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No, Deflation is Not a ‘Danger’ |
No, Deflation is Not a ‘Danger’ |.
The ‘Deflation Danger’ Should Abate …
What is it with this perennial fear the chief money printers have of falling prices? Not that we are likely to see it happen, but if it does, what of it? Bloomberg reports on the recent ECB decision with the following headline: “Draghi Says Deflation Danger Should Abate as Economy Revives”
The headline alone is a hodge-podge of arrant nonsense. First of all, ‘deflation’ (this is to say, falling prices), is not a ‘danger’. Speaking for ourselves and billions of earth’s consumers: we love it when prices fall! It means our incomes go further and our savings will buy more as well. What’s not to love?
The problem is of course that when prices decline, the ‘wrong’ sectors of society actually benefit, while those whose bread is buttered by the inflation tax would no longer benefit at the expense of everybody else. But they never say that, do they? Has Draghi ever explained why he believes deflation to be a danger? No, we are just supposed to know/accept that it is.
Secondly, the ‘as economy revives’ part makes no sense whatsoever. Why and how should a genuinely reviving economy produce inflation? Economic growth occurs when more goods and services are produced. Their prices should, ceteris paribus, fall (of course, we are not supposed to inquire too deeply into which ceteris likely won’t remain paribus if Draghi gets his wish).
From Bloomberg:
“ European Central Bank President Mario Draghi signaled that deflation risks in the euro region are easing for now after new forecasts showed that inflation will approach their target by the end of 2016.
The news that has come out since the last monetary policy meeting are by and large on the positive side,” he told reporters in Frankfurt today after the central bank kept itsmain interest rate at 0.25 percent. He also indicated that money markets are under control at the moment, lessening the need for emergency liquidity measures.
Draghi is facing down the threat of deflation in an economy still recovering from a debt crisis that threatened to rip it apart less than two years ago. New ECB forecasts today underscore his view that the 18-nation bloc will escape a Japan-style period of falling prices as momentum in the economy improves.”
(emphasis added)
We have highlighted the sentence above because we keep reading about the ‘Japan-style deflation trap’ for many, many years now. You would think that Japan was a third world country by now the way this keeps being portrayed as a kind of monetary evil incarnate that destroys the economy. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
Inflation is Not Equivalent to Economic Growth
‘Inflation’ is not the same as ‘economic growth’ – on the contrary, it both causes and frequently masks economic retrogression. How much inflation has there been in the euro area over time? Let’s have a look.
The euro area’s true money supply since 1980. One can only shudder at this depiction of ‘deflation danger’ in action – click to enlarge.
What about prices though? Let’s have a look-see:
Since 1960, there was exactly one year during which prices according to the ‘CPI’ measure actually fell, namely in 2009, by a grand total of 0.5% – click to enlarge.
As Austrian economists have long explained, it is simply untrue that prices must rise for the economy to grow. Consumersobviously benefit from falling prices (only Keynesian like Paul Krugman don’t realize that, as their thought processes are evidently unsullied by logic and/or common sense). All of us can easily ascertain how beneficial the decline in computer prices, cell- and smart phone prices, prices for TV screens, etc. is. Naturally, it would be even better if all prices fell, not only those on a select group of consumer goods.
What about producers? Won’t they suffer? By simply looking at the share prices and earnings of the companies that make all the technological gadgets the prices of which have been continually declining for decades, everybody should realize immediately that the answer must be a resounding NO. This is by the way not only true of the firms that are in the final stages of the production process, i.e. the stages closest to the consumer. It is obviously also true for the firms in the higher stages of the capital structure. But why? It is quite simple actually: prices are imputed all along the chain of production. What is important for these companies to thrive are not the nominal prices of the products they sell, but the price spreadsbetween their input and output.
In fact, the computer/electronics sector is the one that comes closest to showing us how things would likely look in a free, unhampered market economy.
Of course, in said free, unhampered market economy, Mr. Draghi and a host of other central planners would have to look for a new job.
Charts by: ECB
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No, Deflation is Not a ‘Danger’ |
No, Deflation is Not a ‘Danger’ |.
The ‘Deflation Danger’ Should Abate …
What is it with this perennial fear the chief money printers have of falling prices? Not that we are likely to see it happen, but if it does, what of it? Bloomberg reports on the recent ECB decision with the following headline: “Draghi Says Deflation Danger Should Abate as Economy Revives”
The headline alone is a hodge-podge of arrant nonsense. First of all, ‘deflation’ (this is to say, falling prices), is not a ‘danger’. Speaking for ourselves and billions of earth’s consumers: we love it when prices fall! It means our incomes go further and our savings will buy more as well. What’s not to love?
The problem is of course that when prices decline, the ‘wrong’ sectors of society actually benefit, while those whose bread is buttered by the inflation tax would no longer benefit at the expense of everybody else. But they never say that, do they? Has Draghi ever explained why he believes deflation to be a danger? No, we are just supposed to know/accept that it is.
Secondly, the ‘as economy revives’ part makes no sense whatsoever. Why and how should a genuinely reviving economy produce inflation? Economic growth occurs when more goods and services are produced. Their prices should, ceteris paribus, fall (of course, we are not supposed to inquire too deeply into which ceteris likely won’t remain paribus if Draghi gets his wish).
From Bloomberg:
“ European Central Bank President Mario Draghi signaled that deflation risks in the euro region are easing for now after new forecasts showed that inflation will approach their target by the end of 2016.
The news that has come out since the last monetary policy meeting are by and large on the positive side,” he told reporters in Frankfurt today after the central bank kept itsmain interest rate at 0.25 percent. He also indicated that money markets are under control at the moment, lessening the need for emergency liquidity measures.
Draghi is facing down the threat of deflation in an economy still recovering from a debt crisis that threatened to rip it apart less than two years ago. New ECB forecasts today underscore his view that the 18-nation bloc will escape a Japan-style period of falling prices as momentum in the economy improves.”
(emphasis added)
We have highlighted the sentence above because we keep reading about the ‘Japan-style deflation trap’ for many, many years now. You would think that Japan was a third world country by now the way this keeps being portrayed as a kind of monetary evil incarnate that destroys the economy. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
Inflation is Not Equivalent to Economic Growth
‘Inflation’ is not the same as ‘economic growth’ – on the contrary, it both causes and frequently masks economic retrogression. How much inflation has there been in the euro area over time? Let’s have a look.
The euro area’s true money supply since 1980. One can only shudder at this depiction of ‘deflation danger’ in action – click to enlarge.
What about prices though? Let’s have a look-see:
Since 1960, there was exactly one year during which prices according to the ‘CPI’ measure actually fell, namely in 2009, by a grand total of 0.5% – click to enlarge.
As Austrian economists have long explained, it is simply untrue that prices must rise for the economy to grow. Consumersobviously benefit from falling prices (only Keynesian like Paul Krugman don’t realize that, as their thought processes are evidently unsullied by logic and/or common sense). All of us can easily ascertain how beneficial the decline in computer prices, cell- and smart phone prices, prices for TV screens, etc. is. Naturally, it would be even better if all prices fell, not only those on a select group of consumer goods.
What about producers? Won’t they suffer? By simply looking at the share prices and earnings of the companies that make all the technological gadgets the prices of which have been continually declining for decades, everybody should realize immediately that the answer must be a resounding NO. This is by the way not only true of the firms that are in the final stages of the production process, i.e. the stages closest to the consumer. It is obviously also true for the firms in the higher stages of the capital structure. But why? It is quite simple actually: prices are imputed all along the chain of production. What is important for these companies to thrive are not the nominal prices of the products they sell, but the price spreadsbetween their input and output.
In fact, the computer/electronics sector is the one that comes closest to showing us how things would likely look in a free, unhampered market economy.
Of course, in said free, unhampered market economy, Mr. Draghi and a host of other central planners would have to look for a new job.
Charts by: ECB
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Bernanke’s Legacy: A Weak and Mediocre Economy – John P. Cochran – Mises Daily
Bernanke’s Legacy: A Weak and Mediocre Economy – John P. Cochran – Mises Daily.
As Chairman Bernanke’s reign at the Fed comes to an end, the Wall Street Journal provides its assessment of “The Bernanke Legacy.” Overall the Journaldoes a reasonable job on both Greenspan and Bernanke, especially compared to the “effusive praise from the usual suspects; supporters ofmonetary central planning. The Journalargues when accessing Bernanke’s performance it is appropriate to review Bernanke’s performance “before, during, and after the financial panic.”
