I have in mind, especially, the views of Benn Steil and Dinah Walker of the Council on Foreign Relations, as expressed in “Why  Nominal GDP Targeting is a Fad“:
”NGDP targeting having once been the intellectual stomping ground of economists on the right (notably Scott Sumner), its newest supporters come overwhelmingly from the left (such as Christy Romer)…. We think the rage will be short-lived. The reason is that NGDP targeting’s newest supporters are bad-weather fans. That is, they like it now, when NGDP is well below its 2007 “trend” line, meaning that the policy implies extended and more aggressive monetary loosening. But what happens when NGDP goes above its target, as it eventually will? NGDP targeting then requires tightening….”

Let’s consider the analytics first, and hold off awhile on the less edifying political labels.   The nominal GDP proposal was originally studied and supported by many prominent economists in the 1980s.  The problem at the time was a need for monetary discipline, anchoring expectations, and reducing inflation.   Nominal income targeting was not designed as a way of getting easier monetary policy, but rather the opposite.   It is equally good for either purpose:  the target can be set high or low, depending on the times.

Originally, the leading competitor for the role of monetary anchor was money supply targeting (monetarism).  This was the regime that was adopted in the early 1980s by the central banks of the largest economies. But they were forced to abandon it subsequently.  Later on, the leading competitor became Inflation Targeting;  but it too ran into difficulties in the 2000s.   The general argument for nominal GDP throughout has been that it is robust to a variety of shocks, positive and negative.   It dominates money targeting in that it is robust with respect to velocity shocks.  It dominates inflation targeting in that it is robust to supply shocks.

In other words, Nominal GDP Targeting is not a short-term expedient but is fit precisely for the long run.

It is true that a major reason why the nominal GDP proposal has been revived over the last two years is that it could help deliver easy monetary policy in the short run, which is what the economy has needed recently.  Some supporters may indeed view it as a short-term expedient, to be jettisoned when the economic recovery has become better established.   And I can see the attraction of the proposal that the Economist magazine has made for the UK: that the Bank of England commit to keeping interest rates low until nominal GDP has re-attained a level 10% higher than today’s level.  But I personally favor keeping it as the framework in the longer term, with loose nominal GDP targets set annually at a horizon of two years.  The width of the bands and the degree of commitment could be similar to whatever it would be under the alternative of inflation targeting.

The targeted nominal GDP growth rate would not be the same every year, let alone every decade.    If the US were to adopt the framework now, 4 ½ % would not be a bad number for the center of the target range.  (A lower number would be appropriate for some, like Japan, and a higher number for others, especially emerging market countries.)

Steil and Walker support their argument that the proposal is not fit for the long run with an attractive graph.  It shows that in many of the years since 1981 when the rate of growth of nominal GDP was above 4 ½ %, which they claim would imply monetary tightening under the proposed regime, unemployment was above 5 ½ %, prompting the Fed to loosen (wisely, in the authors’ view, if I understand them right).

The problem with this argument is that of those eight years when the Fed is shown loosening  in response to unemployment above 5 ½ % (by my count), seven of the years came during the first part of the sample: 1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1993.   (The only year from the more recent half of the sample is 2003.)  Why is this a problem for the argument?  In the 1980s and even the 1990s, it seems to me that nobody would have set a target so aggressive as to require monetary tightening when nominal GDP reached 4 ½ %.   Back then we were coming down from high levels of inertial inflation and this process was understood to be gradual.   Furthermore, the rate of growth of potential output was higher than today as well.   Thus the numbers chosen for the nominal GDP target would have been higher than today.  They would not have forced the Fed to tighten when unemployment was 7%.

Now to the political labels.  Recall that Steil-Walker claim that the nominal GDP proposal was originally put out by economists on the right and has recently been adopted opportunistically by economists on the left as a short-term fad.   But the originator of the nominal GDP proposal in the UK was Sir James Meade (1978, 1982), who (it turns out) was an “interventionist” and member of the Social Democratic Party.  The earliest proponent in the US was James Tobin (1980, 1983), also a Nobel Prize winner and also on the left.   (I am trying to avoid the confusing word “liberal” which in the US usually means on the left but in the UK continues usually to mean pro-free-market.)

The recent revival of Nominal GDP Targeting came from a group of bloggers who describe themselves as conservatives (Scott Sumner, Lars Christensen and David Beckworth,)   Even those now proposing a one-time threshold for the level of nominal GDP are not noticeably  clustered on the left of the political spectrum.  The current British chancellor is, of course, a Conservative.   Perhaps what is confusing some observers is the reflexive, but wrong, assumption that Labor/Democrats always favor more expansionary policy than Conservatives/Republicans.

In other words, it would be more correct to say that the idea was a proposal of the left picked up by the right than the other way around, as Steil and Walker claim.   But there are plenty of nominal GDP proponents from each side of the political spectrum, currently as in there were in the 1980s, as well as many whose political views are not immediately apparent.  That is all to the good.   This proposal is neither liberal nor conservative.  Nor is it one that I, personally, will be abandoning as soon as the economy returns to full employment.   With money targeting and inflation targeting discredited, Nominal GDP Targeting is left.  Right?

[Notice to readers:  Starting today, my blogposts will also appear at On Deck, the blog space of Project Syndicate.   Some are elaborated versions of Project Syndicate op-eds.  Others, like this one, stand alone.]

Was the achievement a side-effect of reduced economic activity?   It is true that the US economy peaked in late 2007, the same time as emissions.   But the US recession ended in June 2009 and GDP growth since then, though inadequate, has been substantially higher than Europe’s.  Yet US emissions continued to fall, while EU emissions began to rise again after 2009 (EU).  Something else is going on.

The primary explanation, in a word, is “fracking.”   In fourteen words: the use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to recover deposits of shale gas.

One can virtually prove that shale gas is the major factor behind the fall in US emissions.  Natural gas, especially when burnt in combined-cycle gas turbine power plants, emits only half as much greenhouse gas (GHG) as coal.   Ten years ago domestic natural gas production appeared to be reaching its limits; the industry was so sure of this that it made big investments in terminals to import Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).  Yet the fracking revolution has increased the supply of natural gas so rapidly since then that LNG facilities are being expensively converted to export.   Clean natural gas occupies a rapidly increasing share of the generation of electric power.   It has come largely at the expense of coal’s share.  Within power generation, natural gas is up 37% since 2007, while coal is down 25%.  As a result, natural gas has drawn close to coal as the number one source of US power — unthinkable a short time ago. Renewables have been rising, but still constitute only 5% of power generation in the US.  This is less than hydroelectric and far less than nuclear, let alone coal or gas.

Meanwhile, the role of coal – the dirtiest fuel — has been rising in the energy mix of the rest of the world, not falling (IEA, Dec. 2012).  Coal’s share of power has even risen since 2010 in Europe (EC), where some countries are phasing out emission-free nuclear power and no shale gas boom has appeared.    (The trans-Atlantic comparison does not offer grounds for self-righteousness, however.   GHG emissions remain far higher in the US than in Europe.)

The advent of shale gas in the United States has had a variety of implications for the economy, national security, and the environment.  The implications are surely more good than bad.

Short-run economic advantages include job creation.   Medium-run economic advantages include the “re-shoring” of some manufacturing activities.   (It would be wrong to claim job creation as an advantage in the long-run.  Jobs that are created in the oil and gas sector would otherwise be created somewhere else.  But during the last five years of high unemployment, every new job has helped.)   Long-run advantages include reducing macroeconomic vulnerability to future global oil shocks such as those that led to serious recessions in the 1970s.

Moving beyond economics, the reduction in net energy imports is good for US national security.  What happens in the Middle East will still matter, but as oil imports fall American foreign policy will not be as constrained as in the past. US net oil imports have already fallen by half since 2007 and the downward trend is expected to continue.   In Europe, the new developments have the potential to break Russia’s troublesome stranglehold on the supply of natural gas.

