had to engage in a Volcker-like double-digit rate hike (in the early 1980s, he raised short-term interest rates above 20%). There was no political will in Washington (either at the Fed or the White House) for such drastic measures. Nor was there any reason to do this. Bernanke is quite correct: the Fed could have and should have killed the real estate boom with much less pain by directly clamping down on lenders, prohibiting the dangerous practices that were rampant.

Is there any reason to believe that Bernanke is the right Chairman, or that the Fed is the right institution, to lead the effort to re-regulate and re-supervise the financial sector? Quite simply, no.

The Bernanke-led Fed still does not understand monetary operations, as indicated by its recently announced plan to unwind its balance sheet. Over the course of the crisis, the Fed invented new procedures such as auctions through which it provided reserves. Throughout, it always was focused on quantities, rather than prices, using quantitative constraints on the size of the auctions. Further, Bernanke continually promoted “quantitative easing”, reflecting the view that quantities are what matter. Now, the Fed has begun to worry about the size of its balance sheet—and also the size of reserve holdings of the banking system (the other side of the balance sheet coin, because the Fed buys assets by issuing reserves). Still following the thoroughly discredited theory of Milton Friedman, too many bank reserves are supposed to promote too much lending which then causes too much spending and hence inflation. Thus, Bernanke and many outside the Fed fret about how the Fed can reduce outstanding reserves to prevent incipient inflation. The Fed proposes to create new bonds it will sell to reverse the “quantitative easing”.

Actually, the Fed’s tool is price, not quantity, of reserves. When the crisis hit, the Fed should have opened its discount window to lend reserves without limit, to all comers, and without collateral. That is how you stop a run. The Fed’s dallying and dillying about worsened the liquidity crisis, but it eventually provided the reserves that the financial institutions wanted to hold and its balance sheet eventually grew to $2 trillion. Banks are still worried about counterparty risk and possible runs, so they remain willing to hold massive amounts of reserves. When they decide risks have declined, they will begin to reduce reserve holdings. This will not require any special practices by the Fed. Banks will repay their loans from the Fed, using reserves. This automatically reduces reserves and the size of the Fed’s balance sheet. They will offer undesired reserves in the overnight, fed funds market. Since many banks will be trying to unload reserves at the same time, this will put downward pressure on the fed funds rate. The Fed will then offer to sell assets it is holding to mop up the excess reserves (banks will use reserves to buy assets the Fed offers). This will also reduce reserves and the size of the Fed’s balance sheet. All of this will happen automatically, following the same procedures the Fed has always followed. All it needs to do is to watch the fed funds rate, and when it falls below target the Fed will drain reserves to relieve the downward pressure on overnight rates.

Quantitative easing was a misguided notion, and reversal of quantitative easing is similarly misguided. It simply indicates that Bernanke still does not understand how the Fed operates. In truth, formulating and implementing monetary policy is extremely simple and can be reduced to the following:

1. Offer to lend reserves at the discount window at 50 basis points to all qualifying institutions;

2. Pay 25 basis points on reserve holdings;

3. Perform par clearing of checks between banks, and for the Treasury.

Surely President Obama can find a chair who can do that.

The Fed’s relationship with banks is too cozy to make it a good regulator. It is, after all, owned by private banks. The Fed’s district banks are often run by bankers, and district Fed presidents take turns sitting on the policy-making FOMC. There is a particularly incestuous relationship between the NYFed and Wall Street banks—with Timmy Geithner as a prime example of the dangers posed (“I’ve never been a regulator” proclaimed the former head of the NYFed). It does not have the proper culture to closely supervise financial institutions. Its top body, the Board of Governors, are political appointees often with no experience in regulation (many are academic economists, typically mainstream and with a free market orientation). While the FDIC was also mostly asleep at the wheel over the past decade, it does have the proper culture and experience to take over responsibility for regulating and supervising the financial sector. With some management changes, and hiring of a team of criminologists tasked to pursue fraud, the FDIC is the right institution for this job.

