Healthcare Diversions, Part 1: The Elephant in the Room

Posted on September 24, 2009 by | 7 comments
By L. Randall Wray

I have tried to stay clear of the current healthcare debate because all sides appear to be so far from any sensible policy that I remain indifferent to the outcome. However a recent three-hour layover in a major airport in the “new South” brought into sharp focus—at least for me—the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss.

I won’t belabor the obvious point that Americans are, to put it delicately, a bit on the hefty side. But what really struck me is that many have evolved to the point that they are barely bipedal. As passengers attempted to perambulate their way from one gate to the next, it appeared that most had forgotten how to walk. I saw the most ungainly gaits—peregrination with great effort but little forward progress, the zigzag, the toe-heel-toe, the Quasimodo, the sideways roll, the zombie, the stop-start-stop again, all whilst occasionally careening off walls and other passengers. Of course, in some cases the attire dictated the method. A few of the boys had their pants waist bands down around their knees, forcing a duck-like waddle, made even more difficult by the need to use one hand to hold onto the belt lest gravity complete its work and bring the pants down to the ankles. A lot of the girls wore PJs and flip-flops, making it impossible to do much more than shuffle along. Some forty-somethings had eight inch stilettos in which only flamingos could parade about with grace. Still, the vast majority of passengers wore shoes marketed as sporting equipment, designed presumably for activities involving two legs and an upright posture rather than for those of the aquatic or slithering or knuckle-dragging variety.

And here is an interesting factoid: the average American walks just the length of three football fields daily. (Sierra Magazine, Jan/Feb 2007, p. 25) It shows. Since that is the average, it is no doubt boosted by the still considerable number of aging yuppies who manage 3k runs before breakfast, as well as by children the soccer moms idolized by Sarah Palin drive to practice. I presume that most of the airport patrons typically manage little more than a few schlepps from couch to fridge each day, taking a momentary break from their average 1600 hours in front of the TV each year. (Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, 2006 p. 115)

Like many other airlines, ours had provided a welcoming speech as the plane pulled up to the gate, helpfully reminding passengers that the most dangerous part of their journey would soon begin. I had always thought that they were alluding to the fact that we would shortly be behind the wheel of our autos, taking our lives into our own unprofessional hands as we attempted to pilot 2 tons of steel on a 65 mph freeway through an obstacle course of text-messaging drivers (which studies show are twice as impaired as a drunk driver). Actually, they were referring to our more immediate mission—to walk without major mishap to the baggage claim area before returning to the relative safety of a seated or prone position in a vehicle, like the humans in the Wall-E movie. A few centuries ago, our ancestors here in America were able to run down buffalo, or even mastodons, and kill them with spears. Today, most Americans can, with some effort, spear a French fry—providing it is not moving too quickly and that they are seated to steady the aim.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not one of the contrarians who reject the argument that lack of access to healthcare by the uninsured contributes to the US’s relatively poor ranking in terms of health outcome. Surely that explains some of our problem. But too little exercise, too much smoking, too much food, and especially too much bad food have got to be a huge factor. As Michael Pollan argues (In Defense of Food, 2008), unless we address the problem with American Food, Inc., we will not significantly improve our health no matter what we do with health care. According to Pollan, the cost to society of the American addiction to “fast food” (which is neither all that fast nor is it food) is already $250 billion per year in diet-related health care costs. One-third of Americans born in 2000 will develop diabetes in her lifetime; on average, diabetes subtracts 12 years from life expectancy, and raises annual medical costs from $2500 for a person without diabetes to $13,000. While it is true that life expectancy today is higher than it was in 1900, almost all of this is due to reduction of death rates of infants and young children—mostly not due to the high tech healthcare that we celebrate as the contribution of our innovative, profit seeking system, but rather to lower tech inoculations, sewage treatment, mosquito abatement, and cleaner water. The life expectancy of a 65 year old in 1900 was only about 6 years less than it is for a 65 year old today—and rates of chronic diseases like cancer and type 2 diabetes are much higher. (Pollan, p. 93)

Smoking causes 400,000 deaths yearly. Simply banning smoking from public places throughout our country could reduce deaths by 156,000 annually. (NPR 22 Sept) We incarcerate a far higher percentage of our population than any developed society on earth—and health care costs in prisons are exploding for the obvious reason that prisons are not healthy environments. Our relatively high poverty rates, and high percentage of the population left outside the labor market (especially young adult males without a high school degree) all contribute to very poor health outcomes. In a very important sense that I will explore thoroughly in the next blog, more health insurance coverage would no more resolve our health care problems than would provision of car insurance to chronic drunk drivers solve our DUI problem.