While most assessments of Bernanke’s performance as a central banker focus on the “during” and “after” financial-crisis phases with much of the praise based on the “during” phase, the Journaljoins the Austrians and John Taylor in unfavorable assessment of the more critical “before” period. It was this period when the Fed generated its second boom-bust cycle in the Greenspan-Bernanke era. In the Journal’s assessment, Bernanke, Greenspan, and the Fed deserve an “F.” While this pre-crisis period mostly fell under the leadership of Alan Greenspan, the Journal highlights that Bernanke was the “leading intellectual force” behind the pre-crisis policies. As a result of these too loose, too long policies, just as the leadership of the Fed passed from Greenspan to Bernanke, the credit boom the Fed “did so much to create turned to mania, which turned to panic, which became a deep recession.” The Journal’s description of Bernanke’s role should be highlighted in any serious analysis of the Bernanke era:
His [Bernanke’s] role goes back to 2002 when as a Fed Governor he gave a famous speech warning about deflation that didn’t exist [and if it did exist should not have been feared].[1] He and Mr. Greenspan nonetheless followed the advice of Paul Krugman to promote a housing bubble to offset the dot-com crash.
As Fed transcripts show, Mr. Bernanke was the board’s intellectual leader in its decision to cut the fed-funds rate to 1% in June 2003 and keep it there for a year. This was despite a rapidly accelerating economy (3.8% growth in 2004) and soaring commodity and real-estate prices. The Fed’s multiyear policy of negative real interest rates produced a credit mania that led to the housing bubble and bust.
For some of the best analysis of the Fed’s pre-crisis culpability one should turn to Roger Garrison’s excellent analysis. In a 2009 Cato Journal paper, Garrison (2009, p. 187) characterizes Fed policy during the “Great Moderation as a “learning by doing policy” which, based on events post-2003, would be better classified as “so far so good” or “whistling in the dark.” The actual result of this “learning by doing policy” is described by Garrison in “Natural Rates of Interest and Sustainable Growth”:
In the earlier episode [dot.com boom-bust], the Federal Reserve moved to counter the upward pressure of interest rates, causing actual interest rates not to deviate greatly from the historical norm. In the later episode [housingbubble/boom-bust], the Federal Reserve moved to reinforce the downward pressure on interest rates, causing the actual interest rates to be exceedingly low relative to the historical norm. Although the judgment, made retrospectively by economists of virtually all stripes, that the Fed funds target rate was “too low for too long” between mid-2003 and mid-2004, it was almost surely too low for too long relative to the natural rate in both episodes. (p. 433)
Given this and other strong evidence of the Fed’s role in creating the credit driven boom, theJournal faults “Mr. Bernanke’s refusal to acknowledge that the Fed made any mistake in the mania years.”
On the response to the crisis, the Journal refrains from the accolades of many who credit the Fed led by the leading scholar of the Great Depression from acting strongly to prevent another such calamity. According to the Fed worshipers, things might not be good, but without the unprecedented actions and bailouts things would have been catastrophic. The Journal’s more measured assessment:
Once the crisis hit, Mr. Bernanke and the Fed deserve the benefit of the doubt. From the safe distance of hindsight, it’s easy to forget how rapid and widespread the financial panic was. The Fed had to offset the collapse in the velocity of money with an increase in its supply, and it did so with force and dispatch. One can disagree with the Fed’s special guarantee programs, but we weren’t sitting in the financial polar vortex at the time. It’s hard to see how others would have done much better.
But discerning readers of Vern McKinley’s Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts might disagree. Fed actions, even when not verging on the illegal, were counter-productive, unnecessary, and contributed to action freezing policy uncertainty which contributed to the collapse of the velocity of money. McKinley describes much of what was done as “seat-of-the-pants decision-making” (pp. 305-306):
“Seat of the pants” is not a flattering description of the methods of the regulators, but its use is justified to describe the panic-driven actions during the 2000s crisis. It is only natural that under the deadline of time pressure judgment will be flawed, mistakes will be made and taxpayer exposure will be magnified, and that has clearly been the case. With the possible exception of the Lehman Brothers decision … all of the major bailout decisions during the 2000s crisis were made under duress of panic over a very short period of time with very limited information at hand and with input of a limited number of objective parties involved in the decision making. Not surprisingly, these seat-of–the-pants responses did not instill confidence, and there was no clear evidence collected that the expected negative fallout would truly have occurred.
While a defense of some Fed action could be found in Hayek’s 1970s discussion of “best” policy under bad institutions (a central bank) where he argued that during a crisis a central bank should act to prevent a secondary deflation, the Fed actions went clearly beyond such a recommendation. Better would have been an immediate policy to end the credit expansion in its tracks. The Fed’s special guarantee programs and movement toward a mondustrial policy should be a great worry to anyone concerned about long-term prosperity and liberty. Whether any human running a central bank could have done better is an open question, but other monetary arrangements could clearly have led to better outcomes.
The Journal’s analysis of post-crisis policy, while not as harsh as it should be,[2] is critical. Despite an unprecedented expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet, the “recovery is historically weak.” At some point “a Fed chairman has to take some responsibility for the mediocre growth — and lack of real income growth — on his watch.” Bernanke’s policy is also rightly criticized because “The other great cost of these post-crisis policies is the intrusion of the Fed into politics and fiscal policy.”
Because the ultimate outcome of this monetary cycle hinges on how, when, or if the Fed can unwind its unwieldy balance sheet, without further damage to the economy; most likely continuing stagnation or a return to stagflation, or less likely, but possible hyper-inflation or even a deflationary depression, the Bernanke legacy will ultimately depend on a Bernanke-Yellen legacy. Given, as the Journal points out, “Politicians — and even some conservative pundits — have adopted the Bernanke standard that the Fed’s duty is to reduce unemployment and manage the business cycle,” the prospect that this legacy will be viewed favorably is less and less likely. Perhaps if the editors joined Paul Krugman in reading and fully digesting Joe Salerno’s “A Reformulation of Austrian Business Cycle Theory in Light of the Financial Crisis,” they would correctly fail Bernanke and Fed policy before, during, and after the crisis.
But what should be the main lesson of a Greenspan-Bernanke legacy? Clearly, if there was no pre-crisis credit boom, there would have been no large financial crisis and thus no need for Bernanke or other human to have done better during and after. While Austrian analysis has often been criticized, incorrectly,[3] for not having policy recommendations on what to do during the crisis and recovery, it should be noted that if Austrian recommendations for eliminating central banks and allowing banking freedom had been followed, no such devastating crisis would have occurred and no heroic policy response would have been necessary in the resulting free and prosperous commonwealth.
Note: The views expressed in Daily Articles on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.
Comment on this article. When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment.
John P. Cochran is emeritus dean of the Business School and emeritus professor of economics at Metropolitan State University of Denver and coauthor with Fred R. Glahe of The Hayek-Keynes Debate: Lessons for Current Business Cycle Research. He is also a senior scholar for the Mises Institute and serves on the editorial board of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. Send him mail. See John P. Cochran’s article archives.
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Notes
[1] See Joseph T. Salerno, “An Austrian Taxonomy of Deflation — With Applications to the U.S.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 6, no. 4 (2001).
[2] See John P. Cochran’s, Bernanke: The Good Engineer? Mises Daily Article, 21 March 2013 and Bernanke: A Tenure of Failure, Mises Daily Article, 31, July 2013.
[3] See John P. Cochran, Recessions: The Don’t Do List, Mises Daily Article, 17 February 2013.
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The Emerging Market Collapse Through The Eyes Of Don Corleone | Zero Hedge
The Emerging Market Collapse Through The Eyes Of Don Corleone | Zero Hedge.
Submitted by Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory
It Was Barzini All Along
Tattaglia is a pimp. He never could have outfought Santino. But I didn’t know until this day that it was Barzini all along.
— Don Vito Corleone
Like many in the investments business, I am a big fan of the Godfather movies, or at least those that don’t have Sofia Coppola in a supporting role. The strategic crux of the first movie is the realization by Don Corleone at a peace-making meeting of the Five Families that the garden variety gangland war he thought he was fighting with the Tattaglia Family was actually part of an existential war being waged by the nominal head of the Families, Don Barzini. Vito warns his son Michael, who becomes the new head of the Corleone Family, and the two of them plot a strategy of revenge and survival to be put into motion after Vito’s death. The movie concludes with Michael successfully murdering Barzini and his various supporters, a plot arc that depends entirely on Vito’s earlier recognition of the underlying cause of the Tattaglia conflict. Once Vito understood WHY Philip Tattaglia was coming after him, that he was just a stooge for Emilio Barzini, everything changed for the Corleone Family’s strategy.