That leaves the environment.  Here as well the effects on net appear beneficial.   As already noted, the substitution of natural gas in place of coal slows global climate change. Indeed the United States is now on track to meet the Obama administration’s international commitment of emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020.  But natural gas is also better for local air quality.  Burning coal puts sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, mercury and particulates into the air.

Yet it is among environmentalists that heartfelt opposition to fracking has arisen.  Why?

Environmentalists seem to have three sets of fears.  First, they worry that shale gas will displace renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.  But the fact is that GHG emissions can’t be reduced without cutting coal emissions and that shale gas is already displacing coal in the US.  This is not speculation about the future.  It has already been happening.  If renewables or fusion or something else currently unknown can take over after 2050, then great.  But we would still need natural gas as a bridge from here to there.

Put differently, if the world continues to build coal-fired power plants at the rate it has been, those plants will still be around in 2050 regardless what other technologies have become available in the meantime.  Solar power can’t stop those coal fired plants from being built today.  Natural gas can.

Cheap natural gas also helps with heating buildings and increasingly with transportation as well – particularly if electric plug-in cars become more widespread.  In overall primary energy production, natural gas at 31% has now surpassed coal, at 26%. The graph below shows the two lines crossing. (Table 1.2,  US EIA).  Solar and wind together account for only 2% of US primary energy production.

Second, environmentalists worry about local risks, especially to water supplies.  There are also fears of methane leaks and earthquake triggerings.  Such concerns cannot be dismissed.    It is not enough to proclaim that fracking should be safe if operators are responsible and regulators do their job.   One must take into account the likelihood that in some under-regulated US state someone will not act responsibly and some local water supply will get contaminated.

One lesson is that we need to maintain high-quality environmental and safety regulation, with an emphasis on enforcement, unlike the sort of lax regulation of oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that gave us the Deepwater Horizon explosion.  The industry should follow best practices, including making public the chemicals it uses.

But in deciding whether to allow fracking to proceed – and this is what we are talking about: France has banned it and New York state has a moratorium – one must compare the risks of fracking with the risks of the alternative.  Even if there were a serious mishap with fracking, it is unlikely that it would do more damage to health, safety and the environment than the Deepwater Horizon disaster (oil), the Fukushima catastrophe (nuclear), or coal mining tragedies that happen every year (along with lung disease, water pollution from tailings, soil erosion, and other effects of coal).

Finally, some, especially in Europe, have a fear of new and unfamiliar technologies in general.  The claim that the burden of proof lies with the innovation, rather than symmetrically with the status quo, sometimes goes under the name of the “precautionary principle.”   It helps explain the tendency to forget to compare the worst-case risks of the new technology with the known downsides of the old technologies.

One analogy is Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).  It is true that a fundamentally new technology tends to pose risks that are unknown.   But that is no excuse for neglecting to weigh in the balance the known risks of the existing technology.  In the case of genetically modified crops, costs of doing without them include greater need for insecticides and possible food shortages in poor countries.

But GMOs may not be a sufficiently powerful example: Europeans tend to oppose them as well.  So here is a challenge to the precautionary principle with which it is difficult to argue.   Should men worried about their virility be daring enough to try the unfamiliar new technology, Viagra?  Or should they stick with the “tried and true” traditional remedy:  powdered rhino horn?

[This is an extended version of a column at Project Syndicate. Comments can be posted there.]

The International Economy magazine (Winter 2013) asks 16 authorities, “Can Changes in Exchange Rate Valuations Affect Trade Imbalances?“   It is referring to the claim in a recent book by Stanford economist Ron McKinnon that pressure on China to let the renminbi appreciate against the dollar is fundamentally misconceived because such a movement in the exchange rate would not reduce China’s trade surplus nor American’s trade deficit.  This is part of an old debate that pre-dates the rise of the China trade problem.  Ron has long claimed that exchange rates don’t determine trade balances because they are “instead” determined by national saving versus investment.   I thought Paul Krugman demolished the argument pretty effectively 25 years ago, with a textbook graph of internal balance versus external balance.   But evidently many still fall for the argument (including some of the experts in the TIE symposium).   So I try again:

Ron McKinnon has made many important contributions to international macroeconomics over the years. But on this issue, he is simply wrong.

It goes without saying that the current account is equal to the difference between national saving and investment. But it does not follow that we should try to improve the current account in the short run by increasing national saving. Under current conditions, that would send the United States back into recession.

The national saving identity is a tautology: it does not in itself imply causation. True, many of the big movements in the U.S. current account deficit can be explained by changes in national saving: the fiscal expansion of the early 1980s, the investment boom of the late 1990s, and the new fiscal expansion of the 2000s. But the important point is that we care about a lot of things besides just external balance (the trade balance and current account). We care at least as much about internal balance (growth, employment, and inflation). To say that an increase in the budget balance and national saving would improve the trade balance does not imply that this would be good policy or that it is the only way to improve the trade balance.

Of course we need to address the budget deficit in the long run, in balanced sensible ways.  But under current circumstances — a still-weak economy, high unemployment, low inflation, rock-bottom interest rates — a reduction in public or private spending would send the economy straight back into recession. That is why the fiscal cliff of January 1, 2013, was such a danger. To observe that the trade balance would have improved if the sharp fiscal contraction had gone fully into effect would have been small consolation for the self-inflicted recession.

The U.S. trade deficit and Chinese trade surplus have diminished and so are today not quite the problems that they were five years ago. But if improving the U.S. trade balance is considered an important goal, then a devaluation or depreciation of the currency is a better tool for the job. (This proposition does not violate the national saving propositions. Nor, on the other hand, does it justify China-bashing.) Because a real devaluation would also raise demand for U.S. products — admittedly with a lag — and thus move us closer to internal balance, it would be a far more appropriate tool for improving the current account under present-day conditions than would cutting national spending or raising taxes.

There is a danger that some investors will lose sight of the purpose of a benchmark index.   The benchmark exists to represent the views of the median investor dollar.  For many investors, going with the benchmark is a good guideline – especially those who recognize themselves to be relatively unsophisticated and also those who think they are sophisticated but really aren’t.   This is the implication of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH), for example.

On the one hand, EMH theorists are often too quick to discount the possibility of ways to beat the benchmark.   To take an example, it should not have been so hard to figure out during the 2003-07 credit-fed boom that countries with high foreign-exchange-denominated debt, particularly in Europe, were not paying a sufficiently high return to compensate for risk.  That mistake described Eastern European countries with low ratios of reserves to short-term debt as well as periphery euro members that lacked their own currency.  It probably resulted from easy money, reach for yield, and pervasive underestimation of risk.  Or, to take another example (admittedly, a tougher call), some of these countries’ deeply discounted bonds would have been good buys in early 2012, after heavy mark-downs.

On the other hand, most investors would do better if they went with a more passive investment strategy – especially due to high management fees among actively managed funds, exacerbated by excessive turnover.   At a minimum, if one is pursuing an activist strategy such as investing more in low-debt countries, it is helpful to frame it explicitly as a departure from the view of the median investor in order to be clear in your mind as to the nature of the bet you are making.

I can think of four functions of a benchmark index.    First, investors who do not figure that they can systematically beat the median investor need to be able to hold passively a portfolio designed to track a benchmark index consisting median investor holdings.   (See Vanguard.)   The second function is to provide an objective standard by which investors can judge the performance of active portfolio-managers who claim to be able to beat the median investor, within a specific asset class like sovereign debt.  (See Morningstar.)   Third, the same weights that are used in the index can be used to compute an average interest rate or sovereign spread in the market, which can serve as an indicator as to where the median investor is currently, in the risk-on, risk-off spectrum. (See J.P.Morgan’s EMBI — Emerging Market Bond Index.)