So, before ramping up health care insurance, how about an education program to teach people the mechanics of walking. It is not as simple as it sounds. I speak from experience because some years ago I tore a calf muscle and after a long and painful healing process, I developed a gait that was all kinds of ugly. A physical therapist helped me to redevelop a human stride. While we are at it, we can reintroduce Americans to food. I don’t mean the corporate offal that Pollan calls “food-like substances”—products derived from plants and animals, but generated by breaking the original foods into their most basic molecules and then reconstituting them in a manner that can be more profitably marketed. What I mean is real food, produced by farmers and consumed after as little processing as possible. Preferably it will be local, cooked at home, eaten at a table, and will consist mostly of vegetables, grains, and fruits. And let us provide decent jobs to anyone ready to work, as an alternative to locking them up in prison. Ban smoking from all public places and regulate tobacco like the highly addictive and dangerous drug that it is. Together these policies will do far more to improve American health and to reduce health care costs than anything that “reformers” are proposing.

To conclude this part of the analysis: the benefits of extending health insurance coverage are almost certainly overstated and are not likely to make a major dent in our two comparative gaps: we spend far more than any other nation but do not obtain better outcomes and in important areas actually get worse results. Nations that adopt diets closer to ours begin to suffer similar afflictions: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, diverticulitis, malformed dental arches and tooth decay, varicose veins, ulcers, hemorrhoids, and cancer. (Pollan p. 91) Even universal health insurance is not going to lower the costs of such chronic afflictions that are largely due to the fact that we eat too much of the wrong kinds of food and get too little exercise. It makes more sense to attack the problem directly by increasing exercise, reducing caloric intake, and minimizing consumption of corporate food-like substances that make us sick, than to provide insurance so that those who suffer the consequences of our lifestyle can afford costly care.

Let me be as clear as possible: it is neither rational nor humane to deny health care to any US resident. Further, I accept the arguments contending that early treatment through primary care is far more cost effective than waiting for emergency care—and it is obviously more humane. However in the next blog I will explain why I believe that extending health insurance is the wrong way to go if the goal is to extend health care coverage.

7 Comments

Posted in L. Randall Wray, Policy and Reform, Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

What the Fed has to Say About This?

Posted on September 9, 2009 by | 6 comments

An interesting article by Ryan Grym on Fed control of research. “Priceless: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession“

According to the article,

The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.

This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed’s thrall, the economists missed it, too.

“The Fed has a lock on the economics world,” says Joshua Rosner, a Wall Street analyst who correctly called the meltdown. “There is no room for other views, which I guess is why economists got it so wrong.”

One critical way the Fed exerts control on academic economists is through its relationships with the field’s gatekeepers. For instance, at the Journal of Monetary Economics, a must-publish venue for rising economists, more than half of the editorial board members are currently on the Fed payroll — and the rest have been in the past.

Even the late Milton Friedman, whose monetary economic theories heavily influenced Greenspan, was concerned about the stifled nature of the debate.
Friedman, in a 1993 letter to Auerbach that the author quotes in his book, argued that the Fed practice was harming objectivity: “I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results,” Friedman wrote.

It is time for a new start.

6 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged

Selling Death: Wall Street’s Newest Bubble

Posted on September 7, 2009 by | 4 comments
When Wall Street’s commodities bubble crashed last year, I asked whether the next bubble might be in securitized body parts. Wall Street would search the world for transplantable organs, holding them in cold storage as collateral against securities sold to managed money such as pension funds. Of course, it was meant to be an apocryphal story about unregulated banksters gone wild. But as the NYT reports, Wall Street really is moving forward to market bets on death. The banksters would purchase life insurance policies, pool and tranch them, and sell securities that allow money managers to bet that the underlying “collateral” (human beings) will die an untimely death. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is just the latest Wall Street scheme to profit on death, of course. It has been marketing credit default swaps that allow one to bet on the death of firms, cities, and even nations. And the commodities futures speculation pushed by Goldman caused starvation and death around the globe when the prices of agricultural products exploded (along with the price of gasoline) between 2004 and 2008. But now Goldman will directly cash-in on death.