Now imagine that Don Corleone wasn’t a gangster at all, but was a macro fund portfolio manager or, really, any investor or allocator who views the label of “Emerging Market” as a useful differentiation … maybe not as a separate asset class per se, but as a meaningful way of thinking about one broad set of securities versus another. With the expansion of investment options and liquid securities that reflect this differentiation — from Emerging Market ETF’s to Emerging Market mutual funds — anyone can be a macro investor today, and most of us are to some extent.
You might think that the ease with which anyone can be an Emerging Markets investor today would make the investment behavior around these securities more complex from a game theory perspective as more and more players enter the game, but actually just the opposite is true. The old Emerging Markets investment game had very high informational and institutional barriers to entry, which meant that the players relied heavily on their private information and relatively little on public signals and Common Knowledge. There may be far more players in the new Emerging Markets investment game, but they are essentially one type of player with a very heavy reliance on Common Knowledge and public Narratives. Also, these new players are not (necessarily) retail investors, but are (mostly) institutional investors that see Emerging Markets or sub-classifications of Emerging Markets as an asset class with certain attractive characteristics as part of a broad portfolio. Because these institutional investors have so much money that must be put to work and because their portfolio preference functions are so uniform, there is a very powerful and very predictable game dynamic in play here.
Since the 2008 Crisis the Corleone Family has had a pretty good run with their Emerging Markets investments, and even more importantly Vito believes that he understands WHY those investments have worked. In the words of Olivier Blanchard, Chief Economist for the IMF:
In emerging market countries by contrast, the crisis has not left lasting wounds. Their fiscal and financial positions were typically stronger to start, and adverse effects of the crisis have been more muted. High underlying growth and low interest rates are making fiscal adjustment much easier. Exports have largely recovered, and whatever shortfall in external demand they experienced has typically been made up through an increase in domestic demand. Capital outflows have turned into capital inflows, due to both better growth prospects and higher interest rates than in advanced countries. … The challenge for most emerging countries is quite different from that of advanced countries, namely how to avoid overheating in the face of closing output gaps and higher capital flows. — April 11, 2011
As late as January 23rd of this year, Blanchard wrote that “we forecast that both emerging market and developing economies will sustain strong growth“.
Now we all know what actually happened in 2013. Growth has been disappointing around the world, particularly in Emerging Markets, and most of these local stock and bond markets have been hit really hard. But if you’re Vito Corleone, macro investor extraordinaire, that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. Sure, you don’t like to see any of your investments go down, but Emerging Markets are notably volatile and maybe this is a great buying opportunity across the board. In fact, so long as the core growth STORY is intact, it almost certainly is a buying opportunity.
But then you wake up on July 9th to read in the WSJ that Olivier Blanchard has changed his tune. He now says “It’s clear that these countries [China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa] are not going to grow at the same rate as they did before the crisis.” Huh? Or rather, WTF? How did the Chief Economist of the IMF go from predicting “strong growth” to declaring that the party is over and the story has fundamentally changed in six months?
It’s important to point out that Blanchard is not some inconsequential opinion leader, but is one of the most influential economists in the world today. His position at the IMF is a temporary gig from his permanent position as the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics at MIT, where he has taught since 1983. He also received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT (1977), where his fellow graduate students were Ben Bernanke (1979), Mario Draghi (1976), and Paul Krugman (1977), among other modern-day luminaries; Stanley Fischer, current Governor of the Bank of Israel, was the dissertation advisor for both Blanchard and Bernanke; Mervyn King and Larry Summers (and many, many more) were Blanchard’s contemporaries or colleagues at MIT at one point or another. The centrality of MIT to the core orthodoxy of modern economic theory in general and monetary policy in particular has been well documented by Jon Hilsenrath and others and it’s not a stretch to say that MIT provided a personal bond and a formative intellectual experience for a group of people that by and large rule the world today. Suffice it to say that Blanchard is smack in the middle of that orthodoxy and that group. I’m not saying that anything Blanchard says is amazingly influential in and of itself, certainly not to the degree of a Bernanke or a Draghi (or even a Krugman), but I believe it is highly representative of the shared beliefs and opinions that exist among these enormously influential policy makers and policy advisors. Two years ago the global economic intelligentsia believed that Emerging Markets had emerged from the 2008 crisis essentially unscathed, but today they believe that EM growth rates are permanently diminished from pre-crisis levels. That’s a big deal, and anyone who invests or allocates to “Emerging Markets” as a differentiated group of securities had better take notice.
Here’s what I think happened.
First, an error pattern has emerged over the past few years from global growth data and IMF prediction models that forced a re-evaluation of those models and the prevailing Narrative of “unscathed” Emerging Markets. Below is a chart showing actual Emerging Market growth rates for each year listed, as well as the IMF prediction at the mid-year mark within that year and the mid-year mark within the prior year (generating an 18-month forward estimate).
Pre-crisis the IMF systematically under-estimated growth in Emerging Markets. Post-crisis the IMF has systematically over-estimated growth in Emerging Markets. Now to be sure, this IMF over-estimation of growth exists for Developed Markets, too, but between the EuroZone sovereign debt crisis and the US fiscal cliff drama there’s a “reason” for the unexpected weakness in Developed Markets. There’s no obvious reason for the persistent Emerging Market weakness given the party line that “whatever shortfall in external demand they experienced has typically been made up through an increase in domestic demand.” Trust me, IMF economists know full well that their models under-estimated EM growth pre-crisis and have now flipped their bias to over-estimate growth today. Nothing freaks out a statistician more than this sort of flipped sign. It means that a set of historical correlations has “gone perverse” by remaining predictive, but in the opposite manner that it used to be predictive. This should never happen if your underlying theory of how the world works is correct. So now the IMF (and every other mainstream macroeconomic analysis effort in the world) has a big problem. They know that their models are perversely over-estimating growth, which given the current projections means that we’re probably looking at three straight years of sub-5% growth in Emerging Markets (!!) more than three years after the 2008 crisis ended, and — worse — they have no plausible explanation for what’s going on.
Fortunately for all concerned, a Narrative of Central Bank Omnipotence has emerged over the past nine months, where it has become Common Knowledge that US monetary policy is responsible for everything that happens in global markets, for good and for ill (see “How Gold Lost Its Luster”). This Narrative is incredibly useful to the Olivier Blanchard’s of the world, as it provides a STORY for why their prediction models have collapsed. And maybe it really does rescue their models. I have no idea. All I’m saying is that whether the Narrative is “true” or not, it will be adopted and proselytized by those whose interests — bureaucratic, economic, political, etc. — are served by that Narrative. That’s not evil, it’s just human nature.
Nor is the usefulness of the Narrative of Central Bank Omnipotence limited to IMF economists. To listen to Emerging Market central bankers at Jackson Hole two weeks ago or to Emerging Market politicians at the G-20 meeting last week you would think that a great revelation had been delivered from on high. Agustin Carstens, Mexico’s equivalent to Ben Bernanke, gave a speech on the “massive carry trade strategies” caused by ZIRP and pleaded for more Fed sensitivity to their capital flow risks. Interesting how the Fed is to blame now that the cash is flowing out, but it was Mexico’s wonderful growth profile to credit when the cash was flowing in. South Africa’s finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, gave an interview to the FT from Jackson Hole where he bemoaned the “inability to find coherent and cohesive responses across the globe to ensure that we reduce the volatility in currencies in particular, but also in sentiment” now that the Fed is talking about a Taper. Christine Lagarde got into the act, of course, calling on the world to build “further lines of defense” even as she noted that the IMF would (gulp) have to stand in the breach as the Fed left the field. To paraphrase Job: the Fed gave, and the Fed hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Fed.
The problem, though, is that once you embrace the Narrative of Central Bank Omnipotence to “explain” recent events, you can’t compartmentalize it there. If the pattern of post-crisis Emerging Market growth rates is largely explained by US monetary accommodation or lack thereof … well, the same must be true for pre-crisis Emerging Market growth rates. The inexorable conclusion is that Emerging Market growth rates are a function of Developed Market central bank liquidity measures and monetary policy, and that all Emerging Markets are, to one degree or another, Greece-like in their creation of unsustainable growth rates on the back of 20 years of The Great Moderation (as Bernanke referred to the decline in macroeconomic volatility from accommodative monetary policy) and the last 4 years of ZIRP. It was Barzini all along!
This shift in the Narrative around Emerging Markets — that the Fed is the “true” engine of global growth — is a new thing. As evidence of its novelty, I would point you to another bastion of modern economic orthodoxy, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), in particular their repository of working papers. Pretty much every US economist of note in the past 40 years has published an NBER working paper, and I only say “pretty much every” because I want to be careful; my real estimate is that there are zero mainstream US economists who don’t have a working paper here.