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Let the Mea Culpas Begin, Part 1

Posted on January 5, 2010 by | 3 comments

RUBIN AND BERNANKE APOLOGIZE (SORT OF) FOR PAST SINS
Alan Greenspan has already apologized for the damage he wrought, admitting the crisis reveals that his approach to economics is fundamentally flawed.
Apparently it is now time for mea culpas from the rest of the team most responsible for creating this mess: Rubin, Summers, and Bernanke. Rubin and Bernanke just provided theirs (here and here) —albeit somewhat half-heartedly, a bit more Tiger Woods than David Letterman.
Don’t hold your breath for an apology from Summers, who never owns up to his mistakes, ranging from his proposal to use developing nations as toxic waste dumps to his argument that females suffer from congenital handicaps that render them incapable of doing science (here and here).
Still, with three out of the four acknowledging errors, this could indicate a New Year’s trend. Next we can hope that the University of Chicago—the institution most responsible for producing the theories that guided our misguided policymakers—will apologize for its indiscretions. That could set an example for all mainstream economists who, as the Queen pointedly put it, failed to foresee the crisis.
The statements by Rubin and Bernanke are quite interesting—both for what they say and for what they leave out. Rubin claims to have learned that we “need to reform the financial system to better protect against systemic risk and devastating crises in the future.” Nice deduction, Sherlock! But he goes further, admitting he has long had misgivings about the shape of the financial system: “About four years ago, a well-known London investor said to me that the only undervalued asset in the world was risk. I had the same view, as did many others, and often said that markets, including credit, had gone to excess and that would probably be followed by a cyclical downturn—perhaps a sharp one—though the timing, as always, was unpredictable.” Really? Four years ago? Did he try to warn the Bush administration’s regulators? Or his protégé, Timmy Geithner at the NYFed who was busy (by his own admission) NOT regulating banks?
At that time did he feel any guilt, since he was among the most important deregulators who had created the conditions that would ensure undervaluation of risk? Did he push for re-regulation of the financial institution he was running into the ground?
To be fair, Rubin notes other problems with the “free market” approach he used to advocate, indeed, his complaints sound remarkably similar to the arguments long made by progressives (including heterodox economists). For example, the market should not be counted on to determine income distribution:

“Even before the recession hit, our current model had displayed major shortcomings that markets, by their nature, won’t address and that need to be met through public policy. For example, market-based economics, global integration, and the strong growth that has resulted have been accompanied by serious income-distribution problems around the world, though the circumstances differ among countries.”

He even engages in a bit of class warfare:

“For example, market-based economics, global integration, and the strong growth that has resulted have been accompanied by serious income-distribution problems around the world, though the circumstances differ among countries. In the United States, median real wages have lagged behind productivity growth for more than three decades (except for the second half of the 1990s), and income has become more heavily distributed toward the most affluent.”

Hold it a second. The redistribution of income toward the affluent occurred as Wall Street “fat cat bankers” grabbed an ever rising share of corporate profits—the source of the bonuses paid to Rubin and his cronies. In 2006 Rubin received $29.4 million from Citigroup. That was four years ago, when he was supposedly fretting that the whole financial bubble was heading toward collapse (see here).
How about some clawbacks? Compensation caps? Investigations for fraud and significant jail time for fat cat bankers? Ban Goldman Sachs alum from Washington? Unfortunately, Rubin is mum on these issues.
After acknowledging the real suffering generated by Wall Street’s excesses, Rubin concludes:

“…virtually no one involved in the financial system—whether institutions, investors, regulators, analysts, or commentators—recognized the breadth of forces at work or the possibility of a megacrisis, and this included the most experienced among us. More personally, I regret that I, too, didn’t see the potential for such extreme conditions despite my many years involved in financial matters and my concern for market excesses.”