Here is how it works. Goldman will package a bunch of life insurance policies of individuals with an alphabet soup of diseases: AIDS, leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. The idea is to diversify across diseases to protect “investors” from the horror that a cure might be found for one or more afflictions–prolonging life and reducing profits. These policies are the collateral behind securities graded by those same ratings agencies that thought subprime mortgages should be as safe as US Treasuries. Investors purchase the securities, paying fees to Wall Street originators. The underlying collateralized humans receive a single pay-out. Securities holders pay the life insurance premiums until the “collateral” dies, at which point they receive the death benefits. Naturally, managed money hopes death comes sooner rather than later.

Moral hazards abound. There is a fundamental reason why you are not permitted to take out fire insurance on your neighbor’s house: you would have a strong interest in seeing that house burn. If you held a life insurance policy on him, you probably would not warn him about the loose lug nuts on his Volvo. Heck, if you lost your job and you were sufficiently ethically challenged, you might even loosen them yourself.

Imagine the hit to portfolios of securitized death if universal health care were to make it through Congress. Or the efforts by Wall Street to keep new miracle drugs off the market if they were capable of extending life of human collateral. Who knows, perhaps the bankster’s next investment product will be gansters in the business of guaranteeing lifespans do not exceed actuarially-based estimates.

If you think all of this is far-fetched, you have not been paying attention. From Charles Keating’s admonition to his sales staff that the weak, meek and ignorant elderly widows always make good targets, to recent internal emails boasting about giving high risk ratings to toxic securities, we know that Wall Street’s contempt for the rest of us knows no bounds. Those hedge funds holding CDS “insurance” fought to force the US auto industry into bankruptcy for the simple reason that they would make more from its death than from its resurrection. And the reason that most troubled mortgages cannot obtain relief is because the firms that service the mortgages gain more from foreclosure. It is not a big step for Wall Street and global money managers with big gambling stakes at risk to slow efforts to improve health. Indeed, it is easy to see some very nice and profitable synergies developing between Wall Street sellers of death and health insurers opposed to universal, single-payer health care. As AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Trumka recently remarked on NPR, we already have committees deciding when to cut-off care—the private health insurers decide when to deny coverage. It would not be in the interest of securities holders or health insurers to provide expensive care that would prolong the life of human collateral—a natural synergy that someone will notice.

It should be amply evident that Wall Street intends to recreate the conditions that existed in 2005. Virtually every element that created the real estate, commodities, and CDS bubbles will be replicated in the securitization of life insurance policies. If Wall Street succeeds in this scheme, it will probably bankrupt the life insurance companies (premiums are set on the assumption that many policyholders will cancel long before death—but once securitized, the premiums will be paid so that benefits can be collected). But it is likely that the bubble will be popped long before that happens, at which point Wall Street will look for the next opportunity. Securitized pharmaceuticals? Body parts?

Here’s the problem. There is still—even after massive losses in this crisis—far too much managed money chasing far too few returns. And there are far too many “rocket scientists” looking for the next newest and bestest financial product. Each new product brings a rush of funds that narrows returns; this then spurs rising leverage ratios using borrowed funds to make up for low spreads by increasing volume; this causes risk to rise far too high to be covered by the returns. Eventually, lenders and managed money try to get out, but de-levering creates a liquidity crisis as asset prices plunge. Resulting losses are socialized as government bails-out the banksters. Repeat as often as necessary.

Reform of the US financial sector is neither possible nor would it ever be sufficient. As any student of horror films knows, you cannot reform vampires or zombies. They must be killed (stakes through the hearts of Wall Street’s vampires, bullets to the heads of zombie banks). In other words, the financial system must be downsized.

4 Comments

Posted in L. Randall Wray, Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

Fed Profits From The Bailout? Don’t Count Those Chickens Before They Hatch

Posted on September 3, 2009 by | 5 comments
A flurry of reports appears to indicate simultaneously that the government’s bailout of Wall Street is working to bring banks back to life, and that the Fed is making profits on the deal: See for instance here, here and here. According to these reports, the Fed received $19 billion in interest on its emergency loans to troubled institutions, which was about $14 billion more than it would have received if it had instead bought Treasuries. In addition, it was reported that the Fed made $4 billion of profits from the eight largest banks that have repaid TARP funds. This is seen as good news in Congress: “The taxpayers want their money back and they want the government out of our banking system,” said Representative Jeb Hensarling.

There are three fundamental problems with these stories. The first is that it raises a question about the function of the Fed: should a branch of government seek profits at the expense of the private sector? As we all know, the Fed is normally profitable and returns earnings above 6% on equity back to the Treasury. When the Fed profits on its holdings of government debt, that is essentially the government paying itself and thus of no consequence. Profiting at the expense of private institutions—even if they are the hated “banksters” of Wall Street—doesn’t seem to be something to celebrate. Especially when we are in a deep recession or depression, with a long way to go before the financial system recovers. All else equal, I’d rather see the private sector accumulate some profits so that it can recover.