If you search the NBER working paper database for “emerging market crises”, you see 16 papers. Again, the author list reads like a who’s who of famous economists: Martin Feldstein, Jeffrey Sachs, Rudi Dornbusch, Fredric Mishkin, Barry Eichengreen, Nouriel Roubini, etc. Of these 16 papers, only 2 — Frankel and Roubini (2001) and Arellano and Mendoza (2002) — even mention the words “Federal Reserve” in the context of an analysis of these crises, and in both cases the primary point is that some Emerging Market crises, like the 1998 Russian default, force the Fed to cut interest rates. They see a causal relationship here, but in the opposite direction of today’s Narrative! Now to be fair, several of the papers point to rising Developed Market interest rates as a “shock” or contributing factor to Emerging Market crises, and Eichengreen and Rose (1998) make this their central claim. But even here the argument is that “a one percent increase in Northern interest rates is associated with an increase in the probability of Southern banking crises of around three percent” … not exactly an earth-shattering causal relationship. More fundamentally, none of these authors ever raise the possibility that low Developed Market interest rates are the core engine of Emerging Market growth rates. It’s just not even contemplated as an explanation.
Today, though, this new Narrative is everywhere. It pervades both the popular media and the academic “media”, such as the prominent Jackson Hole paper by Helene Rey of the London Business School, where the nutshell argument is that global financial cycles are creatures of Fed policy … period, end of story. Not only is every other country just along for the ride, but Emerging Markets are kidding themselves if they think that their plight matters one whit to the US and the Fed.
Market participants today see Barzini/Bernanke everywhere, behind every news announcement and every market tick. They may be right. They may be reading the situation as smartly as Vito Corleone did. I doubt it, but it really doesn’t matter. Whether or not I privately believe that Barzini/Bernanke is behind everything that happens in the world, I am constantly told that this is WHY market events happen the way they do. And because I know that everyone else is seeing the same media explanations of WHY that I am seeing … because I know that everyone else is going through the same tortured decision process that I’m going through … because I know that everyone else is thinking about me in the same way that I am thinking about them … because I know that if everyone else acts as if he or she believes the Narrative then I should act as if I believe the Narrative … then the only rational conclusion is that I should act as if I believe it. That’s the Common Knowledge game in action. This is what people mean when they say that a market behavior of any sort “takes on a life of its own.”
For the short term, at least, the smart play is probably just to go along with the Barzini/Bernanke Narrative, just like the Corleone family went along with the idea that Barzini was running them out of New York (and yes, I understand that at this point I’m probably taking this Godfather analogy too far). By going along I mean thinking of the current market dynamic in terms of risk management, understanding that the overall information structure of this market is remarkably unstable. Risk-On / Risk-Off behavior is likely to increase significantly in the months ahead, and there’s really no predicting when Bernanke will open his mouth or what he’ll say, or who will be appointed to take his place, or what he or she will say. It’s hard to justify any large exposure to public securities in this environment, long or short, because all public securities will be dominated by this Narrative so long as everyone thinks that everyone thinks they will be dominated. This the sort of game can go on for a long time, particularly when the Narrative serves the interests of incredibly powerful institutions around the world.
But what ultimately saved the Corleone family wasn’t just the observation of Barzini’s underlying causal influence, it was the strategy that adjusted to the new reality of WHY. What’s necessary here is not just a gnashing of teeth or tsk-tsk’ing about how awful it is that monetary policy has achieved such behavioral dominance over markets, but a recognition that it IS, that there are investment opportunities created by its existence, and that the greatest danger is to continue on as if nothing has changed.
I believe that there are two important investment implications that stem from this sea change in the Narrative around Emerging Markets, which I’ll introduce today and develop at length in subsequent notes.
First, I think it’s necessary for active investors to recalibrate their analysis towards individual securities that happen to be found in Emerging Markets, not aggregations of securities with an “Emerging Markets” label. I say this because in the aggregate, Emerging Market securities (ETF’s, broad-based funds, etc.) are now the equivalent of a growth stock with a broken story, and that’s a very difficult row to hoe. Take note, though, the language you will have to speak in this analytic recalibration of Emerging Market securities is Value, not Growth, and the critical attribute of a successful investment will have little to do with the security’s inherent qualities (particularly growth qualities) but a great deal to do with whether a critical mass of Value-speaking investors take an interest in the security.
Second, there’s a Big Trade here related to the predictable behaviors and preference functions of the giant institutional investors or advisors that — by size and by strategy — are locked into a perception of Emerging Market meaning that can only be expressed through aggregations of securities or related fungible asset classes (foreign exchange and commodities). These mega-allocators do not “see” Emerging Markets as an opportunity set of individual securities, but as an asset class with useful diversification qualities within an overall portfolio. So long as market behaviors around Emerging Markets in the aggregate are driven by the Barzini/Bernanke Narrative, that diversification quality will decline, as the same Fed-speak engine is driving behaviors in both Emerging Markets and Developed Markets. Mega-allocators care more about diversification and correlations than they do about price, which means that the selling pressure will continue/increase so long as the old models aren’t working and the Barzini/Bernanke Narrative diminishes what made Emerging Markets as an asset class useful to these institutions in the first place. But when that selling pressure dissipates — either because the Barzini/Bernanke Narrative wanes or the mega-portfolios are balanced for the new correlation models that take the Barzini/Bernanke market effect into account — that’s when Emerging Market securities in the aggregate will work again. You will never identify that turning point in Emerging Market security prices by staring at a price chart. To use a poker analogy you must play the player — in this case the mega-allocators who care a lot about correlation and little about price — not the cards in order to know when to place a big bet.
In future weeks I’ll be expanding on each of these investment themes, as well as taking them into the realm of foreign exchange and commodities. Also, there’s a lot still to be said about Fed communication policy and the Frankenstein’s Monster it has become. I hope you will join me for the journey, and if you’d like to be on the direct distribution list for these free weekly notes please sign up at Follow Epsilon Theory.
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Here it comes– more leading economists call for capital controls
Here it comes– more leading economists call for capital controls.
As the saying goes, ‘desperate times call for desperate measures.’
The phrase is bandied about so frequently, it’s generally accepted truth. But I have to tell you that I fundamentally disagree with the premise.
Desperate times, in fact, call for a complete reset in the way people think. Desperate times call for the most intelligent, effective, least destructive measures. But these sayings aren’t as catchy.
This old adage has become a crutch– a way for policymakers to rationalize the idiotic measures they’ve put in place:
- Inflation-adjusted interest rates that are… negative.
- Trillion dollar deficits.
- Endless wars and saber-rattling
- Unprecedented expansion of central bank balance sheets.
- DIRECT CONFISCATION of people’s bank accounts.
But hey… desperate times call for desperate measures. I guess we’re all just supposed to be OK with that.
One of those desperate measures that’s been coming up a lot lately is the re-re-re-introduction of capital controls.
It started in late 2012, when both the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund seperately endorsed the use of capital controls.
For the IMF, it was a staunch reversal of its previous position, and Paul Krugman lauded the agency’s “surprising intellectual flexibility” a few days later.
The IMF then followed up in 2013 with another little ditty proposing a global wealth tax. The good idea factory is clearly working ’round the clock over there.
Lately, two more leading economists– Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff– have joined the debate.
In a speech to the American Economic Association earlier this month, the pair suggested that rich economies may need to resort to the tactics generally reserved for emerging markets.
This is code for financial repression and capital controls.
The idea behind capital controls is simple: create barriers to restrict the free flow of capital. And if you’re on the receiving end, capital controls can be enormously destructive.
But for politicians, capital controls are hugely beneficial; once they trap funds within their borders, the money can be easily taxed, confiscated, or inflated.
Historically, capital controls have been used in ‘desperate times’. Too much debt. Too much deficit spending. Wars. Huge trade deficit. Intentional currency devaluation. Etc.
Does any of this sound familiar? It’s no surprise that policymakers have once again turned to this ‘desperate measure’. They’re already here.
Iceland has capital controls, over five years after its spectacular meltdown. We can also see capital controls in Cyprus, India, Argentina, etc.
I’ve been writing for years that capital controls are a foregone conclusion. This is no longer theory or conjecture. It’s happening. And every bit of objective evidence suggests that the march towards capital controls will quicken.
This is a HUGE reason to consider holding a portion of your savings overseas in a strong, stable foreign bank where your home government won’t as easily be able to trap your savings.
Other options including storing physical gold (even anonymously) at an overseas depository. Or if you’re inclined and tech savvy, you can also own digital currency.
But perhaps the best way to move some capital abroad is to own foreign real estate, especially productive land.