The fourth function of a benchmark index is to help active investors to devise a deliberate strategy to depart from the views of the median investor when they think that the latter is erring in a particular direction.  They may think that the median investor is under-estimating risk in general (spreads too low) or under-estimating the downside in countries with some particular characteristic.   Examples of such characteristics include insufficient currency flexibility, inadequate reserves, too much short-term debt, too much foreign-currency debt, too much bank debt, insufficient openness to FDI, insufficient cost competitiveness, excessive budget deficits, insufficient national saving, political risk, and so forth.

For each of these four functions of a benchmark, the correct way of weighting different countries is by market capitalization.  True, the keeper of the index will need to judge what countries and what bonds are in “the market,” i.e., are fully investable.   But this is true for any index.

The logic behind the movement away from traditional bond market indices is that by construction they give a lot of weight to countries with high debt, some of which may be over-indebted and at risk of default.  At first the logic seems unassailable.  But in theory, if the market is functioning well, it should already have factored in high debt levels:  such countries should pay higher interest rates to compensate for the risk, unless there is some special reason to think they can service their debts easily.

It is important to emphasize that many investors will want to depart from the benchmark in various directions, as indicated under the fourth motive for having a benchmark.  An investor’s belief that countries with high debt/GDP ratios are riskier than the median investor realizes would call for a strategy equivalent to moving from the market-cap benchmark in the direction of the GDP-weighted benchmark.  But one is more likely to think about the strategy clearly if it is explicitly phrased in terms of factoring in debt/GDP ratios, rather than phrased as following a new GDP-weighted index.  Furthermore the phrasing may help an investor realize that he or she might want to modify the strategy if, for example, the country in question can borrow readily in terms of its own currency (think of American exorbitant privilege or Japan’s high domestic holdings of own debt) or if, on the other hand, its debt has a particularly vulnerable maturity or currency structure (think of Hungary).

Investors are reacting to what has turned out to be default risk that was higher than they had expected, among some high-debt countries.  Taking greater note of high debt levels last decade would have warned investors away from countries like Greece and Hungary.   But there is always a danger of fighting the last war.   Middle-income countries have paid down much of their debts over the last decade, attaining debt/GDP ratios far below those of advanced economies.    As the chart shows, major emerging markets have relatively low debts [first bars, for each country] compared to GDP [second bar].  That is, their debt/GDP ratios [third bar] are now much lower than in advanced countries.  (Russia’s sovereign debt is now below 7 per cent of GDP.)  As a result, there is only a limited supply of their bonds left to hold.  If the global investor community switches from market-cap-weighted to GDP-weighted investing, the high demand and low supply of bonds from low debt/GDP countries may drive their interest rates to unnaturally low levels, setting off new credit-fed boom-bust cycles in their economies.

Of course, as a country’s international debt approaches zero, the keepers of the index might drop it altogether.  But the fall in demand for that country’s remaining international bonds from the investment funds that are following the benchmark could then produce an undesirable discontinuous jump in the interest rate.

Many emerging market countries have paid down debt denominated in dollars or other foreign currencies, while continuing to borrow in their local currencies.  (See the table at bottom.)  Such relatively large countries as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa and Russia, for example, have little dollar-denominated debt left – 3% of GDP or less (shown in the chart as the dark bottom of each first bar).   If an international bond benchmark is to be limited to dollar-denominated debt, then GDP weights could imply a severe imbalance between international investor demand for these countries’ bonds and the small supplies available.

Accordingly, local currency denominated debt must be included in the most useful benchmarks.  But then a portfolio reallocation away from traditional benchmark indices such as the EMBI would imply a big shift in allocations away from simple credit risk toward currency risk.   True, the ability of emerging market economies to attract foreign investment in their local currencies represents an important strengthening of the global financial system, relative to the currency mismatch and balance sheet vulnerabilities of the 1990s.  Nevertheless, an investor switching from one “benchmark” to the other needs to be aware of the extent to which the reduction in default risk comes at the expense of heighted exposure to currency risk.

In short, it is not crazy for an investor to depart from the market-cap-weighted benchmark in the direction of putting more weight on debt/GDP countries and less weight on high debt/GDP countries.   But the GDP-weighted index should not be mistaken for a neutral benchmark.

[A version of this post appears at Project Syndicate, Feb. 11, 2013.  Comments can be posted there.]

Table:  Sovereign debts as a percentage of GDP

Will the new approach help?   The aim is to fix Europe’s long-term fiscal problem, which since the date of the euro’s inception has been evident in the failure of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), the crisis in Greece and other periphery countries that surfaced in 2010, and the various ways in which these countries were subsequently bailed out.

There is no reason to doubt that the eurozone countries will follow through to the extent of adopting the national rules by the end of the year.  ["The granting of new financial assistance under the European Stability Mechanism is conditional on ratification of the fiscal compact and transposition of the balanced budget rule into national legislation in due time."]  But after that the fiscal compact will probably founder on precisely the same shoals as the SGP.

Since the inception of the euro, its members have made official fiscal forecasts that are systematically biased in the optimistic direction.   Other countries do this too, but the bias among eurozone countries is, if anything, even worse than that elsewhere.  During a period of economic expansion, such as 2002-07, governments are tempted to forecast that the boom will continue indefinitely.  Forecasts for tax revenue and budget surpluses are correspondingly optimistic and so hide the need for adjustment of fiscal policies.  During a period of recession, such as 2008-2012, governments are tempted to forecast that their economies and budgets will soon rebound.  Since forecasting is subject to so much genuine uncertainty, nobody can prove that the forecasts are biased when they are made.

Fiscal rules such as the SGP ceilings won’t constrain budget deficits, if forecasts are biased.  The reason is that governments can in any given year forecast that their growth rates, tax revenues, and budget balances will improve in the subsequent years, and then next year say that the shortfalls were unexpected.   Indeed, it turns out that the eurozone bias in official forecasts during 1999-2011 can be neatly characterized as responding to the SGP’s 3% limit on budget deficits by offering over-optimistic forecasts each time governments exceed the limit.  In other words, they adjust their forecasts rather than their policies.   (The results described here come from a new paper, coauthored with Jesse Schreger: “Over-optimistic Official Forecasts and Fiscal Rules in the Eurozone,” forthcoming 2013 in the Review of World Economy, vol.149, no.2, from Germany’s Kiel Institute.)

Phrasing the budget rules in cyclical terms, while highly desirable in terms of macroeconomic impact, does not help solve the problem of forecast bias.  It can even make it worse.  In a year when a forecast for the actual budget deficit turns out to have been over-optimistic, the government has to admit that it made a mistake, which can carry some embarrassment.  In a year when a forecast for the structural budget deficit turns out to have been over-optimistic, the government can still claim that its own calculations show the shortfall to have been cyclical rather than structural.   After all, estimation of potential output and hence the cyclical versus structural decomposition is notoriously, even after the fact.

Will it help that under the fiscal compact the rules are to be adopted at the national level, as opposed to the supranational level on which the SGP operated?  A look at the various rules and institutions that have already been tried by European countries shows that some work and others don’t.  Creating an independent fiscal institution that provides its own independent budget forecasts works, in that it reduces the bias in projections.  Euro area governments with an independent budget forecasting institution have a mean bias when making forecasts while in violation of the Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) that is smaller by 2.7% of GDP [at the one-year horizon], compared to euro area countries that are in violation of the EDP without such an independent fiscal institution.

It would be better still if the governments were legally bound to use these independent forecasts in their budget plans (thereby borrowing an innovation from Chile).

Regardless how well-designed the rules are, clever and determined politicians can find ways around them.  One of the tricks is the privatization of government enterprises which reduces the budget deficit this year on a one-time non-repeatable basis, but might raise it in the long-term if the enterprise had been earning profits.  Another trick is phony legislated sunsets on tax cuts, in order to make future revenues look larger despite the political intention later to make the tax cuts permanent.