Don’t get me wrong. I want retribution, too. We need a “bank holiday”, to begin next Friday: close suspect banks including all of the biggest that were subjected to the wimpy “stress test”. Spend the weekend going through the books and then on Monday begin to resolve the insolvent, to prosecute the banksters for fraud, and to retrieve from them their outsized bonuses financed by the public purse. It is payback time. My only objection is to the notion that we should be celebrating because the Fed appears to have made a profit on (a small part of) the bailout.

Second, there is every reason to suspect that the banks that have repaid TARP money and those making payments on loans from the Fed are still massively insolvent at any true valuation of the toxic waste still on their balance sheets. Recent reported profit in the financial sector is window-dressing, designed to fuel the irrationally exuberant stock market bubble. This will allow traders and other employees to cash in their stock options to recover some of the losses they incurred last year, even as bonuses are boosted for this year. Indeed, the main reason for returning the borrowed funds is to escape controls on executive salaries and bonuses. And, finally, it provides some important PR to counteract the growing anger over the financial bailouts. Only the foolish or those with some dog in the hunt will believe that the banksters have really managed to restore health to the financial sector as they continue to do what they did to cause the crisis.

Last but not least, the Fed’s “profits” are based on an infinitesimally small fraction of its ramped-up operations—its liquidity facilities (that also include discount window loans and currency swaps with other central banks, purchases of commercial paper and financing for investors in asset-backed securities). It has also spent $1.75 trillion buying bad assets, with any losses on those excluded from the profits numbers. The government’s profits also exclude current and expected spending on the rest of its reported $23.7 trillion dollar commitment to the financial bailout and fiscal stimulus package. The failure of just one medium-sized bank could easily wipe out the entire $14 billion of profits that has attracted so much notice. (See also Dean Baker on the government’s “profits”)

It is ironic that Euroland’s regulators are calling for much more radical steps than Washington is willing to take. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are calling for more regulation and for limits on executive compensation even as the Obama administration continues to argue that such limits would constrain the financial sector’s ability to retain the “best and the brightest”. If the bozos that created this crisis are the best that Wall Street can find, it would be better to shut down the US financial system than to keep them in charge. It is doubly ironic that Nigeria (a country that normally would not come immediately to mind as a role model) has actually charged the leadership of five of its major banks with crimes. Each of these banks had received government money in a bailout, and the CEOs stand accused of “fraud, giving loans to fake companies, lending to businesses they had a personal interest in and conspiring with stockbrokers to drive up share prices.”

Isn’t that normal business practice for Wall Street banks favored by Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner? It is time to get the NY Fed out of Goldman’s back pocket, and to permanently downsize the role played by Wall Street and the Fed in our economic system.

5 Comments

Posted in L. Randall Wray, Paulson/Geithner Plans, Policy and Reform, Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

The Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar

Posted on August 31, 2009 by | 1 comment

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is pleased to announce that it will hold a Minsky summer seminar in June 2010. The Seminar will provide a rigorous discussion of both theoretical and applied aspects of Minsky’s economics, with an examination of meaningful prescriptive policies relevant to the current economic and financial crisis. The Seminar will consist of a Summer School from June 19 to 26, 2010, followed by an International Conference on June 27–29, both to be held at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

The Summer School will be of particular interest to graduate students, recent graduates and those at the beginning of their academic or professional careers. The teaching staff will include well-known economists concentrating on and expanding Minsky’s work.

Applications may be made to Susan Howard at the Levy Institute ([email protected]), and should include a current curriculum vitae. Admission to the Summer School will include provision of room and board on the Bard Campus. Small travel reimbursements of $100 for US fellows and $300 for foreign fellows, respectively, will be available for a limited number of participants.

The Conference will provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of papers and work in progress dealing with Minskyan themes. Preference will be given to applicants presenting contributions in the following areas: stock-flow modeling and policy simulations; financial fragility; reconstituting the financial structure; modern money, endogeneity and functional finance; asset bubbles; and employment of last resort (ELR) and macroeconomic stability.

Applications to attend the Conference may be made to Susan Howard ([email protected]), and should include an abstract of the proposed presentation. A registration fee of $200 covering meals and materials will be required for attendance and participation in the Conference program. Participants in the Summer School will be able to attend the Conference without charge. Bookings for hotel lodging at a preferential rate will be available to those attending the Conference.