Foreign real estate is not reportable. It’s a great store of value. It generates both financial profits and personal resilience. It’s a LOT harder to forcibly repatriate. And it ensures that you always have a place to go in case you need to get out of Dodge.
Even if nothing ‘bad’ ever happens, you won’t be worse off for owning productive land in a thriving economy.
Like I said– desperate times don’t call for desperate measures. More than ever, it’s time for a complete reset in the way we look at the most effective solutions. These options are certainly among them.
by Simon Black
Simon Black is an international investor, entrepreneur, permanent traveler, free man, and founder of Sovereign Man. His free daily e-letter and crash course is about using the experiences from his life and travels to help you achieve more freedom.
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The Negative Natural Interest Rate and Uneconomic Growth
The Negative Natural Interest Rate and Uneconomic Growth.
In a recent speech to the International Monetary Fund economist Larry Summers argued that since near zero interest rates have not stimulated GDP growth sufficiently to reach full employment, we probably need a negative interest rate. By this he means a negative monetary rate set by the Fed to equal the “natural” rate, which he believes is now negative. The natural rate, as Summers uses the term, means the rate that would equalize planned saving with planned investment, and thereby, as Keynes taught us, result in full employment. With near zero monetary rates, current inflation already pushes us to a negative real rate of interest, but that is still insufficiently negative, in Summers’ view, to equalize planned investment with planned saving and thereby stimulate GDP growth sufficient for full employment. A negative interest rate is a stunning proposal, and it takes some effort to work out its implications.
Suppose for a moment that GDP growth, economic growth as we gratuitously call it, entails uneconomic growth by a more comprehensive measure of costs and benefits — that GDP growth has now begun to increase counted plus uncounted costs by more than counted plus uncounted benefits, making us inclusively and collectively poorer, not richer. If that is the case, and there are good reasons to believe that it is, would it not then be reasonable to expect, along with Summers, that the natural rate of interest is negative, and that maybe the monetary rate should be too? This is hard to imagine, but it means that savers would have to pay investors (and banks) to use the funds that they have saved, rather than investors and banks paying savers for the use of their money. To keep the GDP growing sufficiently to avoid unemployment we would need a growing monetary circular flow, which would require more investment, which, in turn, would only be forthcoming if the monetary interest rate were negative (i.e., if you lost less by investing your money than by holding it). A negative interest rate “makes sense” if the goal is to keep on increasing GDP even after it has begun to make us poorer at the margin — that is after growth has already pushed us beyond the optimal scale of the macro-economy relative to the containing ecosphere, and thereby become uneconomic.
A negative monetary interest rate means that citizens will spend rather than save, so savings will not be available to finance the investments that produce the GDP growth needed for full employment. The new money for investment comes from the Fed. Quantitative easing (money printing) is the source of the new money. The faith is that an ever-expanding monetary circulation will pull the real economy along behind it, providing growth in real income and jobs as previously idle resources are employed. But the resulting GDP growth is now uneconomic because in the full world the “idle” resources are not really idle — they are providing vital ecosystem services. Redeploying these resources to GDP growth has environmental and social opportunity costs that are greater than production benefits. Although hyper-Keynesian macroeconomists do not believe this, the micro actors in the real economy experience the constraints of the full world, and consequently find it difficult to follow the unlimited growth recipe.
Summers (along with other mainstream growth economists), does not accept the concept of optimal scale of the macro-economy, nor the possibility of uneconomic growth in the sense that growth in resource throughput could reduce net wealth and wellbeing. Nevertheless, it is at least consistent with his view that the natural rate of interest is negative.
A positive interest rate restricts the total volume of investment but allocates it to the most productive projects. A negative interest rate increases volume, but allows investment in practically anything, increasing the probability that growth will be uneconomic. Shall we become hyper-Keynesians and push GDP growth to maintain full employment, even after growth has become uneconomic? Or shall we back off from growth and seek full employment by job sharing, distributive equity, and reallocation toward leisure and public goods?
Why would we allow growth to carry the macro-economy beyond the optimal scale? Because growth in GDP is considered the summum bonum, and it is heresy not to advocate increasing it. If increasing GDP makes us worse off we will not admit it, but will adapt to the experience of increased scarcity by pushing GDP growth further. Non-growth is viewed as “stagnation,” not as a sensible steady state adaptation to objective limits. Stimulating GDP growth by increasing consumption and investment, while cutting savings, is the only way that hyper-Keynesians can think of to serve the worthy goal of full employment. There really are other ways, and people really do need to save for security and old age, as well as for maintenance and replacement of the existing capital stock. Yet the Fed is being advised to penalize saving with a negative interest rate. The focus is on what the growth model requires, not on what people need.
A negative interest rate seems also to be the latest advice from Paul Krugman, who praises Summers’ insights. It is understandable from their viewpoint because in their vision the economy is not a subsystem, or if it is, it is infinitesimal relative to the total system. The economy can expand forever, either into the void or into a near infinite environment. It does not grow into a finite ecosphere, and therefore has no optimal scale relative to any constraining and sustaining environment. Its aggregate growth incurs no opportunity cost and can never be uneconomic. Unfortunately, this tacit assumption of the growth model is seriously wrong.
Larry Summers and other growth-obsessed economists are calling for negative interest rates.
Welcome to the full-world economy. In the old empty-world economy, assumed in the macro models of Summers and Krugman, growth always remains economic, so they advocate printing more and more dollars to expand the economy to take over ever more of the “unemployed” sources and sinks of the ecosystem. If a temporary liquidity trap or zero lower bound on interest rates keeps the new money from being spent, then low or even negative monetary interest rates will open the spending spigot. The empty world assumption guarantees that the newly expanded production will always be worth more than the natural wealth it displaces. But what may well have been true in yesterday’s empty world is no longer true in today’s full world.
This is an upsetting prospect for growth economists — growth is required for full employment, but growth now makes us collectively poorer. Without growth we would have to cure poverty by redistributing wealth and stabilizing population, two political anathemas, and could only finance investment by reducing present consumption, a third anathema. There remains the microeconomic policy of reallocating the same GDP to a more efficient mix of products by internalizing external costs (getting prices right). While this certainly should be done, it is not macroeconomic growth as pursued by the Fed.
These painful choices could be avoided if only we were richer. So let’s just focus on getting richer. How? By growing the aggregate GDP, of course! What? You repeat that GDP growth is now uneconomic? That cannot possibly be right, they say. OK, that is an empirical question. Let’s separate costs from benefits in the existing GDP accounts, and develop more inclusive measures of each, and then see which grows more as GDP grows. This has been done (ISEW, GPI, Ecological Footprint), and results support the uneconomic growth view. If growth economists think these studies were done badly they should do them better rather than ignore the issue.
The leftover Keynesians are correct in pointing out that there is unemployed labor and capital. But natural resources are fully employed, indeed overexploited, and the limiting factor in the full world is natural resources, not labor or capital as used to be the case in the empty world. Some growth economists think that the world is still empty. Others think there is no limiting factor — that capital is a good substitute for natural resources. This is wrong, as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen has shown long ago. Capital funds and natural resource flows are complements, not substitutes, and the one in short supply is limiting. Increasing a non-limiting factor doesn’t help. Growth economists should know this.
Although the growthists think quantitative easing will stimulate demand they are disappointed, even in terms of their own model, because the banks, who are supposed to lend the new money, encounter a “lack of bankable projects,” to use World Bank terminology. This of course should be expected in the new era of uneconomic growth. The new money, rather than calling forth new wealth by employing all these hypothetical idle resources from the empty world era, simply bids up existing asset prices in the full world. Most asset prices are not counted in the consumer price index, (not to mention exclusion of food and energy) so economists unconvincingly claim that quantitative easing has not been inflationary, and therefore they can keep doing it. And even if it causes some inflation, that would help make the interest rate negative.
Aside from needed electronic transaction balances, people would not keep money in the bank if the interest rate were negative. To make them do so, the alternative of cash would basically have to be eliminated, and all money would be electronic bank deposits. This intensifies central bank control, and the specter of “bail-ins” (confiscations of deposits) as occurred in Cyprus. Even as distrust of money increases, people will not immediately revert to barter, in spite of negative interest rates. Barter is so inconvenient that money remains more efficient even if it loses value at a rapid rate, as we have seen in several hyperinflations. But transactions balances will be minimized, and speculative and store-of value-balances will be diverted to real estate, gold, works of art, tulip bulbs, Bitcoins, and beanie babies, creating speculative bubbles. But not to worry, say Summers and Krugman, bubbles are a necessary, if regrettable, means to boost spending and growth in the era of newly recognized negative natural interest rates — and still unrecognized uneconomic growth.