The sentiment is touching, but the attempt to share the blame is factually incorrect. Many financial market participants and commentators saw this coming. Many warned of the consequences of allowing banksters to run wild—but they were mostly ignored or even ridiculed by Rubin and his buddies. There was a very strong will to believe that when the crash came, government would be able to quickly bail-out the financial institutions, as it had so many times before over the course of the postwar period. Of course, that will to believe was bolstered by a strong financial interest in engaging in those practices that would eventually lead to crisis. Perhaps Rubin’s claim that he had not foreseen such a deep crisis is correct, but many others did. He chose not to listen to them.
There are, however, two quite disturbing arguments raised by Rubin in his apology. First, he cites a fundamentally flawed study put out by the Commission on Growth and Development (a task force founded by the World Bank and a collection of “advisors” including Rubin) that purports to prove that market liberalization is a necessary condition for growth and development:

“In the six decades since the end of the Second World War, there has been a broad movement around the world toward a model of market-based economics, public investment, and global integration. With that move came enormous economic progress in industrial countries, including the recovery of war-torn Europe and Japan and, as time went on, in various developing countries.” Further, “The commission also found that no economy anywhere in the world had been successful with largely state-directed activities and high walls against global integration. The evidence, in other words, strongly suggests that a market-based model is still the best way forward.”

Surprisingly, the countries he cites as examples of the success of the Neoliberal market model are South Korea, Singapore, China, and India. While it is true that these nations have relaxed constraints on markets, none is a good candidate for demonstrating the wondrous advantages of market-based economics. Indeed, most analysts recognize that there is a highly successful alternative Asian model of development that opens markets only as development reaches a sufficient level to compete in international markets. Development then continues almost in spite of markets, guided by the very visible hand of government.
And China? Can Rubin actually believe that China’s success is due to reliance on free markets? True, the Chinese government uses international markets when it sees an advantage. And it squelches markets when that is advantageous. Its ability to avoid any of the damages of the “market fall-out” occasioned by the crisis is proof not that markets “work” but that a sovereign government does not have to allow markets to dictate economic outcomes. China grows at an 8% pace in spite of markets. Maybe to spite them—to show off the superiority of its government-led model. And unlike Obama, its premier has no fear of being called a socialist as its government ramps up spending and reigns-in errant entrepreneurs (occasionally sentencing particularly nefarious individuals to death—a practice Rubin might want to adopt here?). It avoids financial crises by avoiding financialization of the sort that Rubin pushed onto the US economy.
The other error is even more serious, as Rubin continues his role as cheerleader for deficit hawks. Clearly he learned nothing from his term as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, when budget surpluses killed the economy and helped to bring on the NASDAQ-led equities crash. (Memo to Rubin: a decade later, stocks still have not recovered their values.) He still, mistakenly, believes that the Clinton boom was due to budget surpluses, failing to realize that the boom created the surpluses (as tax revenue exploded) and this fiscal drag sucked so much income and wealth out of the private sector that a crash was inevitable. He now wants to prevent recovery or at least kill one should it get underway:

“Putting another major stimulus on top of already huge deficits and rising debt-to-GDP ratios would have risks. And further expansion of the Federal Reserve Board’s balance sheet could create significant problems. Second, while the measures taken were absolutely necessary, unwinding the stimulus, restoring a sound fiscal regime, undoing the expansion of the Federal Reserve Board’s balance sheet, and reducing government’s involvement in the financial system will be very difficult, both substantively and politically.”

So what we have is a former head of the Treasury, and who still plays an outsized role in advising Obama administration policy-makers like Geithner, who does not understand how the Treasury works (or, for that matter, how the Fed works). It spends by crediting bank accounts; it taxes by debiting them; and any net spending by the Treasury (called deficit spending) adds to the nongovernment sector’s net income and wealth. There are no risks that would arise from additional stimulus; but there are huge risks of not doing enough. Rather than focusing on the budget deficit—which provides no information of importance to guide policy-makers—Rubin ought to be recommending policy that could create the 25 million or so jobs we will need to restore the nation’s health.
As to unwinding the Fed’s balance sheet, that will be done simply and following normal Fed operational procedures. That is the topic for the next blog, which will also examine Bernanke’s mea culpa.