Summer school and conference programs will be organized by Jan A. Kregel, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray.


For more information, please visit http://www.levy.org/vevents.aspx?event=26

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged

Money as a Public Monopoly

Posted on August 26, 2009 by | 25 comments
By L. Randall Wray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 Comments

Posted in L. Randall Wray, Policy and Reform, Taxes, The Federal Government Deficit, The National Debt, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , ,

Central Bank Sterilization

Posted on August 25, 2009 by | Comments Off on Central Bank Sterilization
By L. Randall Wray [via CFEPS]

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


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

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

Comments Off on Central Bank Sterilization

Posted in L. Randall Wray, Monetary policy, The Federal Government Deficit, Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

‘Monetization’ of Budget Deficits

Posted on August 25, 2009 by | 9 comments
By L. Randall Wray [via CFEPS]

It is commonly believed that government faces a budget constraint according to which its spending must be “financed” by taxes, borrowing (bond sales), or “money creation”. Since many modern economies actually prohibit direct “money creation” by the government’s treasury, it is supposed that the last option is possible only through complicity of the central bank—which could buy the government’s bonds, and hence finance deficit spending by “printing money”.

Actually, in a floating rate regime, the government that issues the currency spends by crediting bank accounts. Tax payments result in debits to bank accounts. Deficit spending by government takes the form of net credits to bank accounts. Operationally, the entities receiving net payments from government hold banking system liabilities while banks hold reserves in the form of central bank liabilities (we can ignore leakages from deposits—and reserves—into cash held by the non-bank public as a simple complication that changes nothing of substance). While many economists find the coordinating activities between the central bank and the treasury quite confusing. I want to leave those issues mostly to the side and simply proceed from the logical point that deficit spending by the treasury results in net credits to banking system reserves, and that these fiscal operations can be huge. (See Bell 2000, Bell and Wray 2003, and Wray 2003/4)


If these net credits lead to excess reserve positions, overnight interest rates will be bid down by banks offering the excess in the overnight interbank lending market. Unless the central bank is operating with a zero interest rate target, declining overnight rates trigger open market bond sales to drain excess reserves. Hence, on a day-to-day basis, the central bank intervenes to offset undesired impacts of fiscal policy on reserves when they cause the overnight rate to move away from target. The process operates in reverse if the treasury runs a surplus, which results in net debits of reserves from the banking system and puts upward pressure on overnight rates—relieved by open market purchases. If fiscal policy were biased to run deficits (or surpluses) on a sustained basis, the central bank would run out of bonds to sell (or would accumulate too many bonds, offset on its balance sheet by a treasury deposit exceeding operating limits). Hence, policy is coordinated between the central bank and the treasury to ensure that the treasury will begin to issue new securities as it runs deficits (or retire old issues in the case of a budget surplus). Again, these coordinating activities can be varied and complicated, but they are not important to our analysis here. When all is said and done, a budget deficit that creates excess reserves leads to bond sales by the central bank (open market) and the treasury (new issues) to drain all excess reserves; a budget surplus causes the reverse to take place when the banking system is short of reserves.

Bond sales (or purchases) by the treasury and central bank are, then, ultimately triggered by deviation of reserves from the position desired (or required) by the banking system, which causes the overnight rate to move away from target (if the target is above zero). Bond sales by either the central bank or the treasury are properly seen as part of monetary policy designed to allow the central bank to hit its target. This target is exogenously “administered” by the central bank. Obviously, the central bank sets its target as a result of its belief about the impact of this rate on a range of economic variables that are included in its policy objectives. In other words, setting of this rate “exogenously” does not imply that the central bank is oblivious to economic and political constraints it believes to reign (whether these constraints and relationships actually exist is a different matter).

In conclusion, the notion of a “government budget constraint” only applies ex post, as a statement of an identity that has no significance as an economic constraint. When all is said and done, it is certainly true that any increase of government spending will be matched by an increase of taxes, an increase of high powered money (reserves and cash), and/or an increase of sovereign debt held. But this does not mean that taxes or bonds actually “financed” the government spending. Government might well enact provisions that dictate relations between changes to spending and changes to taxes revenues (a balanced budget, for example); it might require that bonds are issued before deficit spending actually takes place; it might require that the treasury have “money in the bank” (deposits at the central bank) before it can cut a check; and so on. These provisions might constrain government’s ability to spend at the desired level. Belief that these provisions are “right” and “just” and even “necessary” can make them politically popular and difficult to overturn. However, economic analysis shows that they are self-imposed and are not economically necessary—although they may well be politically necessary. From the vantage point of economic analysis, government can spend by crediting accounts in private banks, creating banking system reserves. Any number of operating procedures can be adopted to allow this to occur even in a system in which responsibilities are sharply divided between a central bank and a treasury. For example, in the US, complex procedures have been adopted to ensure that treasury can spend by cutting checks; that treasury checks never “bounce”; that deficit spending by treasury leads to net credits to banking system reserves; and that excess reserves are drained through new issues by treasury and open market sales by the Fed. That this all operates exceedingly smoothly is evidenced by a relatively stable overnight interbank interest rate—even with rather wild fluctuations of the Treasury’s budget positions. If there were significant hitches in these operations, the fed funds rate would be unstable.