A bright silver lining to this cloud of confusion is that the recognition of a negative natural interest rate may be the prelude to recognition of the underlying uneconomic growth as its cause. For sure this has not yet happened because so far the negative natural interest rate is seen as a reason to push growth with a negative monetary interest rate, rather than as a signal that growth has become a losing game. But such a realization is a reasonable hope. Perhaps a step in this direction is Summers’ suggestion that the old Alvin Hansen thesis of secular stagnation might deserve a new look.
The logic that suggests negative interest also suggests negative wages as a further means of increasing investment by lowering costs. To maintain full employment via GDP growth, not only must the interest rate now be negative, but wages should become negative as well. No one yet advocates negative wages because subsistence provides an inconvenient lower positive bound below which workers die. On this “other side of the looking glass” the logic of uneconomic growth pushes us in the direction of a negative “natural” wage, just as with a negative “natural” rate of interest. So we artificially lower the wage costs to “job creators” by subsidizing below-subsistence wages with food stamps, housing subsidies, and unpaid internships. Negative interest rates also subsidize investment in job-replacing capital equipment, further lowering wages. Negative interest rates, and below-subsistence wages, further subsidize the uneconomic growth that gave rise to them in the first place.
The leftover Keynesians tell us, reasonably enough, that paying people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up, is better than leaving them unemployed with no income. But paying people to deplete and pollute the Creation on which our lives and welfare ultimately depend, in order to expand the macro-economy beyond its optimal or even sustainable scale, is surely worse than just giving them a minimum income, and some leisure time, in exchange for doing no harm.
An artificial monetary rate of interest forced down by quantitative easing to equal a negative natural rate of interest resulting from uneconomic growth is not a solution. It is just baling wire and duct tape. But it is all that even our best and brightest economists can come up with as long as they are imprisoned in the empty world growth model. The way out of this trap is to recognize that the growth era is over, and that instead of forcing growth into uneconomic territory we must seek to maintain a steady-state economy at something approximating the optimal scale. Since we have overshot the optimal scale of the macro-economy, this will require a period of retrenchment to a reduced level, accompanied by much more equal sharing, frugality, and efficiency. Sharing means putting limits on the range of inequality that we permit; it has huge moral and social benefits, even if politically difficult. Frugality means using less resource throughput; it results in less depletion and pollution and more recycling and efficiency. Efficiency means squeezing more life-support and want-satisfaction from a given throughput by technological advance and by improvement in our ethical priorities. Economists need to replace the Keynesian-neoclassical growth synthesis with a new version of the classical stationary state.
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Mainstream Economists Finally Admit that Runaway Inequality Is Hurting the Economy Washington’s Blog
Mainstream Economists Finally Admit that Runaway Inequality Is Hurting the Economy Washington’s Blog.
But Bad Government Policies Are Making Inequality Worse By the Day
AP reported Tuesday:
The growing gap between the richest Americans and everyone else isn’t bad just for individuals.
It’s hurting the U.S. economy.
***
“What you want is a broader spending base,” says Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James, a financial advisory firm. “You want more people spending money.”
***
“The broader the improvement, the more likely it will be sustained,” said Michael Niemira, chief economist at the International Council of Shopping Centers.
***
Economists appear to be increasingly concerned about the effects of inequality on growth. Brown, the Raymond James economist, says that marks a shift from a few years ago, when many analysts were divided over whether pay inequality was worsening.
Now, he says, “there’s not much denial of that … and you’re starting to see some research saying, yes, it does slow the economy.”
As one example, Paul Krugman used to doubt that inequality harmed the economy. As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote in 2010:
Krugman says that he used to dismiss talk that inequality contributed to crises, but then we reached Great Depression-era levels of inequality in 2007 and promptly had a crisis, so now he takes it a bit more seriously.
Krugman writes this week in the New York Times:
The discussion has shifted enough to produce a backlash from pundits arguing that inequality isn’t that big a deal.
They’re wrong.
The best argument for putting inequality on the back burner is the depressed state of the economy. Isn’t it more important to restore economic growth than to worry about how the gains from growth are distributed?
Well, no. First of all, even if you look only at the direct impact of rising inequality on middle-class Americans, it is indeed a very big deal. Beyond that, inequality probably played an important role in creating our economic mess, and has played a crucial role in our failure to clean it up.
Start with the numbers. On average, Americans remain a lot poorer today than they were before the economic crisis. For the bottom 90 percent of families, this impoverishment reflects both a shrinking economic pie and a declining share of that pie. Which mattered more? The answer, amazingly, is that they’re more or less comparable — that is, inequality is rising so fast that over the past six years it has been as big a drag on ordinary American incomes as poor economic performance, even though those years include the worst economic slump since the 1930s.
And if you take a longer perspective, rising inequality becomes by far the most important single factor behind lagging middle-class incomes.
Beyond that, when you try to understand both the Great Recession and the not-so-great recovery that followed, the economic and above all political impacts of inequality loom large.
***
Inequality is linked to both the economic crisis and the weakness of the recovery that followed.
Indeed – as we noted in September – a who’s-who of prominent economists in government and academia have now said that runaway inequality harms economic growth, including:
- Fed chairman Ben Bernanke (video continues here)
- Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin (more)
- Former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair
- Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
- One of America’s leading economists, Robert Shiller
- Former chief IMF economist Raghuram Rajan
- Former U.S. Secretary of Labor and UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich
- Stanford University professor John Taylor
- Northeastern University professor Robert Gordon (more)
- University of Oregon professor Mark Thoma
- University of California professor Emmanuel Saez
- Paris School of Economics professor Thomas Piketty
- Famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith
- Harvard Business School professor David Moss
- Paris School of Economics professor Romain Rancière
- London School of Economics professor Robert Wade
- University of Notre Dame professor David Ruccio
- Harvard professor Lawrence Katz
- Arkansas State University professor Christopher Brown
- Global economy and development division director at Brookings and former economy minister for Turkey, Kemal Dervi
- Societe Generale investment strategist and former economist for the Bank of England, Albert Edwards
- World Bank economist Branko Milanovic
- Deputy Division Chief of the Modeling Unit in the Research Department of the IMF, Michael Kumhof
- Former executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Policy Development, and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, Bruce Bartlett
- IMF economist Andrew Berg (IMF economist)
- IMF economist Jonathan Ostry
- Federal Reserve chairman from 1934 to 1948, Marriner S. Eccles
- And many others
Even the father of free market economics – Adam Smith – didn’t believe that inequality should be a taboo subject.
Numerous investors and entrepreneurs agree that runaway inequality hurts the economy, including:
- More than half of all international investors polled by Bloomberg
- Billionaire and legendary investment adviser Jeremy Grantham
- Billionaire and hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller
- Billionaire Bill Gates
- Billionaire Warren Buffet
- Billionaire Nick Hanauer
Indeed, extreme inequality helped cause the Great Depression, the current financial crisis … and the fall of the Roman Empire . And inequality in America today is twice as bad as in ancient Rome, worse than it was in Tsarist Russia, Gilded Age America, modern Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen, many banana republicsin Latin America, and worse than experienced by slaves in 1774 colonial America. (More stunning facts.)
Bad government policy – which favors the fatcats at the expense of the average American – is largely responsible for our runaway inequality.
And yet the powers-that-be in Washington and Wall Street are accelerating the redistribution of wealthfrom the lower, middle and more modest members of the upper classes to the super-elite.
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Krugman Blowing Bubbles – Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada
Krugman Blowing Bubbles – Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada.
The perennial question of modern economics is simple: how are market downturns best combated? It’s a good question, if you are trying to deduce truth in matters. It also makes for good fodder to appease career-granting benefactors, i.e. the government. It was not always this way however. Economists, if true to their craft, do not make for barrels of optimism. They are supposed to be a splash of cold water on wishful thinkers.
The unholy alliance between the state and the economic profession would never last if dismal science practitioners were gadflies who swatted down every harebrained scheme that festered in the dreams of central planners. This was one of the problems encountered by classical economists. Being market-friendly, it was tough appealing to monarchs or government leaders who wanted a quick fix to economic doldrums. No head of the public wants to tell his citizens, “Sorry, I cannot help you today. You must help yourself.”
Eventually John Maynard Keynes would come along and give the economic vocation the crony justification it needed to become respectable in the eyes of the state. His The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was a how-to guide for pols looking to spend other people’s money. At last they had an excuse: to boost unemployment by paying laid-off workers to dig holes aimlessly.