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Fed Offers New CD; Chairman Bernanke is still confused

Posted on December 30, 2009 by | 7 comments

By L. Randall Wray

As reported in the NYT yesterday, the Fed has decided to offer banks an interest-paying CD. So far, so good. However, the argument offered by the Fed to justify this “innovation” is that it needs to start mopping up reserves in order to prevent inflation:

The Federal Reserve on Monday proposed allowing banks to park their reserves at the central bank, a move aimed at weaning the economy off extraordinary infusions of cash and curbing inflation. The Fed would create the equivalent of a certificate of deposit that pays interest to banks for keeping some of their reserves — which are currently estimated at more than $1 trillion — for up to one year. That would help offset some of the $2.2 trillion the central bank has fanned out into the economy during the financial crisis. It also would allow the Fed to quickly entice banks to take more money out of circulation in case inflation emerged as a serious threat in the near future. The proposal was the latest sign the Fed is intensifying its efforts to scale back the vast amounts of money it pumped into the economy at the height of the crisis.

This blog has published a number of pieces explaining why there is no need to worry about the trillions of dollars of reserves and cash created by the Fed to deal with the run to liquidity set-off by this crisis (see here and here). As and when banks decide they do not want to hold reserves, they will retire their loans at the discount window and will begin to purchase higher-earning assets. As this pushes up asset prices (reducing interest rates), the Fed will begin to unwind its balance sheet—selling the assets it purchased during the crisis. Retiring discount window loans plus purchases of assets from the Fed will eliminate undesired reserve holdings. It is all automatic and nothing to worry about or to plan for. And it will not set off a round of inflation. The old “money multiplier” view according to which excess reserves cause banks to lend, which induces spending, which causes inflation, was abandoned by all serious monetary theorists long ago. Chairman Bernanke ought to abandon it, too.

However, there is nothing wrong with offering longer-maturity CDs to replace overnight reserve deposits held by banks at the Fed. Banks are content to hold deposits at the Fed—safe assets that earn a little interest. They are hoping to play the yield curve to get some positive earnings in order to rebuild capital. If they can issue liabilities at an even lower interest rate so that earnings on deposits at the Fed cover interest and other costs of financing their positions in assets, this strategy might work. That is what they did in the early 1990s, allowing banks that were insolvent to work their way back to profitability. The Fed could even lend to banks at 25 basis points (0.25% interest) so that they could buy the CDs, then pay them, say, 100 or 200 basis points (1% or 2% interest) on their longer maturity CDs. The net interest earned could tide them over until it becomes appropriate for them to resume lending to households and firms.

Finally, note that these new CDs are equivalent to Treasuries: government debt that pays interest. However, no one has castigated the Fed for proposing to bankrupt our grandchildren by running up debt. Apparently, this is because economists and policymakers recognize that the Fed is just substituting one kind of liability (reserves) for another kind of liability (CDs). But that is exactly what a sale of a Treasury bond does: it substitutes one government liability (Fed reserves) for another government liability (Treasury bonds). Operationally, it all amounts to the same thing. Once this is recognized, the Treasury can stop issuing debt, we can all stop worrying about our grandchildren, and our nation can get on with ramping up fiscal policy to get out of this economic crisis.

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A New Maestro?