9 Comments

Posted in L. Randall Wray, Monetary policy, Taxes, The Federal Government Deficit, The National Debt, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , ,

Job Guarantee

Posted on August 23, 2009 by | 11 comments
By L. Randal Wray

A job guarantee program is one in which government promises to make a job available to any qualifying individual who is ready and willing to work. Qualifications required of participants could include age range (i.e. teens), gender, family status (i.e. heads of households), family income (i.e. below poverty line), educational attainment (i.e. high school dropouts), residency (i.e. rural), and so on. The most general program would provide a universal job guarantee, sometimes also called an employer of last resort (ELR) program in which government promises to provide a job to anyone legally entitled to work.

Many job guarantee supporters see employment not only as an economic condition but also as a right. Wray and Forstater (2004) justify the right to work as a fundamental prerequisite for social justice in any society in which income from work is an important determinant of access to resources. Harvey (1989) and Burgess and Mitchell (1998) argue for the right to work on the basis that it is a fundamental human (or natural) right. Such treatments find support in modern legal proclamations such as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the US Employment Act of 1946 and the Full Employment Act of 1978. Amartya Sen (1999) supports the right to work on the basis that the economic and social costs of unemployment are staggering with far-reaching consequences beyond the single dimension of a loss of income (see also Rawls 1971). William Vickrey (2004) identified unemployment with “cruel vandalism”,outlining the social and economic inequities of unemployment and devising strategies for its solution. A key proposition of such arguments is that no capitalist society has ever managed to operate at anything approaching true, full, employment on a consistent basis. Further, the burden of joblessness is borne unequally, concentrated among groups that already face other disadvantages: racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, younger and older individuals, women, people with disabilities, and those with lower educational attainment. For these reasons, government should and must play a role in providing jobs to achieve social justice.

There are different versions of the job guarantee program. Harvey’s (1989) proposal seeks to provide a public sector job to anyone unable to find work, with the pay approximating a ‘market wage,’ whereby more highly skilled workers would receive higher pay. Argentina’s Jefes program (examined below) targets heads of households only and offers a uniform basic payment for what is essentially half-time work. In Hyman Minsky’s (1965) proposal, developed further at The Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, University of Missouri-Kansas City and independently at The Centre of Full Employment and Equity, University of Newcastle, Australia, the federal government provides funding for a job creation program that offers a uniform hourly wage with a package of benefits. (Wray 1998; Burgess and Mitchell 1998) The program could provide for part-time and seasonal work, as well as for other flexible working conditions as desired by the workers. The package of benefits would be subject to congressional approval, but could include health care, childcare, payment of social security taxes, and usual vacations and sick leave. The wage would also be set by congress and fixed until congress approved a rate increase—much as the minimum wage is currently legislated. The perceived advantage of the uniform basic wage is that it would limit competition with other employers as workers could be attracted out of the ELR program by paying a wage slightly above the program wage.

Proponents of a universal job guarantee program operated by the federal government argue that no other means exists to ensure that everyone who wants to work will be able to obtain a job. Benefits include poverty reduction, amelioration of many social ills associated with chronic unemployment (health problems, spousal abuse and family break-up, drug abuse, crime), and enhanced skills due to training on the job. Forstater (1999) has emphasized how ELR can be used to increase economic flexibility and to enhance the environment. The program would improve working conditions in the private sector as employees would have the option of moving into the ELR program. Hence, private sector employers would have to offer a wage and benefit package and working conditions at least as good as those offered by the ELR program. The informal sector would shrink as workers become integrated into formal employment, gaining access to protection provided by labor laws. There would be some reduction of racial or gender discrimination because unfairly treated workers would have the ELR option, however, ELR by itself cannot end discrimination. Still, it has long been recognized that full employment is an important tool in the fight for equality. (Darity 1999) Forstater (1999) has emphasized how ELR can be used to increase economic flexibility and to improve the environment as projects can be directed to mitigate ecological problems.