Still, other things equal, the right institutions can reduce the procyclicality of fiscal policy in the short run and help deliver debt sustainability in the long run.    Examples of the right institutions are cyclically adjusted budget targets combined with independent agencies that make independent fiscal forecasts.  Things can still go wrong even if such mechanisms are in place; but, as the history of the SGP illustrates, the risk is higher if they are not.

[The original of this post appears at Project Syndicate.  Comments may be posted there.]

It took some time before the two new institutions became associated with the explicit concepts of fiscal policy and monetary policy, respectively.   It wasn’t until after the experience of the 1930s that they came to be viewed as potential instruments for managing the macro-economy.  John Maynard Keynes, of course, pointed out the advantages of expansionary fiscal policy in circumstances like the Great Depression.   Milton Friedmanblamed the Depression on the Fed for allowing the money supply to fall.    [Tools of fiscal policy used by governments, in addition to tax rates and tax deductions, are spending and transfers.  Tools of monetary policy used by central banks include interest rates, quantities of money and credit, and instruments such as reserve requirements and foreign exchange intervention used in various (non-US) countries.]

In subsequent debate, Keynes was associated with support for activist or discretionary policy.  The aim was counter-cyclical response to economic fluctuations: expansion in recessions, discipline in booms.  (It is a myth that he favored big government generally.  He said “the boom is the time for austerity.”)      Friedman opposed activist or discretionary policy, believing that government institutions, whether monetary or fiscal, lacked the ability to get the timing right.   But both great economists were opposed to pro-cyclical policy moves, such as the misguided US tightening of 1937 at a time when the economy had not yet fully recovered.

After World War II, the lessons of the 1930s were incorporated into all the macroeconomic textbooks and, to some extent, into the beliefs and actions of policy-makers.  But many of these lessons have been forgotten in recent decades, crowded out of public consciousness by experiences such as the high-inflation 1970s.  As a result, many politicians in advanced countries are repeating the mistakes of 1937 today.  This despite conditions that are qualitatively similar to those that determined Keynes’ policy recommendations in the 1930s: high unemployment, low inflation, and rock-bottom interest rates.

The austerity-versus-stimulus debate has been thoroughly hashed out.   On the one hand, proponents of austerity correctly point out that the long-term consequences of permanently expansionary macroeconomic policy [both fiscal and monetary] are unsustainable deficits, debts, and inflation.    On the other hand, proponents of stimulus correctly point out that in the aftermath of a recession, when unemployment is high and inflation low, the immediate consequences of contractionary macroeconomic policy are continued unemployment, slow growth, and debt/GDP ratios that go up rather than down.  Procyclicalists, both in the US and Europe, represent the worst of both worlds:  they push in the direction of expansion during booms such as 2003-07 and in the direction of contraction during recessions such as 2008-2012, thereby exacerbating both the upswings and downswings.  Countercyclicalists have it right:  working in the direction of fiscal and monetary discipline during booms and ease during recessions.

Less thoroughly aired recently is the question whether — given recent conditions – monetary or fiscal expansion is the more effective instrument.   This question was addressed clearly in 1937 by Sir John Hicks in a once-famous article titled “Mr. Keynes and the Classics.”  The graphical model is known to many generations of undergraduate students in macroeconomics under the label “IS-LM.”

The answer to the question which form of policy is more effective:  under the circumstances that held in the 1930s and that hold again now – which are conditions not just of high unemployment and low inflation, but also near-zero interest rates — stimulus in the specific form of fiscal expansion is much more likely to be effective in the short-term than stimulus in the form of monetary expansion.   Monetary expansion is rendered relatively less effective because interest rates can’t be pushed below zero.  (Flat LM curve.)  This situation, labeled by Keynes a liquidity trap, is today called the Zero Lower Bound.  In addition, firms are less likely to react to easy money by investing in new plant and equipment if they can’t sell the goods they are producing in the factories they already have.  (Flat IS curve.)  The hoary — but still evocative — metaphor is “pushing on a string.”  Meanwhile, fiscal expansion is rendered relatively more effective, in that it doesn’t push up those rock-bottom interest rates and thereby crowd out private-sector demand.

Despite the inability of central banks to push short-term nominal interest rates much lower, one should not give up completely on monetary policy, especially because fiscal policy is so thoroughly hamstrung by politics in most countries.  It is worth trying all sorts of things:  quantitative easing, forward guidance, nominal targets.   Even if the short-term interest rate channel is inoperative, such steps may work through other channels:  long-term interest rates, credit channel, risk premia, expected inflation, asset prices, commodity prices or exchange rates.  But the effects of each are highly uncertain.

That monetary policy is less effective than fiscal policy under conditions of high unemployment and zero interest rates should not be a novel position.  But many economists have forgotten much of what they knew and politicians may not have even heard the proposition.

Introductory economics textbooks have long talked about the Keynesian multiplier effect:  the recipients of federal spending (or of consumer spending stimulated by tax cuts or transfers) respond to the increase in their incomes by spending more as well, as do the recipients of that spending, and so on.  Again, the multiplier is much more relevant under current conditions than in the normal situation where the expansion goes partly into inflation and interest rates and thus crowds out private spending.  By the time of the 2008-09 global recession even those who believed that fiscal stimulus works had marked down their estimates of the fiscal multiplier — intimidated, perhaps, by newer theories of policy ineffectiveness.  The subsequent continuing severity of recessions in the United Kingdom and other countries pursuing contractionary fiscal policies, apparently to the surprise of the politicians enacting them, suggested that multipliers are not just positive, but greater than one, as the old wisdom had it.   The IMF Research Department has now reacted to this recent evidence and bravely confessed that official forecasts, including even its own, had been operating with under-estimates of multiplier magnitudes.

A new wave of econometric research estimates fiscal multipliers using methods that allow them to be higher in some circumstances than others.   Baum, Poplawski-Riberio and Weber (2012) allow the estimate to change when crossing a threshold measure of the output gap.  Batini, Callegari and Melina (2012) allow regime-switching, across recessions versus booms.  Others that similarly distinguish between multipliers in periods of excess capacity versus normal times include Auerbach and Gorodnichenko (2012a, 2012b), Baum and Koester (2011), and Fazzari, Morley and Panovska (2012).  Most of this research finds high multipliers under conditions of excess capacity and low interest rates.  (Few of them have the courage to mention that this is what one would have expected from the elementary textbooks of 50 years ago, perhaps due to fear of sounding old-fashioned.)   Related studies confirm other conditions that matter for the size of the fiscal multiplier in precisely the way the traditional textbooks say, for example that they are lower in small open economies because of crowding out of net exports.

Needless to say, the effects of fiscal policy are subject to substantial uncertainty.   One never knows, for example, when rising debt levels might suddenly alarm global investors who then start demanding abruptly higher interest rates, as happened to countries on the European periphery in 2010.    (For this reason, the United States would be well-advised to lock in a long-term path toward debt sustainability, even while undertaking a little short-term stimulus.)   In the case of stimulus in the form of tax cuts, one never knows how much of the boost to disposable income will be saved by households rather than spent. We are also uncertain as to the magnitude of negative effects of high tax rates, via incentives, on long-term growth.   And it is true that monetary policy is much better understood than it was in the past.

Nevertheless, if the question is whether it is monetary policy or fiscal policy that can more reliably deliver demand expansion under current conditions, the answer is the latter.  One might even dramatize the contrast by speaking of “monetary alchemy and fiscal science.”

A much-admired 2010 paper by Eric Leeper had it the other way around: it characterized monetary policy as science and fiscal policy as alchemy.   It is true that the state of knowledge and practice at central banks, which actually set the instruments of monetary policy, is close to the best that modern society has to offer.    It is likewise true that the instruments of fiscal policy are set in a very political process that is poorly informed by the state of economic knowledge and motivated largely by politicians’ desire to be re-elected.  These political realities may be what the author of “Monetary Science, Fiscal Alchemy” had in mind.