Posted on December 25, 2009 by | 8 comments

By L. Randall Wray

Ok, the media is a poor judge of the performance of the Chairman of the Board of Governors. It seems like only yesterday that it anointed “maestro” status to Chairman Greenspan, right before all hell broke loose and he had to admit that his whole approach to financial markets had been dangerously wrong-headed. Now Chairman Bernanke is awarded with a magazine’s choice as “man of the year”—purportedly for saving capitalism as we know it. More importantly, the Senate is trying to decide whether he deserves reappointment. Usually these votes are little more than a rubber-stamping. Yet, something seems amiss this time around as the Senate Banking Committee voted 16 to 7 for approval—with significant opposition to reappointment. To some extent this is probably a vote of no-confidence for the Administration’s approach to dealing with the financial mess created by three decades of complete mismanagement of the banking system by a succession of Fed and Treasury officials. And, in truth, it would make more sense to fire Timmy Geithner and Larry Summers—who have done far more harm to the economy than has Ben Bernanke.

Let us suppose for a moment that Bernanke had done everything exactly right. Would he deserve accolades? In truth, the job of a Fed Chairman is pretty darn simple. So far as monetary management goes, he has one tool—the overnight interest rate target that is set in meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee. The Chairman has tremendous influence at these meetings, as we know from the transcripts that are released with a 5 year lag. While tremendous significance is believed to surround changes to the Fed’s target rate, in truth the overnight rate has little influence over the economy. As conventional thinking goes, the Fed raises rates in an inflation and lowers them in a recession. When the crisis hit, the Fed should have lowered rates, and did so. By itself, this should have had no impact; and by all accounts it had no impact. Should anyone receive man of the year designation for doing something that any Fed Chairman would have done, and which everyone agrees has virtually no impact?

Better to replace the FOMC with a rule that the overnight rate will be kept at zero from now on, a directive that the NYFed would implement. That would provide a lot more stability to the financial sector—and would go some way toward J.M. Keynes’s “euthanasia of the functionless rentier class”. But that is a story for another day.

In a crisis, the other thing the Fed does is to “provide liquidity”—that is, it lends reserves to prevent bank runs. This has been widely accepted policy since the 1840s and there is no central bank anywhere in the world that would not act as a lender of last resort in the sort of situation Bernanke faced. In fact, Bernanke was a bit slow to the gate on this, and never seemed to fully understand what he was doing. While he should have lent reserves without limit, to all comers, and against any kind of collateral, he played around with a variety of limited auctions, let a major financial institution fail due to lack of access to the Fed’s lending, and demanded good collateral for far too long. If anything, the Fed’s slow learning curve contributed to the crisis. Man of the year? I think not.

Finally, the Fed is supposed to be a regulator of financial institutions—through the thick and thin of the business cycle. Let us suppose a counterfactual: what if Bernanke had been a competent regulator from the time of his appointment? In truth, he consistently and persistently opposed any regulation that might have prevented this crisis, but in that he only followed his predecessor. And most of the damage had been done, with Greenspan at the helm since 1987 and with most of the important deregulation already accomplished by 2000. Clearly Bernanke deserves a grade of D- as a regulator (Timmy proudly earned an F when he testified before Congress that in all his years at the helm of the NY Fed he had never acted as a regulator!). So, he is certainly no worse than a Rubin or a Paulson and by 2005 when he was appointed he would not have had sufficient time or influence to overcome all the damage that had already been done. But a Man of the Year might have at least sounded a warning—rather than continually claiming even through summer 2007 that all was fine and dandy.

Bernanke will win reappointment. He has probably learned a bit as a result of this crisis so he will be a better head in his second term than he was in his first. Much is made of his scholarship that focused on the Great Depression. It is indeed a great advance over the work of Milton Friedman, who claimed the Fed caused the crisis by reducing the money supply. Bernanke also blamed the Fed for the initiation of the crisis, but the prolonged depression resulted because of the failure of financial institutions—which disrupted the relation between banks and their customers. When the bank of a farmer or entrepreneur failed, they were unable to borrow to finance operations—which collapsed production and employment. This is probably why Bernanke wants to prop up Wall Street institutions at all costs, to get “credit flowing again”. What he does not understand is that Wall Street banking has evolved—these are not lenders. They are speculators that serve no useful public purpose. If Bernanke were ever to figure that out, and would start to close down these predators, then he might deserve to be called Maestro.