Our friend Paul Krugman is Keynes’s most vocal disciple, and never tires of reinvoking his intellectual master’s teachings of mo’ money, mo’ debt, and no mo’ problems. In a recentinterview with the forever exhausted-looking Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider, Kruggy is perplexed by the Federal Reserve’s inability to inflate out of the ongoing economic slowdown. He snakes out a position between naysayer Larry Summers, who thinks the economy can only grow with artificial bubbles, and someone who is more optimistic about the future. On necessary bubbles, Krugman tells us:
“If we look at the evidence…and it kind of looks like…we need bubbles to grow. We’ve had one bubble after another. Long-term rise in debt, with no inflation…the economy is looking like it’s just barely managing to keep its above water with all those bubbles so…that’s the observation.”
Krugman blames the news status quo on slowing technological innovation and lower population growth. As for the United States, the Nobel Laureate is convinced the trade deficit is largely at fault. Lastly, he concedes that no one really knows why the economy must be goosed by a shot of exuberance.
That’s all true, if you forget the fact that some folks do actually understand why Krugman and his like-minded colleagues are scratching their heads over bubbles.
That the past few decades have witnessed financial bubble after financial bubble is not proof positive of a great need for them. Krugman’s assumption is that had the Fed not interfered in the marketplace to boost particular assets, the whole economy would have imploded. It’s a false assumption, but totally in line with Keynesian theory.
From the stagflation in the late 1970s to the stock market crash of 1987, forward to the failure of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, the popping of the dot-com bubble years later, and finally culminating in the housing crisis of 2007-2008, Krugman and Summers appear to have a point. All of these cases of faux prosperity were caused by the Fed’s meddling with the money supply, pushing interest rates down below their natural level. The headache after each instance was cured with the hair of the dog – meaning more inflation, more stimulus, and more central bank liquidity. The roller coaster ride of money printing has left the economy distorted and unable to find true balance again.
For the life of him, Krugman can’t seem to find any evidence of market stability without the animal spirits being thrown a liquidity bone. And yet, his go-to example of angelic prosperity – the 1950s – has all the markings of a relatively calm period of prosperity absent of central bank interference. As former Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman points out, the heads of the Federal Reserve following World War II were less-than-enthusiastic about ginning up growth via the printing press. This was when William McChesney Martin was at the helm and President Eisenhower was reluctant to keep up the hog wild spending of his predecessor. In an interview with the American Mises Institute, Stockman comments:
Although central banking does cause moral hazards and lends itself to abuses, there have been periods in which monetary and fiscal discipline have been employed. Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin, for example, really did take the punch bowl away when the party got started because he took monetary discipline seriously. Fiscal discipline under Eisenhower and the gold standard behind Bretton Woods helped put off the day of reckoning for quite a long time.
After wartime price controls were relaxed in the late 1940s, capitalists and private investors were freed of government burden and began investing in the country yet again. Washington’s budget was cut significantly, including hundreds of billions removed from the Pentagon’s death machine expenditures. Stockman brings attention to the data: “Between 1954 and 1963, real GDP growth averaged 3.4 percent while annual CPI inflation remained subdued at 1.4 percent.”
So yes, this was the non-bubble prosperity Krugman is looking for. As Justin Raimondowrites, “[E]ight years of relative fiscal sanity under the Eisenhower presidency ushered in the greatest economic expansion in modern times.” What’s funny is that Krugman is one of the biggest cheerleaders of post-war prosperity and continually advocates going back to the Ike-era. But he wrongly attributes the golden times to pro-union labor policies and high rates of taxation.
Regardless, the takeaway from the decade of General Motors, Elvis, decent manners, and the Red threat is bubbles are not necessary for economic growth. By trying to stimulate demand, the Fed only mucks up economic calculation and capital accumulation.
Krugman’s solutions for the bubble-addicted economy are no better than his own understanding of economic theory. Widespread unemployment can be cured, in his opinion, by weaker purchasing power, a stronger welfare state, and continual government spending. In other words, by top-down central planning that attempts to tweak society “just so.” All these efforts are nothing but a shell game that take money from some and give it to another. Basically, Krugman is King Solomon with a sword, cutting everyone into parts he sees most fit.
Saying we need continuous financial bubbles to keep full employment is such a flawed conception of economics, it belongs on an island of misfit philosophies. Krugman’s incessant promotion of statism is doing more harm to the economy than good. As an opinion-molder, he is perpetuating the economic malaise of the last few years. More bubbles won’t help the recovery, just harm it more. In the middle of a grease fire, Krugman calls for more pig fat. And the rest of us are the ones left burnt.
James E. Miller is editor-in-chief of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada. Send him mail
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Krugman: “Fiat Money…Backed By Men With Guns” – Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada
Krugman: “Fiat Money…Backed By Men With Guns” – Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada.
Say what you will about Keynesian superstar Paul Krugman, he doesn’t mince words. In a recent interview with Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal, Krugman gave his opinion that Bitcoin was in a bubble because it wasn’t backed by a tangible asset.
Perhaps sensing that this may have undercut the case for Krugman’s preferred monetary system, Krugman was quick to add thatgovernment-issued fiat money was “backed by men with guns.” (See the video for yourself.) Thus, Krugman thought that government currencies were not in a bubble, even if they weren’t backed by tangible assets, because people needed to obtain the currency in order to pay taxes.
Krugman’s analysis provides a good opportunity to explore the subtlety of Ludwig von Mises’ monetary economics. On the one hand, Mises was a “hard money” man who was a fierce opponent of government fiat money. It is also true that Mises was a classical liberal who would have opposed government coercion in the form of legal tender laws, capital gains taxes on gold and silver, and other ways that governments currently use their “guns” to solidify the present system where most people on Earth use government-issued notes as their primary form of money.
However, even though a libertarian and proponent of Misesian economics might object to government-issued fiat money because of the coercion–”men with guns”–involved, strictly speaking Mises would not agree that a currency can be backed by guns, in the way Krugman describes. To speak in this manner is a complete surrender in the face of the economist’s task of explaining money.
Mises’ grand work in this area is his The Theory of Money and Credit, for which my free study guide is available. As Mises conceived it, the central theoretical task when it comes to money is to explain why money has a particular purchasing power. Why should it be that people give up valuable goods and services for a particular item–the money commodity–according to definite exchange ratios?
Mises’ answer is that people form expectations about the future purchasing power of money, and that is what gives it purchasing power today. These expectations in turn are based on their observations of the money’s purchasing power in the past. Thus lays the groundwork for Mises’ famous “regression theorem,” in which people’s subjective valuations of money necessarily involves a historical component (unlike their subjective valuation of, say, pizza). Gold, silver, and other forms of commodity money could ultimately be traced back to the days of barter, in which they had definite exchange ratios with other goods because of their usefulness as regular commodities.
In the case of government-issued fiat currencies, Mises explained their purchasing power using the same theoretical apparatus. The only difference is that at some point in the past, the currencies (such as the dollar, pound, franc, etc.) had been explicitly linked to the precious metals, and that’s what grounded everyone’s valuations of them.
Thus, Krugman’s glib assertion that today’s government fiat monies derive their value from guns completely dodges the problem for the economist: to explain the magnitude of that value. Even if we conceded that the government could force everyone to use something–let’s say a particular type of sea shell–as money, by insisting on payment of taxes in the form of sea shells, that policy wouldn’t explain why an hour of labor should trade for 10 shells, rather than 100 or 1,000. This is especially true when we reflect that most government taxes are expressed in terms of percentages, rather than an absolute amount.
Furthermore, it’s obvious that Krugman’s “explanation” would have no way of accounting for changes in either variable. For example, in the 1970s in the United States, price inflation took off dramatically, meaning the purchasing power of the dollar fell sharply. Was this because of a reduction in taxes? Of course not. And in the 1920s, there were sharp cuts in marginal income tax rates at the federal level. Did this lead to severe price inflation, as people now didn’t need as many dollars to pay Uncle Sam? On the contrary, consumer prices were fairly stable in this period.
As these observations should demonstrate, Krugman really hasn’t offered a viable explanation for the purchasing power of money. One might be tempted to say that at best, governments can use their taxing power to dictate what the monetary unit is, even though they would still have little control over its purchasing power.
Yet even this concedes too much. Strictly speaking, if the only policy we are considering is that the government says every year, “Citizens must turn in such-and-such number of sea shells as tax payment,” that alone won’t even be sufficient to conclude that the sea shells will be the money in this society. People could still use some other commodity as the money, and then use the actual money to buy the sufficient number of sea shells each year right before paying their taxes.
UPDATE: After originally posting this, I realized there was a problem with one of my examples: In the 1920s amidst the marginal income tax rate cuts designed by Treasury Secretary Mellon, the U.S. was still on the gold standard. Thus this period is not a good refutation of Krugman’s explanation for fiat money’s exchange value. (Of course, we can simply look at other examples of governments that engaged in large-scale tax cuts even while using a fiat currency, and we don’t typically see a sharp rise in price inflation accompanying them.)