But the ancient alchemists were not in fact stupid or selfish people in general, notwithstanding their search for the “philosopher’s stone” that was to turn lead into gold (of which modern proponents of returning monetary policy to the pre-1914 gold standard are reminiscent).  Nor was the alchemists’ problem that the monarchs of their day refused to listen to them.  It was rather that the state of knowledge fell far short of what the modern science of chemistry can tell us.
The term alchemy could be applied to pre-Keynesians like US Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (whose Depression prescription was that President Herbert Hoover should “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system”).  It could also be applied to the “Treasury view” in the UK of 1929. (Churchill:  ”The orthodox Treasury view … is that when the Government borrow[s] in the money market it becomes a new competitor with industry and engrosses to itself resources which would otherwise have been employed by private enterprise, and in the process raises the rent of money to all who have need of it.” ).  But in light of all that was learned in the 1930s, it would be misleading to characterize the current state of fiscal policy knowledge as alchemy.

References

Miguel Almunia, Agustín Bénétrix, Barry Eichengreen, Kevin O’Rourke, and Gisela Rua, 2010, “From Great Depression to Great Credit Crisis: Similarities, Differences and Lessons,” Economic Policy, 25 (62), pp. 219-65.

Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2012a, “Measuring the Output Responses to Fiscal Policy,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, vol. 4(2), pp. 1-27, May.

Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2012b, “Fiscal Multipliers in Recession and Expansion,” NBER Chapters, in Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis, edited by AlbertoAlesina and Francesco Giavazzi (University of Chicago Press).

Nicoletta Batini, Giovanni Callegari and Giovanni Melina, 2012. “Successful Austerity in the United States, Europe and Japan,” IMF Working Papers 12/190, International Monetary Fund.

Anja Baum and Gerritt Koester, 2011, “The Impact of Fiscal Policy on Economic Activity Over the Business Cycle – Evidence from a Threshold VAR Analysis” Deutsche Bundesbank, Research Centre in its series Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies  number 2011,03.

Anja Baum, Marcos Poplawski-Riberio and Anke Weber, 2012, “Fiscal Multipliers and the State of the Economy,” IMF Working Paper 12/286, International Monetary Fund, December.

Olivier Blanchard and Daniel Leigh, 2013, “Growth Forecast Errors and Fiscal Multipliers,” IMF Working Paper No. 13/1, January.  Forthcoming, American Economic Review, May.

Steven Fazzari, James Morley, and Irina Panovksa, 2012, “State-Dependent Effects of Fiscal Policy,”  UNSW Australian School of Business Research Paper No. 2012-27, April.

Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, 1963,  A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (Princeton University Press).

John Hicks, 1937, Mr. Keynes and the Classics: A Suggested Reinterpretation,” Econometrica, pp. 147-59.

Ethan Ilzetzki, Enrique Mendoza & Carlos Vegh, 2011. “How Big (Small?) are Fiscal Multipliers?,” IMF Working Papers 11/52 (International Monetary Fund.)  Forthcoming, Journal of Monetary Economics.

Eric Leeper, 2010, “Monetary Science, Fiscal Alchemy,” NBER Working Paper No. 16510.

Christina Romer and David Romer, 2013, “The Most Dangerous Idea in Federal Reserve History: Monetary Policy Doesn’t Matter,” UC Berkeley, January.

Antonio Spilimbergo, Steven Symansky, and Martin Schindler, “Fiscal Multipliers,” Staff Position Note No. 2009/11, International Monetary Fund.

[This post also appears at Econbrowser. Comments may be posted there.]

It should be almost as needless-to-say that the approaching debt ceiling bomb is not helpful in solving our fiscal situation, any more so than were previous standoffs:  the January 1, 2013, fiscal cliff; before that, the August 2011 debt ceiling standoff, which led Standard and Poor’s to downgrade the credit rating of US debt for the first time in history; and before that, the 1995 shutdown of the government, which largely discredited Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The current debt ceiling bomb is, of course, another attempt to hold the country hostage under threat of blowing us all up.  The conflict is usually phrased as a question of ideological polarization, a battle between fiscal conservatives and their opponents.  This familiar frame does not seem right to me.  There is in fact no correlation or consistency between the practice of federal fiscal discipline and the political rhetoric, either across states or across time.

What are the demands of the hostage-takers?   Even if there existed an explicit ransom letter detailing specific severe spending cuts, in exchange for which it credibly offered to raise the debt ceiling, President Obama’s refusal to negotiate under such conditions would be fully justified.  But the situation is worse than that.  There is no specific set of demands, and never has been.  I truly believe there does not exist any set of spending cuts that the blackmailers would accept if they came from Obama.

Remember the occasions in the past when he has announced that he will accept the Republican position on some issue, only to have his opponents switch places, saying “if you are in favor of it, we are against it”?    One example was the idea of Obamacare itself, which originally came from conservative think tanks and Mitt Romney.   Another example was the proposal for an automatic version of what in February 2010 became the Simpson-Bowles Commission.

There are only so many dollars that can be cut out of PBS and foreign aid.   If, hypothetically, Obama were to come out in support of severe cuts in agricultural supports, oil and gas subsidies, Medicare benefits and other programs, Republicans would attack him for proposing hurtful cuts. (Remember attacks on Obama’s health plan for non-existent “death panels” and fictional cuts to Medicare benefits?)  Simultaneously, Republicans would say that the cuts were not big enough.

What would be enough?   Some debt crazies have said they think it would be fine if we failed to raise the debt ceiling.  Some are crazy enough to think it is not a problem if the US government were to default on its legal obligations.  (They may not realize that defaulting on the bill for office supplies that you ordered from Staples is as bad as  missing interest payments on your debt.)  But some want to enforce a balanced budget immediately:  the refusal to allow the government to borrow any more is not just a negotiating tactic, but is the outcome they want.  This is crazy in light of the adverse economic and financial impact (which would be much worse than that of the fiscal cliff that we just dodged two weeks ago).

But the prize for ultimate insanity must go to those who want to eliminate the budget deficit rapidly and insist on doing it without raising taxes, cutting defense, or cutting programs for seniors.  These people deserve the label “deranged” because what they are demanding is for a literally false proposition to be true.  It is arithmetically impossible to eliminate the budget deficit if the cuts are to come primarily in non-defense discretionary spending.

To be very clear, I don’t think most Republicans believe all of this.  Certainly my many economist friends who are Republicans do not.  The truly “deranged” people are just a subset of the “crazy” people, who are in turn a subset of those who are unwise enough to favor the debt ceiling threat as a tactic, who are in turn a subset of the Republican Party.   The problem is that it is this minority of a minority that is holding the whole country hostage.  The size of the minority evidently shrunk after the August 2011 debt ceiling debacle, after the November 2012 election, and after the January 1 cliff.   But it still has its finger on the grenade pin.

So that leads us to the question of tactics.  A variety of stratagems have been proposed for the White House to use to defuse the bomb, if it comes to that.  These are all designed as ways that the federal government can continue to meet its legal obligations beyond March, even if the Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling.   While these unconventional proposals are beyond anything that would have been contemplated under normal conditions, they must be considered, in light of the correspondingly absurd situation in which the country would find itself.  If the Congress refuses to act, the White House would have to choose between two contradictory laws: the one that Congress passed to authorize spending and taxes versus the debt ceiling law that apparently prohibits the government from borrowing to make up the difference between spending and taxes.  Following the implication of the latter law would have disastrous impacts on the country and the world if obeyed.