Finally, some supporters emphasize that an ELR program with a uniform basic wage also helps to promote economic and price stability. ELR will act as an automatic stabilizer as employment in the program grows in recession and shrinks in economic expansion, counteracting private sector employment fluctuations. The federal government budget will become more counter-cyclical because its spending on the ELR program will likewise grow in recession and fall in expansion. Furthermore, the uniform basic wage will reduce both inflationary pressure in a boom and deflationary pressure in a bust. In a boom, private employers can recruit from the ELR pool of workers, paying a mark-up over the ELR wage. The ELR pool acts like a “reserve army” of the employed, dampening wage pressures as private employment grows. In recession, workers down-sized by private employers can work at the ELR wage, which puts a floor to how low wages and income can go.

Critics argue that a job guarantee would be inflationary, using some version of a Phillips Curve approach according to which lower unemployment necessarily means higher inflation. (Sawyer 2003) Some argue that ELR would reduce the incentive to work, raising private sector costs because of increased shirking, since workers would no longer fear job loss. Workers might be emboldened to ask for greater wage increases. Some argue that an ELR program would be so big that it would be impossible to manage; some fear corruption; others argue that it would be impossible to find useful things for ELR workers to do; still others argue that it would be difficult to discipline ELR workers. It has been argued that a national job guarantee would be too expensive, causing the budget deficit to grow on an unsustainable path; and that higher employment would worsen trade deficits. (Aspromourgous 2000; King 2001; See Mitchell and Wray 2005 for responses to all of these critiques.)

There have been many job creation programs implemented around the world, some of which were narrowly targeted while others were broad-based. The 1930s American New Deal contained several moderately inclusive programs including the Civilian Conservation Corp and the Works Progress Administration. Sweden developed broad based employment programs that virtually guaranteed access to jobs, until government began to retrench in the 1970s. (Ginsburg 1983) In the aftermath of its economic crisis that came with the collapse of its currency board, Argentina created Plan Jefes y Jefas that guaranteed a job for poor heads of households. (Tcherneva and Wray 2005) The program successfully created 2 million new jobs that not only provided employment and income for poor families, but also provided needed services and free goods to poor neighborhoods. More recently, India passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005) that commits the government to providing employment in a public works project to any adult living in a rural area. The job must be provided within 15 days of registration, and must provide employment for a minimum of 100 days per year. (Hirway 2006) These real world experiments provide fertile ground for testing the claims on both sides of the job guarantee debate.

References

Aspromourgos, T. “Is an Employer-of-Last-Resort Policy Sustainable? A Review Article.” Review of Political Economy 12, no. 2 (2000): 141-155.

Burgess, J. and Mitchell, W.F. (1998), ‘Unemployment Human Rights and Full Employment Policy in Australia,’ in M. Jones and P. Kreisler (eds.), Globalization, Human Rights and Civil Society, Sydney, Australia: Prospect Press.

Darity, William Jr. “Who loses from Unemployment.” Journal of Economic Issues, 33, no. 2 (June 1999): 491.

Forstater, Mathew. “Full Employment and Economic Flexibility” Economic and Labour Relations Review, Volume 11, 1999.

Ginsburg, Helen (1983), Full Employment and Public Policy: The United States and Sweden, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Harvey, P. (1989), Securing the Right to Employment: Social Welfare Policy and the Unemployed in the United States, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hirway, Indira (2006), “Enhancing Livelihood Security through the National Employment Guarantee Act: Toward effective implementation of the Act”, The Levy Economics Institute Working Paper No. 437, January, www.levy.org.

King, J.E. “The Last Resort? Some Critical Reflections on ELR..” Journal of Economic and Social Policy 5, no. 2 (2001): 72-76.

Minsky, H.P. (1965), ‘The Role of Employment Policy,’ in M.S. Gordon (ed.), Poverty in America, San Francisco, CA: Chandler Publishing Company.

Mitchell, W.F. and Wray, L.R. (2005), ‘In Defense of Employer of Last Resort: a response to Malcolm Sawyer,’ Journal of Economic Issues, 39(1), 235-245.

Rawls, J. (1971), Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sawyer, M. (2003), ‘Employer of last resort: could it deliver full employment and price stability?,’ Journal of Economic Issues, 37(4), 881-908.

Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

Tcherneva, Pavlina and L. Randall Wray (2005), “Gender and the Job Guarantee: The impact of Argentina’s Jefes program on female heads of poor households”, Center for Full Employment and Price Stability Working Paper No. 50, December, www.cfeps.org.

Vickrey, W.S. (2004), Full Employment and Price Stability, M. Forstater and P.R. Tcherneva (eds.), Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Wray, L.R. and Forstater, M. (2004), ‘Full Employment and Economic Justice,’ in D. Champlin and J. Knoedler (eds.), The Institutionalist Tradition in labor Economics, Armonk: NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Wray, L.R. (1998), Understanding Modern Money: the key to full employment and price stability, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

11 Comments

Posted in L. Randall Wray, Policy and Reform, Uncategorized, Unemployment

Tagged , , ,

Interest Rate Determination

Posted on August 21, 2009 by | 26 comments
By L. Randall Wray [via CFEPS]

A few years ago, textbooks had traditionally presented monetary policy as a choice between targeting the quantity of money or the interest rate. It was supposed that control of monetary aggregates could be achieved through control over the quantity of reserves, given a relatively stable “money multiplier”. (Brunner 1968; Balbach 1981) This even led to some real world attempts to hit monetary growth targets—particularly in the US and the UK during the early 1980s. However, the results proved to be so dismal that almost all economists have come to the conclusion that at least in practice, it is not possible to hit money targets. (B. Friedman 1988) These real world results appear to have validated the arguments of those like Goodhart (1989) in the UK and Moore (1988) in the US that central banks have no choice but to set an interest rate target and then accommodate the demand for reserves at that target. Hence, if the central bank can indeed hit a reserve target, it does so only through its decision to raise or lower the interest rate to lower or raise the demand for reserves. Thus, the supply of reserves is best thought of as wholly accommodating the demand, but at the central bank’s interest rate target.

Why does the central bank necessarily accommodate the demand for reserves? There are at least four different answers. In the US, banks are required to hold reserves as a ratio against deposits, according to a fairly complex calculation. In the 1980s, the method used was changed from lagged to contemporaneous reserve accounting on the belief that this would tighten central bank control over loan and deposit expansion. As it turns out, however, both methods result in a backward looking reserve requirement: the reserves that must be held today depend to a greater or lesser degree on deposits held in the fairly distant past. As banks cannot go backward in time, there is nothing they can do about historical deposits. Even if a short settlement period is provided to meet reserve requirements, the required portfolio adjustment could be too great—especially when one considers that many bank assets are not liquid. Hence, in practice, the central bank automatically provides an overdraft—the only question is over the “price”, that is, the discount rate charged on reserves. In many nations, such as Canada and Australia, the promise of an overdraft is explicitly given, hence, there can be no question about central bank accommodation.

A second, less satisfying, answer is often given, which is that the central bank must operate as a lender of last resort, meaning that it provides reserves in order to preserve stability of the financial system. The problem with this explanation is that while it is undoubtedly true, it applies to a different time dimension. The central bank accommodates the demand for reserves day-by-day, even hour-by-hour. It would presumably take some time before refusal to accommodate the demand for reserves would be likely to generate the conditions in which bank runs and financial crises begin to occur. Once these occurred, the central bank would surely enter as a lender of last resort, but this is a different matter from the daily “horizontal” accommodation.

The third explanation is that the central bank accommodates reserve demand in order to ensure an orderly payments system. This might be seen as being closely related to the lender of last resort argument, but I think it can be more plausibly applied to the time frame over which accommodation takes place. Par clearing among banks, and more importantly par clearing with the government, requires that banks have access to reserves for clearing. (Note that deposit insurance ultimately makes the government responsible for check clearing, in any event.)

The final argument is that because the demand for reserves is highly inelastic, and because the private sector cannot increase the supply, the overnight interest rate would be highly unstable without central bank accommodation. Hence, relative stability of overnight rates requires “horizontal” accommodation by the central bank. In practice, empirical evidence of relatively stable overnight interest rates over even very short periods of time supports the belief that the central bank is accommodating horizontally.

We can conclude that the overnight rate is exogenously administered by the central bank. Short-term sovereign debt is a very good substitute asset for overnight reserve lending, hence, its interest rate will closely track the overnight interbank rate. Longer-term sovereign rates will depend on expectations of future short term rates, largely determined by expectations of future monetary policy targets. Thus, we can take those to be mostly controlled by the central bank as well, as it could announce targets far into future and thereby affect the spectrum of rates on sovereign debt.

26 Comments

Posted in L. Randall Wray, Monetary policy, Uncategorized

Tagged , ,