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Krugman Gets it Wrong

Posted on December 19, 2009 by | 13 comments

By L. Randall Wray

In his column in yesterday’s NYT, Professor Paul Krugman rose to the defense of Paul Samuelson. He argued that Michael Hudson’s piece, originally published in 1970, not only misunderstood Samuelson’s theories but also wrongly asserted that he was not deserving of a Nobel. Krugman’s main argument was that Samuelson’s version of “Keynesian” economics offered a solution to depressions that pre-existing “institutionalist” theory did not have:
Faced with the Depression, institutional economics turned out to have very little to offer, except to say that it was a complex phenomenon with deep historical roots, and surely there was no easy answer. Meanwhile, model-oriented economists turned quickly to Keynes — who was very much a builder of little models. And what they said was, “This is a failure of effective demand. You can cure it by pushing this button.” The fiscal expansion of World War II, although not intended as a Keynesian policy, proved them right. So Samuelson-type economics didn’t win because of its power to cloud men’s     minds. It won because in the greatest economic crisis in history, it had something useful to say.

This claim is bizarre, to say the least. First, Roosevelt’s New Deal was in place before Keynes published his General Theory, and it was mostly formulated by the American institutional economists that Krugman claims to have been clueless. (There certainly were clueless economists—those following the neoclassical approach, traced to English “political economy”.)

Second, it was Alvin Hansen, not Paul Samuelson, who brought Keynesian ideas to America. And Hansen retained the more radical ideas (such as the tendency to stagnation) that Samuelson dropped. Further, Hansen was—surprise, surprise—working within the institutionalist tradition (as documented by in a book by Perry Mehrling).

Third, many other institutionalists also adopted Keynesian ideas in their work—before Samuelson’s simplistic mathematization swamped the discipline. For example, Dudley Dillard—a well-known institutionalist—wrote the first accessible interpretation of Keynes in 1948; Kenneth Boulding’s 1950 Reconstruction of Economics served as the basis for four editions of his Principles book—on which a generation of American economists was trained (again, before Samuelson’s text took over). It is in almost every respect superior to Samuelson’s text. I encourage Professor Krugman to take a look.

Fourth, Hyman Minsky (who first trained with institutionalists at the University of Chicago—before it became a bastion of monetarist thought) took Samuelson’s overly simplistic multiplier-accelerator approach and extended it with institutional ceilings and floors. He quickly grew tired of the constraints placed on theory by Samuelsonian mathematics and moved on to develop his Financial Instability Hypothesis (which Krugman has admitted he finds interesting, even if he does not fully comprehend it). I ask you, how many analysts have turned to Samuelson’s work to try to understand the current crisis—versus the number of times Minsky’s work has been invoked?

And fifth, Samuelson’s “button” approach to dealing with the business cycle has been thoroughly discredited since the late 1960s—when he announced that we would never have another recession. In truth, as Minsky argued, it is not possible to “fine-tune” the economy because “stability is destabilizing”. The simplistic “Keynesian” approach propagated by the likes of Samuelson leaves out the behavioral and institutional analysis that is necessary to deal with instability and crisis.

Sixth, as has been long recognized, Samuelson purposely threw Keynes out of his analysis as he developed the “Neoclassical Synthesis”. The name dropping was intentional—Keynes was too radical for the cold warrior Samuelson. At best, what Samuelson presented was a highly bastardized version of Keynes—as Joan Robinson termed it, a Bastard Keynesian approach (we know the mother was neoclassical economics but we do not know who the father was).

Finally, and most telling of all, whose work is universally acknowledged as the most insightful analysis of the Great Depression? Might it be John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash? I have never heard anyone refer to any work of Samuelson in that context.

So Professor Krugman has got it wrong.

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

Posted on December 16, 2009 by | 7 comments

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.

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