• Given the contradiction between the two laws, President Obama could just ignore the debt ceiling and follow the direct implications of the spending and taxation laws. I am not qualified to judge the legality of this course of action. The courts would eventually have to sort it out. The hope is that by then the Congress would have come to its senses and raised the debt limit.
• In the meantime, the White House might try invoking the 14^th Amendment, as Bill Clinton suggested at the time of the last debt ceiling standoff, in 2011.  The Amendment includes the passage “The validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.” Again the Supreme Court would eventually have to decide the issue.
• The Treasury could issue “IOUs” to the office supply stores, soldiers, Social Security recipients, etc. The IOUs would just be written acknowledgements of a legal fact: that the government owes these people money. Maybe the Federal Reserve could let it be known that it will honor these IOUs. (There must be something wrong with this, or somebody besides me would have proposed it already.)
• The government writes an option to buy all its property and buildings for $1, and then sells that very valuable option to the Federal Reserve for something like its true value. This proposal has been made by the Yale constitutional expert Jack Balkin last time around, from which I infer that it is not obviously contrary to the law.
• And finally, the most colorful of the proposals: the trillion dollar coin. The Treasury would exercise its legal authority to mint a commemorative coin made out of platinum, with a face value of $1 trillion. The Federal Reserve would then buy the coin for $ 1 trillion, allowing the Treasury to pay its obligations by drawing down its checking account at the Fed up to that amount. This proposal originated in the blogosphere and was one of those anointed by Balkin in July 2011. Paul Krugman greatly elevated its prominence by declaring his support earlier this month.

Contrary to some fears, none of these proposals need result in the money supply being any larger than it would otherwise be.  The Federal Reserve determines the money supply.  If it creates a new component of money by buying a platinum coin, a property option or IOUs, it can offset it by shrinking other components of the money supply by the same amount, leaving the total unchanged.

The Obama Administration so far is eschewing gimmicks, and is calling on the Congress to do its job in a responsible manner.  This is the right approach.

But in the event that the minority does succeed in blocking a debt increase, it may be worth turning to some legal gimmick to avert the financial and economic catastrophe.   Of the five proposals bulleted above, the platinum coin is the one that seems to have the most experts currently expressing belief in its legality.  It is certainly clever.  Unfortunately, it would probably be the worst from a political standpoint.  The reason is – I am guessing here – there is a fairly high overlap between the debt crazies (defined above) and people who have paranoid conspiracy theories that relate to the Fed, money and precious metals (especially gold, but platinum is too close for comfort). For all I know, some of these people are the same who believe that Obama was born outside the U.S.  (That would fall into the category of deranged propositions, also defined above; but there is no need for us to go there.)  When you are dealing with a crazy person, it is best to avoid anything that would pour gasoline on the flames of his paranoia.  We actually want to win back some of those people who are merely misguided but not really insane.  After all, just getting past the current debt cliff wouldn’t solve the problem, with sequester and shutdown deadlines also looming.   So I’d go for some other legal gimmick, one that would be less likely to feed the paranoia and more likely to continuing chipping away at popular support for the extremists.

[I have been interviewed this week on the trillion dollar coin by Boston magazine and radio station WGBH.]

Monetary policymakers would do well to consider a shift toward targeting nominal GDP.   (Carney is evidently contemplating precisely this.)  The switch could be phased in via two steps, without abandoning the established inflation anchor.

A number of monetary economists pointed out the robustness of nominal GDP targeting after monetarist rules broke down in the 1980s.  (Meade and other references are given below.)  ”Robustness” refers to the target’s ability to hold up in the long term under various shocks. The context at that time was the need in the US and other advanced countries for an explicit anchor to help bring expected inflation rates down.  The status quo regime to achieve this, during the heyday of monetarism, had been a money growth rule.  Relative to the money growth rule, the advantage of nominal GDP targeting was robustness with respect to velocity shocks in particular.

These days the presumptive nominal anchor and cyclical context are both very different than they were in the 1980s.  The popular regime is Inflation Targeting.   The advantage of a nominal GDP target relative to a CPI target is robustness, in particular, with respect to supply shocks and terms of trade shocks.    For example, a nominal GDP target for the European Central Bank could have avoided the mistake of July 2008: the ECB responded to a spike in world oil prices by raising interest rates to fight consumer price inflation — just as the economy was going into recession.    A nominal GDP target for the US Federal Reserve might have avoided the mistake of excessively easy monetary policy during 2004-06, a period when nominal GDP growth exceeded 6 per cent.

Why have proposals for nominal GDP targeting been revived at this particular juncture, after two decades of living in obscurity?  The motive, in large part, is to deliver monetary stimulus and higher growth — needed in the US, Japan, UK and Euroland — while still maintaining a credible nominal anchor.   For an economy on the fence between recovery and recession, such as Euroland, a target for nominal GDP that constituted 4% increase over the coming year would in effect supply as much monetary ease as a 4% inflation target.  (The new proponents show up on the left, the right, and the center of the political spectrum:  Romer, 2011, and Krugman, 2011  on the Left; Scott Sumner, Lars Christensen and David Beckworth, on the Right; and Goldman Sachs, 2011, and Woodford, 2012, in the center.)

There are at least three reasons why central bankers are wary of the proposals for nominal GDP targeting.  First, a longstanding concern is that the public doesn’t know the difference between nominal GDP, real GDP and inflation.  But communications clarity is not a reason to go with a complicated function of inflation and real growth (as in the ubiquitous Taylor rule) in place of the simpler nominal income target.  Furthermore, the financial markets do understand the differences among these variables.

Secondly, central bankers also worry they may not be able to achieve the nominal GDP target.   Needless to say, the margin around the target could and should be wide, though there is no reason why it has to be wider than the bands around the old M1 targets or the more recent inflation targets and there are reasons to think the width of a nominal GDP band could be a bit less.  Moreover, under current conditions, the shift in policy need be nothing more than a commitment to keep monetary policy easy so long as nominal GDP falls short of the target.  It would thus serve a purpose similar to the Fed’s December 12, 2012, announcement that it would keep interest rates low so long as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5% – but it would not suffer the imperfections of the unemployment number (particularly its inverse relationship with the labor force participation rate and its tendency to lag other measures of expansion).

Third, in the current context, central bankers fear that it would undermine their long-term inflation anchor.

Some economists, such as Paul Krugman (2012) and the IMF’s chief economist Olivier Blanchard (2010) have proposed responding to recent high unemployment by explicitly setting a target for expected inflation above the traditional 2% — say, 4% — as a way of reducing real interest rates in the presence of the Zero Lower Bound on nominal interest rates.  They like to remind Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke of similar recommendations that he made to Japan in the past.

But there is little support for the proposal to set a high inflation target.   Many central bankers are strongly averse to countenancing inflation rate targets of 4% or even 3%.  They do not want to abandon the hard-won 2% number that has succeeded in keeping inflation expectations well-anchored for so many years.   The economists can say that the upward change in the inflation target would be made explicitly temporary; but the central bankers worry that to target a higher number even temporarily would do permanent damage to the credibility of the long-term anchor.

Central bankers worry that to set a target for nominal GDP growth of 5% or more in the coming year would inevitably be interpreted as setting an inflation target in excess of 2%, and thus again would damage the credibility of the anchor permanently.   They don’t want to give up on the 2% number.   Their view on this is unlikely to change.  But it doesn’t have to.

The practical solution for overcoming these worries entails phasing in a nominal GDP target in two steps.  Here is how to do it.

One of the main communications devices currently used by the US Federal Reserve is the Summary of Economic Projections.   The governors and regional presidents give their forecasts of real growth rate and inflation rates for each of the next three years and for the long run.   (Also for interest rates.)   The press interprets these as policy statements, even if they are only labelled projections.

My proposal is to start, in Phase I, by omitting near term projections for real growth and inflation.   Do keep the longer run projections, and keep the inflation setting where it is, 2% [formerly 1 ½ -2% for the US].  But add a longer run projection for nominal GDP growth as well.  It should be around 4-4 ½ % to avoid any discontinuous jumps:  That number would imply a long-run real growth rate of 2-2 ½ %, the same as now.  Nobody could call such a move inflationary.   For Japan, the targets for nominal and real GDP growth would have to be set at lower levels, due in part to the absence of population growth.