Robert P. Murphy is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, and has written for Mises.org, LewRockwell.com, and EconLib. He has taught at Hillsdale College and is currently a Senior Economist for the Institute for Energy Research. He lives in Nashville.
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Does the Fed Favor Any Group in Particular? Mark Spitznagel vs. Paul Krugman
Does the Fed Favor Any Group in Particular? Mark Spitznagel vs. Paul Krugman.
Kicking off this Economic Farce Royale… we have Mark Spitznagel explaining why the Fed is the root of all evil… or at least the source of the so-call “wealth gap”. We’ve sprinkled our own comments throughout to keep it lively and (God help us) not too serious.
OK. Round one, *ding, ding*…
Amajor issue is the growing disparity between rich and poor, the 1% versus the 99%. While the president’s solutions differ from Republicans, they both ignore a principal source of this growing disparity.
The source is not runaway entrepreneurial capitalism, which rewards those who best serve the consumer in product and price. (Would we really want it any other way?) There is another force that has turned a natural divide into a chasm… dun, dun, dun… the Federal Reserve. The relentless expansion of credit by the Fed creates artificial disparities based on political privilege and economic power.
[Go figure…]
David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, pointed out that when money is inserted into the economy (from a government printing press or, as in Hume’s time, the importation of gold and silver), it is not distributed evenly but “confined to the coffers of a few persons, who immediately seek to employ it to advantage.”
[Well, yeah…]
In the 20th century, the economists of the Austrian school built upon this fact as their central monetary tenet. Ludwig von Mises and his students showed that an increase in money supply is beneficial to those who get it first and is detrimental to those who get it last. Monetary inflation is a process, not a static effect. To think of it only in terms of aggregate price levels (I’m looking at you Ben Bernanke) is to ignore this pernicious process and the imbalance and economic dislocation that it creates.
As Mises protégé Murray Rothbard explained, monetary inflation is akin to counterfeiting, which necessitates that some benefit and others don’t. After all, if everyone counterfeited in proportion to their wealth, there would be no real economic benefit to anyone. Similarly, the expansion of credit is uneven in the economy, which results in wealth redistribution. To borrow a visual from another Mises student, Friedrich von Hayek, the Fed’s money creation does not flow evenly like water into a tank, but rather oozes like honey into a saucer, dolloping one area first and only then very slowly dribbling to the rest.
The Fed doesn’t expand the money supply by uniformly dropping cash from helicopters over the hapless masses. Rather, it directs capital transfers to the largest banks (whether by overpaying them for their financial assets or by lending to them on the cheap), minimizes their borrowing costs, and lowers their reserve requirements. All of these actions result in immediate handouts to the financial elite first, with the hope that they will subsequently unleash this fresh capital onto the unsuspecting markets, raising demand and prices wherever they do.
The Fed, having gone on an unprecedented credit expansion spree, has benefited the recipients who were first in line at the trough: banks (imagine borrowing for free and then buying up assets that you know the Fed is aggressively buying with you) and those favored entities and individuals deemed most creditworthy. Flush with capital, these recipients have proceeded to bid up the prices of assets and resources, while everyone else has watched their purchasing power decline.
At some point, of course, the honey flow stops—but not before much malinvestment. Such malinvestment is precisely what we saw in the historic 1990s equity and subsequent real-estate bubbles (and what we’re likely seeing again today in overheated credit and equity markets), culminating in painful liquidation.
The Fed is transferring immense wealth from the middle class to the most affluent, from the least privileged to the most privileged. This coercive redistribution has been a far more egregious source of disparity than the president’s presumption of tax unfairness (if there is anything unfair about approximately half of a population paying zero income taxes) or deregulation.
Pitting economic classes against each other is a divisive tactic that benefits no one. Yet if there is any upside, it is perhaps a closer examination of the true causes of the problem. Before we start down the path of arguing about the merits of redistributing wealth to benefit the many, why not first stop redistributing it to the most privileged?
Ooh… Them fightin’ words. OK, we turn to *ahem* America’s leading economist, nobel laureate and pointy head, Paul Krugman. He’ll now take himself too seriously and give us his academic rebuttal. We took a few editorial liberties so you wouldn’t fall asleep…
Round two, *ding, ding*…
I’ll be the first to admit that these past few years have been lean times in many respects — but they’ve been boom years for agonizingly dumb, pound-your-head-on-the-table economic fallacies. The latest fad — illustrated by what Mark Spitznagel just wrote above [ouch] — is that expansionary monetary policy is a giveaway to banks and plutocrats generally.
Indeed, his screed actually claims that the whole 1 versus 99 thing should really be about reining in or maybe abolishing the Fed. (Hah… Could you imagine that!) Unfortunately, and I’m sorry for this backhanded compliment, some pretty smart people have bought into at least some version of this dumb story.
What’s wrong with the idea that running the printing presses is a giveaway to plutocrats? Let me count the ways!
First, the situation is utterly the reverse of what Spitznagel claimed. Quantitative easing isn’t being imposed on an unwitting populace by financiers and rentiers; it’s being undertaken, to the extent that it is, over howls of protest from the financial industry. I mean, c’mon! Where are the editorials demanding that the Fed raise its inflation target, right?!
[Crickets…]
Uhh… Beyond that, let’s talk about the economics.
The deliberately misleading… er I mean, naive, version of Fed policy Spitznagel made is that Ben Bernanke is “giving money” to the banks. What it actually does, of course, is buy stuff from the banks, usually short-term government debt but nowadays sometimes other stuff with money that didn’t exist before. But, seriously, it’s not a gift.
To claim that it’s a gift you have to claim that the prices the Fed is paying are artificially high, or equivalently that interest rates are being pushed artificially low. And you do in fact see assertions to that effect all the time. But if you think about it for even a minute, that claim is truly bizarre.
I mean, what is the un-artificial, or if you prefer, “natural” rate of interest? As it turns out, there is actually a standard definition of the natural rate of interest and it’s basically defined on a PPE basis (that’s for proof of the pudding is in the eating). Roughly, the natural rate of interest is something, kind of like the rate that would lead to stable inflation at more or less full employment.
[Uh-huh…]
And we have low inflation with high unemployment, strongly suggesting that the natural rate of interest is below current levels, and that the key problem is the zero lower bound which keeps us from getting there. Under these circumstances, expansionary Fed policy isn’t some kind of giveway to the banks, it’s just a giveaway to the banks that the economy needs.
Furthermore, Fed efforts to do this probably tend on average to hurt, not help, bankers. Yes, I just wrote that with a straight face. Banks are largely in the business of borrowing short and lending long; anything that compresses the spread between short rates and long rates is likely to be bad for their profits. And the things the Fed is trying to do are in fact largely about compressing that spread, either by persuading investors that it will keep short rates at zero for a longer time or by going out and buying long-term assets. These are actions you would expect to make bankers angry, not happy — and that’s what has actually happened.
How, exactly, does expansionary monetary policy hurt the 99 percent? Think of all the people living on fixed incomes, we’re told. But who are these people? I know the picture: retirees living on the interest on their bank account and their fixed pension check — and there are no doubt some people fitting that description. But there aren’t many of them, which makes it ok.
No, the real victims of expansionary monetary policies are the very people who the current mythology says are pushing these policies. And that, I guess, explains why we’re hearing the opposite.
The typical retired American these days relies largely on Social Security — which is indexed against inflation. He or she may get some interest income from bank deposits, but not much: ordinary Americans have fewer financial assets than the elite can easily imagine. And as for pensions: yes, some people have defined-benefit pension plans that aren’t indexed for inflation. But that’s a dwindling minority — which again means it’s perfectly ok — and I assume the effect of, say, 1 or 2 percent higher inflation isn’t going to be enormous even for this minority.
What’s the takeaway? That unless you’re going to go stumping for policy on capitol hill (in which case, there’s no hope for you) you should focus on actionable steps you can take to increase your wealth… instead of engaging in groupthink. As for the policy debate…well, it’s always good for a laugh.
Regards,
The Daily Reckoning
Ed. Note: Whether you’re on a fixed income or not, there are ways you can safeguard and even grow your wealth, regardless of where you stand on the issue debated above. Today’s Daily Reckoning email edition gave readers a chance to get in on a one-time live event that will help them do just that. Didn’t see that offer? Not to worry… The Daily Reckoning will be back tomorrow with another opportunity for you to take advantage of. Be sure you don’t miss that one too. Sign up for the FREE Daily Reckoning email edition, right here.
Olduvaiblog: Musings on the coming collapse 