A few months later, in Phase II, add projections for nominal GDP growth for the next three years.  These numbers should be greater than 4 % – perhaps 5 ½ %  – but with the long run projection unchanged at 4 or 4 ½ %.   Much public speculation would ensue, as to how the 5 ½ % breaks down between real growth and inflation.  The truth is that the central bank has no control over that – monetary policy determines the total but not the breakdown – and thus doesn’t know what the answer is any more than anyone else does.  But the nominal GDP target would insure that either (i) real growth will accelerate, as we hope, or else, (ii) if real growth falls short, there will be an automatic decline in the real interest rate which will push up demand, which again is what is desired.  The targets for nominal GDP growth could be chosen so as to put the level of nominal GDP on an accelerated path back to its pre-recession trend.  In the long run, when nominal GDP is back on its path of 4-4 ½ %, real growth will be back at its potential, say 2 ½ %, and inflation back at 1 ½ % – 2%.

This way of phasing in nominal GDP targeting delivers the advantage of some stimulus now, when it is needed – while satisfying the central bankers’ reluctance to abandon their cherished low inflation target.

References

Bean, Charles (1983), “Targeting Nominal Income: An Appraisal”, The Economic Journal, 93:806-819.
Bernanke, Ben (2000), “Japanese Monetary Policy: A Case of Self-Induced Paralysis?” Chapter 7 in  Ryoichi Mikitani and Adam S. Posen, eds., Japan’s Financial Crisis and Its Parallels to U.S. Experience (Institute for International Economics), pp. 149-166.
Blanchard, Olivier, Giovanni Dell’Ariccia, and Paolo Mauro (2010), “Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy,” IMF Staff Position Note, 12 Feb.
Frankel, Jeffrey (1995), “The Stabilizing Properties of a Nominal GNP Rule,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 27, no. 2, May, 318-334.Reprinted in Financial Markets and Monetary Policy (MIT Press. 1997). .
Frankel, Jeffrey (2012), “Inflation Targeting is Dead. Long Live Nominal GDP Targeting,” VoxEU, June 19.
Feldstein, Martin and Jim Stock (1994), “The Use of a Monetary Aggregate to Target Nominal GDP”,  in N. Gregory Mankiw, ed.,   Monetary Policy, NBER (University of Chicago Press).
Hall, Robert and N. Gregory Mankiw (1994), “Nominal Income Targeting,”  in N. Gregory Mankiw, ed., Monetary Policy (University of Chicago Press), 71-93.
Hatzius, John (2011), “The Case for a Nominal GDP Level Target,” US Economics Analyst, issue 11/41,Goldman Sachs, Oct.
Krugman, Paul (2011) “A Volcker Moment Indeed (Slightly Wonkish),” Oct. 30.
Krugman, Paul (2012a), “Two per cent is not enough”, The New York Times, 26 January.
Krugman, Paul (2012b), “Earth to Bernanke”, The New York Times, 24 April.
McCallum, Bennett and Edward Nelson (1998), “Nominal Income Targeting in an Open-Economy Optimizing Model,”  Journal of Monetary Economics, 43(3):553-578.
Meade, James (1978), “The Meaning of Internal Balance,” The Economic Journal, 88:423-435.
Romer, Christina (2011), “Dear Ben: It’s Time for Your Volcker Moment,” New York Times, Oct. 29.
Woodford, Michael (2012) “Methods of Policy Accommodation at the Interest-Rate Lower Bound,” presented at the Jackson Hole symposium, August (Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City).

A short version of this post appeared at Project Syndicate;  comments can be posted there.  A version also appears at VoxEU.

This was a trip back in time, to 1959.   For one thing, a majority of the (few) autos on the street in Havana are large American cars from the 1950s.  Most are beautiful.   One hears about the cars, but I had thought the reports must be exaggerated.

Cuba’s economic system is out of Alice in Wonderland.   It has one of the world’s longest lasting dual exchange rate systems.  Currently the cost of dollars in the market is 25 times higher than the official rate of one peso per one dollar.  This means that a worker in the hotel sector or restaurant sector who is able to keep dollar earnings has an income 25 times higher than one who must turn them in to the government.

The island long ago developed an advantage in skilled services such as medicine and education.  But doctors and professors earn far less than those who join the fledgling private economy.  The latter features 178 possible approved jobs.  The possible choices on the list by design make no use of an educated person’s skills.   They include waiter, bathroom attendant, taxi driver, automobile battery repairman, mule driver, and wheel barrow operator.   Most people are still employed by the state, however.

Perhaps American consumer society has too many goods available; but Cuba has far too few.  Most things that one would want — a toaster to make breakfast, leather to make shoes, tools for auto repair, software to upgrade a computer, spare parts to keep all those appliances from the 1950s running, …everything – is only available either by rationing, waiting in line, or going to the black market.  Many are not available at all.

How can such a system have persisted for so long?   Why doesn’t everyone see the folly?

Repression and fear don’t explain it.  The fact is that the advantages of the market system are not hard-wired into human brains — not anywhere, and especially not when they have been portrayed as the allies of selfishness and corruption, in opposition to such noble ideals as cooperation, fairness, and equality.

When the Soviet Union was collapsing, Robert Shiller and co-authors surveyed residents of Moscow and New York regarding their attitudes toward free markets.   Unsurprisingly, many of the Russians gave answers that strike an economist as failing to appreciate adequately the virtues of the marketplace as a mechanism to bring supply and demand into equality.  For example 66% of the Russian respondents thought it was unfair of flower-sellers to charge higher prices on holidays.  The surprising finding, however, was that just as high a percentage of Americans thought it was unfair of the flower-sellers to raise prices!  (Economists, of course, point out that  demand is much higher on holidays, and that without the higher prices flower-growers would have no incentive to increase the supply at such times.)

People in Eastern Europe eventually figured out that communism does not work and that the market system does.  If the United States of America did not exist, or if the embargo did not exist, Cubans could do likewise: infer that there is something fundamentally wrong with an economic system that involves so much time wasted and so many simple desires frustrated.  But in the case of Cuba, there is an alternative explanation right at hand.  Many of these goods would be imported from the United States, or produced at home with inputs from the United States.  Therefore it must be the US and its embargo that is to blame.  So it seems to many Cubans.

When makers of foreign policy ”get tough” with another country, they often under-estimate the extent to which the opponent’s government can derive long-lasting legitimacy by pointing to the external threat to rally its people.   The citizens of the last two countries still clinging to communism, Cuba and North Korea, both vividly remember military conflict with the United States (the Bay of Pigs and the Korean War, respectively) and both countries have long been subject to American sanctions.   The first communist country to experiment with market reforms, Poland, was one that never came into military conflict with the West.    Lesson:  the US should end its obsolete embargo against Cuba.  Let those private-sector auto mechanics have their spare parts!

Harvard’s Jorge Dominguez likens the Cuban reform path to an accordion that alternately goes in and out.  Liberalization took hold out of the desperate economic situation (”special period”) that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s long-time benefactor.  The reform process was then slowed from 1996 to 2005 — even stopped altogether — in part because Venezuelan support made it less necessary.

Reforms have been renewed in recent years– now under “los lineamientos,” translated as “the guidelines.”  For example, the government announced in 2011 it would let people buy and sell houses. Farmers can sell directly to the market, to hotels and restaurants, rather than just to the government.  One explanation for the recent reforms is that the more pragmatic Raul Castro took over after his brother became ill in 2006.  But another explanation is that money from Venezuela has lately begun to level off and appears uncertain in the future.  (For one thing, Venezuela’s oil production has declined during a period when everyone else’s has boomed, due to mismanagement by Hugo Chavez of his own economy.)

Referring to the heavy economic dependence on the US that had ended abruptly after the 1959 revolution and to the heavy dependence on the Soviet Union that had ended abruptly after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuba’s Minister for Heavy Industry in 1995 vowed, “We will never let this happen to us for the third time.” (Jatar, 1999, p.38).  Yet that is what is now happening with respect to dependence on Venezuela.

For now, Cuba is casting about for a model to follow.  The example of Sweden shows that it is possible to combine a strong social safety net with a strong private economy.  But what Cuba seeks is a model of transition out of communism.

The Chinese economic miracle is the obvious model, beginning with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping.  This judgment assumes that income equality is in reality not as important to Cuba as the requirements that the Communist Party maintain control and the country’s leaders never have to say they were wrong.  The Cuban slogan has long been “Socialism or death!” Cubans are proud, and mindful of their history of ill-treatment by larger powers.  In this they resemble the Chinese, who have converted to capitalism more energetically than the capitalists while yet leaving the giant picture of Chairman Mao up in Tiananmen Square.

But when the Chinese and Soviets split in the 1960s, Cuba went with the latter.  Only in some American college dorm rooms did posters of Mao and Che appear side-by-side.   So for now the model is Vietnam, rather than China.  (Unfortunately, the Vietnamese economy has been troubled of late.)

Four things will happen soon, probably at approximately the same time:  the aging generation of Cuban émigrés who have dictated American policy on Cuba will give way to the next generation; the Castros will pass from the scene as well; American-Cuban relations will be normalized; and the world’s 2^nd-to-last museum of communism will spontaneously convert to a rapidly growing service-exporting economy.   Lineamientos and models will no longer seem so necessary.

I just hope that before the wave of American money and tourists arrives on its shores, the government of Cuba undertakes the appropriate regulatory intervention:  a zoning law that all car bodies in some designated part of Old Havana must date from 1959 or earlier.

References
•   Jorge I. Dominguez “Hello from Havana,”  Harvard Magazine, July-August 2009.
•   Dominguez, et al, eds., Cuban Economic and Social Development (Harvard University Press), 2012.
•  Anna Julia Jatar-Hausmann, The Cuban Way (Kumarian Press), 1999.
•  Robert Shiller, Maxim Boycko & Vladimir Korobov, “Popular Attitudes Towards Free Markets: The Soviet Union and the United States Compared,” American Economic Review81, no.3, pp.385-400, June 1991.

[A shorter version of this column was published by Project Syndicate. Comments may be posted there.]

Politicians who advertise themselves as “fiscal conservatives” sometimes campaign on crowd-pleasing pledges to cut taxes while simultaneously reducing budget deficits.  These are difficult promises to deliver on in practice, since the budget deficit equals government spending minus tax revenue.

Aspiring fiscal conservatives may be interested in learning four innovative tricks that are commonly used by American politicians who like to promise what seems impossible.   Each of these feats has been perfected over three decades or more.  Indeed they first acquired their colorful names in the early years of the Ronald Reagan presidency:

1. The “Magic Asterisk”
2. “Rosy Scenario”
3. The Laffer hypothesis
4. The “Starve the Beast” hypothesis.

As shop-worn as these four conjuring tricks are, voters and journalists continue to fall for them. Thus they remain useful equipment in the repertoire of the fiscal conservative.

The first term was coined by Reagan’s Budget Director, David Stockman.  Originally it was an act of desperation, because the numbers in the 1981 budget plan didn’t add up.  “We invented the ‘magic asterisk’:  If we couldn’t find the savings in time – and we couldn’t-we would issue an IOU. We would call it ‘Future savings to be identified.’” [p.124]   Since that time the Magic Asterisk has become a familiar device in the American policy arena.   Recent examples include the recommendation of the Simpson-Bowles commission to cut real spending growth by precise amounts, without saying where.   US Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has done the same in his spending plan.   [In his first debate with President Obama however, he finally identified one specific cut: the government's slice of the cost of public television - which is less than 1% of 1% of the federal budget, though most voters are under the illusion that it is far greater.]   Another current application of the Magic Asterisk is Romney’s plan to eliminate enough tax expenditures to make up the revenue lost by cutting marginal tax rates by 20% (which is $5 trillion in revenue), while steadfastly refusing to say what tax expenditures he would eliminate.

As Election Day nears, the pressure on a candidate to get more specific grows.  The conjurer is thus forced to go to Trick Two:  since he can’t find enough tax loopholes to eliminate, he must claim that what he meant by closing the revenue gap was that stronger economic growth will bring in the added revenue.   The most popular magician’s assistant of all time makes her encore on the stage.  Murray Weidenbaum, Reagan’s first Council of Economic Advisers Chairman, deserves the credit for originally dreaming up Ms. Rosy Scenario, “perhaps my most lasting legacy” [p.57].  The Reagan Administration in its early years forecast 5% income growth (twice the long-run average), in order to imply in its projections a boost to revenues big enough to make up for its many tax cut measures [p.93-97].   Since then candidates of every party have made use of Rosy’s talents.

Indeed official growth forecasts are systematically overly optimistic in almost all of a sample of 33 countries, contributing to overly optimistic budget forecasts.   European governments are particularly biased.

In the Republican primaries last year, candidate Tim Pawlenty assumed a 5 per cent growth rate to make his own plan work.   He was all but laughed out of the race.  Mitt Romney probably can’t get away with this sleight-of-hand either.   The press asks, “Why should we believe that the growth rate will magically accelerate just because you become president?   Where will this GDP come from?   It sounds like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.”  Right on cue, it is time for Trick 3.

Trick 3 is the famous Laffer Hypothesis.   This is the proposition, identified with “supply side economics,” that reductions in tax rates are like magic beans:  they stimulate economic growth a lot — so much so that total tax revenue (the tax rate times income) goes up rather than down.   One might think that the Romney campaign would never resurrect such a hoary and discredited trick.  After all, two of his main economic advisers, Glenn Hubbard and Greg Mankiw, both have textbooks in which they say that the Laffer Hypothesis is incorrect as a description of US tax rates.  Mankiw’s book, in its first edition, even called its proponents “charlatans.”  But the historical record is that each Republican presidential candidate since Reagan has had good economic advisers who disavow the Laffer Hypothesis.  Yet time and again the president (or candidate), and his vice president (or running mate) and his political aides read from a script that relies on the Laffer logic (Appendix I). They are the ones who make the policy if the candidate wins, not the academic economist.   (George W. Bush had these same two top economic advisers in his first term, Hubbard and Mankiw, when he cut taxes and transmogrified a record surplus into a record deficit.)

Trick 4, “Starve the Beast,” typically comes later, if and when the president is elected, has enacted his tax cuts, and discovers that smoke and mirrors don’t work against hard fiscal reality. He can’t find enough spending to cut (Magic Asterisk has disappeared up the conjurer’s sleeve); the acceleration in GDP is nowhere to be seen (Rosy Scenario has vanished in thin air); and tax revenues have not grown (no rabbit in the Laffer hat).   The audience is now told that losing tax revenue and widening the budget deficit was the plan all along.  The performer explains that the deficit is all the fault of congress for not cutting spending and that the only way to tame the beast is raise the budget deficit because “Congress can’t spend money it doesn’t have.”  This trick never works either, of course.  Congress can in fact spend money it doesn’t have, especially if the “conservative” president has been quietly sending it budgets every year that call for that.

By the time the crowd realizes it has been had, the confidence man has pulled off the greatest trick of all:  yet another audience who came to see the deficit shrunk instead leaves the theater with the deficit bigger than when it came in.

References
Jeffrey Frankel, 2008, “Snake-Oil Tax Cuts,” Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper 221, September.
–2011, “Over-optimism in Forecasts by Official Budget Agencies and Its Implications,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy vol.27, no. 4, 536-562. NBER WP 17239; Summary in NBER Digest.
David Stockman, 1986, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (Harper & Row).
Murray Weidenbaum, 2005, Advising Reagan: Making Economic Policy, 1981-82 (Washington Univ., St.Louis).

[A version of this column appeared earlier at Project Syndicate, which has the copyright.  Comments can be posted there.]